Molly Andrews

University College London | UCL · Social Research Institute

There are many aspects of Catherine Kohler Riessman’s narrative scholarship which have established her international reputation in the field. This contribution pays tribute to the role she has played as a mentor, both through her written work and in her practice. Mentoring, which is time-consuming and painstaking work, is a critical but widely unac...

What stories are told, and ultimately tellable, has consequences for our ability to imagine the world otherwise. This chapter examines in-depth a particular story told 25 years in retrospect by an East German dissident about a book that he had hidden from the Stasi and that ultimately disappeared. After the wall opened, the narrator reads his Stasi...

This article explores the role of educators in our current environment, where truth and truthfulness must fight their corner in a world of ‘alternative facts’. The article opens with a review of the effects of the 24/7 news cycle on our sense of the overall well-being of the world, then discusses the meaning of moral identity and questions whether...

This article opens with a problematisation of how one can meaningfully discuss the concept of quality in a methodology as notoriously ‘murky’ as narrative research. Unlike other kinds of qualitative approaches, there is a lack of consensus of what constitutes narrative, much less a clearly prescribed protocol for ascertaining evaluation. It then pr...

Professori Molly Andrews käsittelee englanninkieliseen alkuperäisartikkeliin pohjaavassa katsaus-artikkelissaan poliittisen anteeksiannon narratiivisia rakenteita. Nojaten laajamittaiseen narratologiseen tutkimukseen entisen Itä-Saksan (DDR) salaisen poliisin Stasin informanttien ja näiden kohteiden kohtaamisista artikkeli rakentaa aiempaa monipuol...

This article reports on a conversation between users of two research methods, biographical interviews and imagined futures essay writing. A dialogue form is used to discuss these methods and their potential to be combined. The value of comparing research methods is discussed, and then the two methods are described and points of connection and contr...

Although there is widespread agreement with the argument that Hannah Arendt made more than half a century ago, that forgiveness is “one of the human faculties that make social change possible” (Misztal, 2011, p. 201), beyond this, there is little consensus of what it means. Applying a narrative structure to this discussion, there is a lack of clari...

This article explores later life as a special moment for the imagination, for persons of all ages. If we were to routinely ask ourselves what is the life we hope to be able to look back on, we would increase the likelihood that our ultimate life review would bring us deeper satisfaction. Why, then, do we not devote more attention to imagining our f...

This article examines political commitment to work for progressive social change as a lifelong activity. Challenging assumptions that idealism is something which is associated with youth, and, appropriately, later to be ‘grown out of’, the article presents an alternative model for examining social activism as a lifelong engagement. Revisiting resea...

This article reviews the author’s critique of “agelessness” as a form of ageism, first published nearly twenty years ago. Here, the author reflects personally and professionally on her original arguments, re-evaluating if the tendency toward agelessness deprives the old of one of their most hard-earned resources: Their age.

This article examines why imagination is so central to narrative, and narrative such a vital component of imagination. What is the role of imagination in helping us to 'see difference', not only between others and ourselves but also between ourselves and who we might be, or might have been? The article explores the situated nature of imagination an...

For most of the 40 years of the existence of the GDR, the outside world took little interest in what happened there. If someone from the West were asked to talk about their image of East Germans, if they had anything at all to say, it probably would have been with regard to the marked achievement of East German athletes, whose performance, they mig...

Narrative research has become a catchword in the social sciences today, promising new fields of inquiry and creative solutions to persistent problems. This book brings together ideas about narrative from a variety of contexts across the social sciences and synthesizes understandings of the field. Rather than focusing on theory, it examines how narr...

In the last two decades, narrative has acquired an increasingly high profile in social research. It often seems as if all social researchers are doing narrative research in one way or another. Yet narrative research, although it is popular and engaging, is also difficult. How to go about it is much discussed. People working in this field are freque...

This essay argues that how we view our own old age is highly influenced by socially pervasive, though never explicit, expectations regarding old age as a generic category. I idenfiy four key expectations - the right to an old age; the idea that being old means being endowed with certain (positive or negative) characteristics; the fragmented relatio...

Several years ago, after a lecture I gave on research methods to first year undergraduates, a member of class came up to me. The woman, considerably older than me and from the Caribbean, asked if we could have a quick word. I agreed, and asked her if she would like to go to my office. No, she assured me, that wouldn’t be necessary; hers would be a...

This chapter is co-written by the three directors of the Centre for Narrative Research at the University of East London, UK and consists of their reflections on teaching narrative to postgraduate students in Britain. The organisation of the chapter is in three different voices, reflecting the design and teaching of the actual course. There is a gen...

