Porous borders: exploring the potential of biographical research across disciplinary boundaries

This paper explores the meaning of recounting, retelling and reconstituting knowledge across disciplines through biographical interviews. There is increasing academic interest in the personal interactions that constitute the spaces in which information is exchanged and constituted. Researchers have acknowledged the physical embodiment and contextual nature of research and the means of its dissemination. New research in the social science and humanities has also drawn attention to the personal nature of the testimonials generated through the interview process. Researchers such as Robert Reynolds (2010) point to the inherently emotional nature of the interaction between interviewer and participant, while others such as Katherine Blee (2006) have explored the ethics of entanglement experienced by interviewers as a narrative is formulated. These fluid interactions and the pressures of complicity are at the centre of this paper. Rather than assume the participant alone is able to give meaning to their own narrative, the authors explore the co-constitutive nature of research involving biographical interviews. They do so by exploring the implications of cross-disciplinary research in interviews. Each discipline involves its own intellectual framing of the interview space, invokes its own imagining of what constitutes legitimate knowledge, and has its own emotional responses to the development of interviews. Yet, the porous nature of disciplinary boundaries offer rich spaces in which to imagine how respondents might speak back to the researcher to reclaim agency and meaning. This paper is the product of an ongoing collaborative conversation between researchers in the fields of sport biography, social anthropology and migration history. Each approaches the formulation of biography in a distinctive manner according to disciplinary training. However, it is the emotional dynamic within interviews that lies at the core of the paper’s findings. This intersection of feelings and academic discourse is rarely acknowledged in the construction of knowledge, however it offers space in which to reflect on the relationship between interviewer and participant. The construction of knowledge, as the interview dynamic develops and establishes norms, provides rich potential to understand knowledge and its communication back to the wider community