The voices of the tale: the storyteller in early Byzantine collective biographies, miracle collections, and collections of edifying tales

This article is a first attempt to approach the figure of the storyteller in three types of early Byzantine tale collections (fourth–seventh centuries): collective biography, miracle collection, and collection of edifying tales. Our approach draws significantly on Walter Benjamin's discussion of the storyteller and Monica Fludernik's work on conversational storytelling. Our analysis has a twofold purpose: first, to revise the impression that the storyteller is a canonical force that possesses the same characteristics in every single tale; second, to suggest that the storyteller is an inherent feature of short hagiographical narratives.

Cricket and the Beechworth Asylum, 1910–1915: A collective biography

Prosopography, otherwise known as collective biography, is a method that has been widely used by historians but is less well known as a sociological research technique. In this article, we review definitions and uses of prosopography, its advantages and limitations. We describe steps in the method with reference to a study of the Beechworth Asylum cricket team in rural Victoria, Australia, and show the extent of members’ involvement with activities in the town. Prosopography is shown to be a useful tool for sociological research, while findings of the study add to the limited literature about staff in Australian asylums.

(Re)Assembling Anti-Oppressive Practice Teachings in Youth and Community Work through Collective Biography (2)

This article draws on research undertaken as part of a Collective Biography project generated by a group of activists and lecturers teaching and researching in youth and community work (YCW). Collective Biography (CB) is an approach to research in which participants work productively with memory and writing to generate collective action orientated analysis. The emphasis on collectivized approaches to CB work acts as a potential strategy to disrupt and resist the reproduction of power in academic knowledge-making practices and the impact of powerful policy discourses in practice. The article explores the current context and contemporary challenges for teaching anti-oppressive practice in UK based universities before briefly scoping out the methodology of CB. Extracts from a memory story are used as an example of the process of collective analysis generated through the process of CB in relation to racism, the role of anti-oppressive practice, and as the basis for YCW educators to think collectively about implications for teaching going forward. The article goes on to explore the role of concepts that were worked with as part of the CB process and considers the potential significance for teaching anti-oppressive practice in YCW. The article concludes by starting to scope out key considerations relating to the potential role of CB as a grass roots strategy to open spaces of possibility alongside young people and communities in reassembling the teaching of anti-oppressive practice in YCW.

A Community of Councillors: Tudor Government and Prosopography

The Tudor privy council was the executive board of the English state and its members the leading political players of the era. Historians of Tudor politics have traditionally focused on kings and great men. When they deal with the privy council, they treat councillors in isolation, only exploring their links with others during moments of political strife. The result is a historiography dominated by faction and division. A prosopographical approach – a form of collective biography that helps identify the shared elements in a group’s experiences, and foregrounds the relations between its members - allows us to look at this group of men as a group, and in so doing to see them differently. Their many shared experiences - a childhood spent together at the same grammar school, a tour of Europe’s universities as young adults, joint military service, marriage into the same family, or time spent together hunting, hawking, and feasting - makes it much harder to divide councillors into neat opposing camps. More broadly, this paper uses the case-study of Tudor privy councillors to illustrate how tools taken from the Digital Humanities can enhance and expand the prosopographical approach: in particular modern relational database software moves us beyond simply identifying common themes in the lives of the members of this group, and allows us to explore patterns of interaction between them. Such an approach, moreover, has the potential to enhance our understanding of many other groups of the early modern period. ​

Finding ourselves as Black women in Eurocentric theory: collaborative biography on learning and reshaping qualitative inquiry

PurposeQualitative research consistently centers Eurocentrism through courses' integrations of ontological, epistemological and axiological perspectives. This literal whitewashing was a source of great frustration and confusion for the authors, four Black women, who found their identities omitted and disregarded in qualitative inquiry. Using Collins' outsider-within concept and collective narratives to center their experiences, the authors seek through their writing to actively repurpose and re-engage with qualitative scholarship that generally seeks to exclude Black women.Design/methodology/approachTheoretically informed by Collins' outsider-within concept, the authors use Deleuze and Parnet's collective biography to tell the stories of four Black doctoral students negotiating race, gender, class and intellectual identity, while critiquing Eurocentric theory, through coursework. The collaborative writing process provided shared space for the engagement of individual thoughts and experiences with(in) others' narratives.FindingsBlack women can interpret qualitative inquiry outside of the Eurocentric norm, and qualitative courses can provide spaces for them to do so by repositioning Black women philosophers as central to understanding qualitative inquiry.Originality/valueThrough collective biography (Deleuze and Parnet, 2007), this paper centers the voices of four Black women scholars who use a creative writing approach to think with/through theory as Black women (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012). The paper offers new discussions of and ways in which qualitative researchers might decolonize Eurocentric ways of knowing in qualitative inquiry and qualitative pedagogy from students' perspectives.