Yasmin Gunaratnam
I have spent a lot of time outside of academia, in contract research and working in the community sector. I have been at Goldsmiths since 2008 and teach undergraduate and postgraduate courses on research methods, culture, gender and stories. My research is interested in understanding life's threshold moments; times of transition and border crossing. So I have wanted to know more about how people improvise their way across life's thresholds (for example at times of first-time motherhood, illness and death).
I am passionate about stories and narrative and am interested in developing new forms of sociological writing. I write short stories and poems. My latest book 'Death and the Migrant: bodies, borders, care' uses a method that I am developing called 'case stories'. The book, which was published by Bloomsbury Academic in November 2013, brings together my ethnographic and narrative work with dying migrants and on intercultural care.
In January 2013 I began a British Academy Fellowship to develop my case stories approach. The aim of the project was to develop resources for care professionals that will support their work with what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has called 'social suffering'. My focus was upon the pain of social exclusion, racial hatred and intolerance. More information about the project is here http://www.case-stories.org/
Phone: 0207 919 2957
Address: Warmington Tower
New Cross
London, SE14 6NW
I am passionate about stories and narrative and am interested in developing new forms of sociological writing. I write short stories and poems. My latest book 'Death and the Migrant: bodies, borders, care' uses a method that I am developing called 'case stories'. The book, which was published by Bloomsbury Academic in November 2013, brings together my ethnographic and narrative work with dying migrants and on intercultural care.
In January 2013 I began a British Academy Fellowship to develop my case stories approach. The aim of the project was to develop resources for care professionals that will support their work with what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has called 'social suffering'. My focus was upon the pain of social exclusion, racial hatred and intolerance. More information about the project is here http://www.case-stories.org/
Phone: 0207 919 2957
Address: Warmington Tower
New Cross
London, SE14 6NW
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Books
In July 2013, the UK government arranged for a van to drive through parts of London carrying the message 'In the UK illegally? GO HOME or face arrest.' This book tells the story of what happened next.
The vans were short-lived, but they were part of an ongoing trend in government-sponsored communication designed to demonstrate toughness on immigration. The authors set out to explore the effects of such performances: on policy, on public debate, on pro-migrant and anti-racist activism, and on the everyday lives of people in Britain. This book presents their findings, and provides insights into the practice of conducting research on such a charged and sensitive topic.
Features
* Brings together a diversity of experience and perspectives of the use of narrative and stories, from leading international scholars and practitioners in the fields of both social science and palliative care
* Considers the value and impact of narrative approaches in the delivery of palliative and end of life care including narrative medicine, research, education, therapy, rehabilitation, user involvement, spiritual, family and bereavement care
* Identifies examples and methods/media of working more effectively with narratives in everyday clinical practice
* Offers 'real-world' examples from international contributors including palliative care service users and those working in the social and human sciences, medicine, theology and the creative arts
Papers
of mixedness in the social sciences, and in everyday life, can run together different phenomena, strata, states, their sensual traits and their relative maturity or in/stabilities. In the process, different modalities of mixing can be subsumed or collapsed. The article also
provides a summary of the key ideas and arguments made by contributors to the issue.
literature on ‘social pain’ and suggests that social pain is the mortar rather than merely a reflection of the affects and neurology of transnational migrations, loss and social violation.
racist events with a rendering of a foreseeable linear temporality of racism and of intergenerational identifications in the future provide the women with a means of living with ontological insecurity and threat. Although this reproduction of linear time can appear to exclude the singularity of unknown futures and others, with regard to the demands of multicultural living, understanding of time can be more open and undecided. The author locates an ethicality to the mothers’ deliberations in how to live in situations
marked by racism and multiculturalism in both their negotiation of temporal registers and in the sharing and interrogation of perspectives and strategies with others. Particular attention is given to the ambivalent use of temporality as an instrument of narrative agency. The discussion also considers how the methodological apparatus of the focus group is engaged with matters of intimate citizenship, conveying and participating in the
production of the research problem."
