Abstract
The exploration of narrative expressions constitutes a central element of the ethnographer’s trade. It also, however, presents numerous methodological and interpretive dilemmas which are not easily resolved. For example, such dilemmas may emerge when a young person may be interviewed about, or asked to visualize, their past experience in a neighbourhood, the wider city or family life. For experienced ethnographers, we learn that young people may often imagine they have little history to tell and that many young people have been born into local conditions of loss that have substantially erased patterns of familial or community memory. In this chapter, we argue that narratives expressed by young people always carry residual meanings which operate in the present in reappropriated forms and which shape their projected futures. It is the ethnographic interpretation of these narratives that may assist us in better understanding how particular identity categories – such as a young person imagining he or she is Eminem or seeing oneself as ‘a Thug’ or ‘a Gina’ – may be seen as part of a larger narrative imagination – as a form of social and cultural meaning which carries residual effects into the present.
‘Of time and the City’ is taken from the title of Terrance Davies’ photomontage of childhood in Liverpool, UK during and after the Second World War.
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Notes
- 1.
Here we are able to witness the power of Ricoeur’s notion of narratives and their surplus effects in the form of the imagination. Ricoeur suggests that individuals must narrate themselves into a possible world based upon their own historically informed imagination of the future: “what is proposed in the text is the proposing of a world that I might inhabit and into which I might project my own powers” (Kearney 2004, p. 53).
- 2.
These subcultural groups will be discussed later in this chapter in the description of the ethnographic study.
- 3.
We also begin to showcase work on a third case study which was not completed at the time of the Canadian study but is currently underway, in the UK and South Africa, and is supported by the second author. We wish to thank Jaqueline Kennely for actiong as the senior researcher and co-author on “Lost Youth in the Global City” and her valuable methodological insights which have inspired elements of this chapter.
- 4.
There are some notable exceptions (too see the work of Roger Simon (2005)). Noteworthy to is that narrative and narrativization are largely defined in educational research as one’s personal narrative. For Ricoeur, narrative has a much wider meaning in that narrativization refers to the idea of expressing a story though an imagined ideal of what we wish the story to be, as a horizon of the possible.
- 5.
These storied youth narratives—encoded and recoded in human time—point us towards a sociology of young people which does not use the category of “change” as a fetish and which endeavors to position young people solely as the vehicles of transition, future citizenship, and progress.
- 6.
Mira is not the woman in the image. Mira was a baby found wrapped in a blanket and left on the streets of Toronto in the middle of winter in the late 1990s. The woman in the image is Jazzie and the article which sat alongside this photo was part of a series about homeless women and abandoned babies which arose after the incident involving baby Mira (for a full account of how we assessed these images before taking them into school classrooms for discussion).
- 7.
Rose (2007) tells us that making images as a way of answering a research question is relatively rare but is crucial in understanding social differences and of visualizing these differences as a form of cultural expression.
- 8.
Noteworthy exceptions to this were the visual sociologists from the early subcultural studies tradition developed primarily at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, founded by Richard Hoggart in 1964.
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Dillabough, JA., Gardner, P. (2015). 4.3 “Of Time and the City”: Young People’s Ethnographic Accounts of Identity and Urban Experience in Canada. In: Smeyers, P., Bridges, D., Burbules, N., Griffiths, M. (eds) International Handbook of Interpretation in Educational Research. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9282-0_35
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