Since the collapse of East Germany in 1989, many East Germans have been occupied with Vergangenheitsbewaelitigung ('working through the past') in an attempt to gain insight into how and why 'that which called itself socialism' was able to operate as it did for 40 years. The opening of the East German Stasi files is one example of the effort to docu...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to argue for an archaeological expedition of sorts, to search for and to uncover a host of stories which might assist us in piecing together a framework worth dedicating our future lives to understanding ageing. Design/methodology/approach – This is a theoretical paper on ageing. Findings – An individual's e...

Persons who submitted applications to give testimony received very clear guidance on where their stories should begin, and where they should end; those who wanted to contextualize their experiences of loss were not allowed a platform to contemplate the wider causes of their suffering. Some who gave testimony before the trc recalled afterwards the a...

Featuring extraordinary personal accounts, this book provides a unique window through which to examine some of the great political changes of our time, and reveals both the potential and the challenge of narrating the political world. Molly Andrews' novel analysis of the relationship between history and biography presents in-depth case studies of f...

This paper comprises discussions from a residential symposium, "Methods in Dialogue", that took place near Cambridge, UK, in May 2005. The symposium concluded a series of seminars organised by the London East Research Institute and the Centre for Narrative Research at the University of East London and supported by the Economic and Social Research C...

In this chapter the author responds to feed back from an earlier article entitled: “Memories of mother: Counter-narratives of early maternal influence” which explored maternal influence on memory and personal narrative. The chapter is an excerpt from a book which focuses on the fluidity of counter-narratives. Published (author's copy) Peer Reviewed

In this chapter the three authors who are co-directors of the Centre for Narrative Research at the University of East London bring together their views on narrative research, theory and method. The chapter is organized around their individual stories of each author’s relationship with narrative research. Published (author's copy) Peer Reviewed

This article will compare the narrative projects of nation building and dismantling as represented in the truth commissions of South Africa and East Germany. One of the most important aspects of truth commissions is that personal suffering on a wide scale is publicly acknowledged and written into the national fabric. The relationship between indivi...

One of the most dominant cultural narratives is `the story of mothering' but as many researchers have documented, there is a large chasm between this cultural product and individuals' lived experiences of mothering and being mothered. When individuals talk about their relationships with their mothers, they locate themselves - knowingly or not - pol...

Feminist scholars conducting research with non-feminist and anti-feminist women are confronted with a dilemma that is rarely articulated in feminist writing: how can we represent these women's lives as they experience them while at the same time challenging women's oppression? A related dilemma is whether a feminist researcher is justified in descr...

There is something splendid about the word ageful – a word which I had not encountered before reading Bytheway (2000). Ironically, Bytheway does not share my affection for his invention; rather, for him it seems to have negative connotations, reflected in his comment: ‘as gerontologists we are vulnerable to seeing ourselves and those we study...

This article compares Enright's cognitive-developmental model of forgiveness (Enright et al., 1989, 1991, 1992, 1994) with a model of forgiveness based on communication between the wronged and the wrongdoer. While unilateral forgiveness is unconditional and is a process which happens wholly within the person who has suffered an injustice, negotiate...

In recent years, many researchers in the study of ageing have adopted a terminology of ‘agelessness’. They argue that old age is nothing more than a social construct and that until it is eliminated as a conceptual category, ageism will continue to flourish. This article challenges this view, stating that the current tendency towards ‘agelessnes...

East Germany's revolution has been portrayed in the western media as a popular uprising rejecting the old socialist order and wholeheartedly embracing Western capitalism. This article examines the politics of leaders of the East German citizens' movement who spearheaded these changes in 1989, using data collected with prominent dissidents nearly th...

In this article the author discusses the challenges and rewards of conducting cross-cultural sociological research in a non-native language. The argument is illustrated through the author's personal experience conducting oral historty research in Berlin.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Cambridge, 1989.

The article explores the relationship between the three labels of feminist political psychologist from the perspective of the author. It interweaves personal narrative with case studies to illustrate how these three concepts are intricately bound together. In order to pursue research in political psychology gender can not be ignored as a central ca...

This article explores attitudes to forgiveness giving a range of illustrations from international politics through to classic literature. It draws on personal accounts from the cold war era in Eastern Germany. The article concludes that balancing the claims of justice and forgiveness is morally and politically important for communities to rebuild t...

The article explores a guiding assumption about oral history or "people's history": that it empowers "the people" simply because they are at the center of it. It provides the context of the Ministerium fur Staatsicherheit the "MfS" or "Stasi" files which were gathered by the communist government of Eastern Germany during the cold war. The author ob...

This chapter explores the relationship between the stories people tell about their lives, and the political frameworks which form the context for those stories. Discussion in the article is based on data collected in four different research projects: the first carried out with fifteen British lifetime socialist activists; the second with anti-war a...

Taking direct examples from the author’s own international research this chapter illustrates the patriotism of social change activists. It points out that one characteristic which people of this description share, even in different times and in different countries, is a professed deep love for their country which contrasts with the way in which the...