Leverhulme Public Lecture: Professor Catherine Riessman

• Date: 24 February 2010
• Speaker: Professor Catherine Kohler Riessman, Leverhulme Visiting Professorial Fellow & Research Professor, Boston College
• Location: Institute of Education in association with Birkbeck, University of London

The Thomas Coram Research Unit, IOE Cordially invites you to the Leverhulme Public Lecture: Borrowing Narrative Identities: Language, Loss and Bob Dylan

The lecture will take place at 5pm–6pm on Wednesday 24 February 2010, at the Institute of Education 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL, followed by light refreshments Clarke Hall.

RSVP to Tracy Walpole: t.walpole@ioe.ac.uk, 020 7612 6958

Abstract:

We are forever borrowing and appropriating language from the mouths of others to construct our identities. Storytelling about the ‘self’ is pervasive in everyday life and often occurs in research interviews, but meanings are rarely transparent. Emotional experience can be especially difficult to narrate—it goes beyond words and familiar structures of narrative discourse. In a case study I recount my intellectual journey with an interview segment collected long ago from a man who spoke of a period of “bleak depression.” I reinterpret the personal narrative in light of Bakhtinian thought, contemporary theorizing about masculinities, recent developments in narrative inquiry, and a musical referent. Attention to the appropriation of language expands understanding of gender and idioms of emotional distress.