Title
Dr.
Last Name
Elliker
First name
Florian
Email
florian.elliker@unisg.ch
ORCID
Phone
+41 71 224 2932
Homepage
1 - 5 of 5
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PublicationTraining for Advanced Research in the Narrative Study of Lives Within the Context of Political and Educational Transformation : A Case Study in South AfricaIt is widely accepted that the humanities and social sciences in South Africa have stagnated since the end of the anti-apartheid struggle in this country. This article argues that a programme in The Narrative Study of Lives provides a platform for establishing and strengthening a significant component of the training of social and human scientists. Its essence is epistemologically related to indigenous knowledge, cultural transmission and community engagement, and it can therefore contribute towards a democratisation of knowledge. The programme is situated in a participatory learning environment and the supervisors aim for students to assimilate new knowledge at a deep level, engage critically with it and apply it in ways that demonstrate their solid grasp of content and research processes. In addition to this focus on thesis-as-product, supervision is also concerned with the person-as-product. The programme aims at building students' capacity to master and apply metatheory, substantive theory as well as qualitative research methodology. The epistemology of The Narrative Study of Lives programme is largely based on the phenomenological/interpretivist tradition and it largely operates within an idealist theory of knowledge. The program does emphasise, however, the need to straddle the often-irresolvable antagonisms of subject and object, micro and macro, objectivist and constructivist, and structure and agency. For this reason students are sensitised to distinguish between the biographical, institutional/organisational and the societal contexts within which narratives should be analysed. => http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs130285
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PublicationOn the Interpretive Work of Reconstructing Discourses and Their Local ContextsMany strands of discourse analysis conceive discourses as relatively large structural connections. They are thus able to comprehend seemingly scattered phenomena as articulations of macro-level structures. Their focus on the macro-level of analysis, however, comes often at the neglect of the local contexts in which discourses are reproduced and employed. Action and interpretation are not only instructed by discourses, but also by local systems of relevance of resilient groups, communities or organizations. In this article, we develop interpretive strategies to distinguish between discourses and their reproductive local context. Based on a case study that analyzes students' narrations about their experiences of the transformation process at a higher education institution in South Africa, we reconstruct the "ethnographic context" of these narrations. We demonstrate how the use of a specific discourse-thematically linked to "race" and "culture"-is shaped by local groups, in our case by student residences at this higher education institution. We frame our case in socialconstructivist terms and pursue a sociology of knowledge approach to discourse. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs130342
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PublicationSharing the Burden: Narrating the Struggle Against Breast Cancer( 2013-02-05)
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PublicationBlack, White and In-Between: Affective and Emotional Facets of Performing Diversity in ‘Tiny Publics'( 2013-08-31)
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PublicationThe Storied Life: The Role of Storytelling in the Construction of Individual and Collective Identity( 2013-08-29)