Autobiographical research: Memory, time and narratives in the first person

This text is about life narratives, memory and time as basic elements in autobiographical research. Aspects of these have seemed important to me whilst I have been conducting and coordinating a research project involving a team of researchers from Brazil and other countries. In this article I take the memory of the individual narrator as the focus, despite the fact that the memories of narrator and researcher are intertwined and co-defined through social and cultural relations and that the narrators´ memory and the analysis and the interpretation of the narrator and researcher are intertwined and complementary to each other. I deal with time since the narrator’s perspective on the past reality is involved in any narration. The article has four parts. The first is focused on the research approach in general. Among other concepts I distinguish between autobiographical research, life stories and life narratives. The second part is focused on a specific research project that studied peoples’ memories about distinguished educators and education development in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. This project offers the backdrop for understanding representations of memory and time. The third part draws on examples from this project to clarify the dimensions of memory and time as I understood them. Finally, in the last part, but not aiming to conclude, I relate these findings to some concepts from the literature. (DIPF/Orig.