Suchergebnisse

Review of: Migrant Representations: Life Story, Investigation, Picture, Peter Leese (2022)
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 290 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-48750-316-1, h/bk, £95.00

This life story qualitative research with Papua New Guinea youth shows how resilience is negotiated in a communal cultural context with limited access to formal social services. Using extracts from one life story, themes of family, faith and future are discussed. Implications for human services are the need to: engage informal social support systems through community development; recognize that young people have potential to change dramatically; and use a strengths-based approach. Implications for life story research are: methods can be culturally bound; stories are complex; stories can be collectively owned; and broad cultural representation is limited.

The paper draws on the author's interview experiences and interrogates the conditions in which research interviews generate narratives and storytelling; interviews that do not invite storytelling and interviews where people were asked to give a life story. First, the paper considers the question as to what provokes storytelling. It suggests that people engage with the narrative mode to some extent under the conditions of their own choosing. Second, it examines the processes by which mean making is achieved in storytelling and made sense of by the research analyst. Contrasting two cases of Irish migrants, drawn from a study of fatherhood across three generations in Polish, Irish and white British families, the paper then considers issues of analysis. The argument is made that sociological qualitative research has to engage with narrative analysis and that this involves a close examination not only of what is told and not told but also the forms in which stories are told (the structuring of stories and their linguistic nuances), and the methods by which the interviewee draws in and persuades the listener. Lastly and most importantly, the paper concludes that attention should be made to talk and context in equal measure. It considers the importance of contextualisation of interview data contemporaneously and historically and the methodological strategies through which the researchers create second order narratives in the analysis of their research.

The versions of Powell's life examined in this chapter contain two overarching features ethnographers claim are means by which immigrant blacks work to accrue "good" black status. First, their emphasis on Powell as the son of industrious Jamaican immigrants comports with the common practice ethnographers locate among second-generation black immigrants of consciously telegraphing their ethnic heritage as a means of "filtering" themselves for the dominant culture so that they can ward off downward social mobility still linked to a black racial identity in the United States. The inclusion of ancestry in life stories by political hopefuls is not in itself remarkable, but the Powell stories so conspicuously emphasize his distinctive black heritage that they suggest a peculiarly potent symbiotic relationship between its utility both for Powell the "candidate" and for the dominant culture. Second, Powell's "superior" black narrative endorsed and enacted the strategy of racial "exiting" rather than of "voice" to effect social entry or, to use Steele's terms, the strategies of "bargaining" for white racial innocence rather that "challenging" it. Many American blacks have long gravitated toward collective political "voice" to redress racial inequities, but some immigrant blacks—particularly those with strong ethnic identities—have favored individual strategies for mobility designed to elude the stigma of stereotypical "inferior" blackness. Steele contends that because whites yearn for a clear racial conscience, the most accepted and, therefore, successful blacks are not racial "challengers" but racial "bargainers," those blacks willing to grant "white society its innocence in exchange for entry into mainstream" by saying, in effect, "I already believe you are innocent (good, fair-minded) and have faith that you will prove it"; black challengers, by contrast, annoy by confronting white society with the goad, "If you are innocent, then prove it," thereby holding white innocence captive until some ransom is paid. Thus, racial bargaining accommodates "exit" symbiotically: individual blacks escape the taints of blackness while members of the dominant culture escape the taints of racism.