The Centre for Narrative Research

Abstract

This chapter tells the story of the Centre for Narrative Research: where the inspiration for its formation came from, how it was situated within the wider political and intellectual culture of the University of East London, and how it has developed over the twenty years of its existence. The chapter closes with a few thoughts about the future, what kind of work we hope we have helped to lay some foundation for, and what we see as the greatest obstacles to our vision. The Background: What and who we are The Centre for Narrative Research was officially created in 1999 by Corinne Squire, Molly Andrews, and Shelly Day Scalter, all of whom at that time were situated in the programme of Psychosocial Studies. All three of us had in different contexts spent a lot of time listening to stories people told about their lives, and had positioned our work as psychologists who were concerned with the social and political world. It is ironic to think that in some ways we had Mrs. Thatcher and her introduction of the research excellence exercise, which later came to dominate much of academic life, to thank for our existence, as it helped us to create a justification for our very existence, as we could 'justify' our desire to build a research community in monetary terms. In the late 1990s there was a large student expansion at the university and workloads were very pressing. Research was very much backgrounded in this context, and we had neither postgraduate students nor sabbaticals. Nonetheless, we were able to organize a series of research seminars, and later workshops, postgraduate seminars, and short summer schools. At the same time, we were teaching the undergraduate module on Life Histories, so a synergy between the different levels of teaching, and bridge building between that and our research, began to develop. This aspect of incorporating teaching at all levels with the narrative scholarship of the centre has always been an important part of the work we see ourselves doing.