Embodied narratives

Auto/biography and life history methods can generate deep and rich insights into human life and learning. As this book shows, they also celebrate the complexity and interdependence of the many aspects and levels of life that are kept separate by the hegemonic view of learning and research, which is overly functionalist, reductionist, disembodied, and disconnected. In fact, stories are a powerful means to illuminate the connections between emotions and meaning, contents and contexts, body and physical space, subjectivities and social structures - at a micro, messo, and macro level - in adult and lifelong learning. A community of researchers, who regularly meet to share ideas and methods, is involved here, building a framework - not unique, but pluralistic and complex - for rethinking about narrative methods as not only addressed to words, events, and meanings, as it is usually thought, but to relationships, contexts, voices, images and metaphors, urban and natural places, cultures, and ecologies.