sought joint ownership of the study with people affected by cancer. An exploratory, qualitative approach was used. Consultation groups were the main method, combining focus group and nominal group techniques. Seventeen groups were held with a total of 105 patients broadly representative of the UK cancer population. Fifteen areas for research were identified. Top priority areas included the impact cancer has on life, how to live with cancer and related support issues; risk factors and causes of cancer; early detection and prevention. Although biological and treatment related aspects of science were identified as important, patients rated the management of practical, social and emotional issues as a higher priority. There is a mismatch between the research priorities
identified by participants and the current UK research portfolio. Current research activity should be broadened to reflect the priorities of people affected by the disease.
In July 2013, the UK government arranged for a van to drive through parts of London carrying the message 'In the UK illegally? GO HOME or face arrest.' This book tells the story of what happened next.
The vans were short-lived, but they were part of an ongoing trend in government-sponsored communication designed to demonstrate toughness on immigration. The authors set out to explore the effects of such performances: on policy, on public debate, on pro-migrant and anti-racist activism, and on the everyday lives of people in Britain. This book presents their findings, and provides insights into the practice of conducting research on such a charged and sensitive topic.
Features
* Brings together a diversity of experience and perspectives of the use of narrative and stories, from leading international scholars and practitioners in the fields of both social science and palliative care
* Considers the value and impact of narrative approaches in the delivery of palliative and end of life care including narrative medicine, research, education, therapy, rehabilitation, user involvement, spiritual, family and bereavement care
* Identifies examples and methods/media of working more effectively with narratives in everyday clinical practice
* Offers 'real-world' examples from international contributors including palliative care service users and those working in the social and human sciences, medicine, theology and the creative arts
of mixedness in the social sciences, and in everyday life, can run together different phenomena, strata, states, their sensual traits and their relative maturity or in/stabilities. In the process, different modalities of mixing can be subsumed or collapsed. The article also
provides a summary of the key ideas and arguments made by contributors to the issue.
literature on ‘social pain’ and suggests that social pain is the mortar rather than merely a reflection of the affects and neurology of transnational migrations, loss and social violation.
racist events with a rendering of a foreseeable linear temporality of racism and of intergenerational identifications in the future provide the women with a means of living with ontological insecurity and threat. Although this reproduction of linear time can appear to exclude the singularity of unknown futures and others, with regard to the demands of multicultural living, understanding of time can be more open and undecided. The author locates an ethicality to the mothers’ deliberations in how to live in situations
marked by racism and multiculturalism in both their negotiation of temporal registers and in the sharing and interrogation of perspectives and strategies with others. Particular attention is given to the ambivalent use of temporality as an instrument of narrative agency. The discussion also considers how the methodological apparatus of the focus group is engaged with matters of intimate citizenship, conveying and participating in the
production of the research problem."
sought joint ownership of the study with people affected by cancer. An exploratory, qualitative approach was used. Consultation groups were the main method, combining focus group and nominal group techniques. Seventeen groups were held with a total of 105 patients broadly representative of the UK cancer population. Fifteen areas for research were identified. Top priority areas included the impact cancer has on life, how to live with cancer and related support issues; risk factors and causes of cancer; early detection and prevention. Although biological and treatment related aspects of science were identified as important, patients rated the management of practical, social and emotional issues as a higher priority. There is a mismatch between the research priorities
identified by participants and the current UK research portfolio. Current research activity should be broadened to reflect the priorities of people affected by the disease.
In 2014, I began a newly revamped set of lectures on research methods for first year undergraduates in sociology. This was their first taste of methods and I was keen to find literature that would both inspire and stretch them. As well as wanting to find accessible reading from a range of diverse authors (not only white men!) I also wanted to encourage students to explore and ‘play’ with more challenging texts, sociological theory and vocabularies.
Taking my inspiration from a short blog post by Peter Kaufman (http://www.everydaysociologyblog.com/2013/07/poetic-sociology.html) of his experiences of using poetry to teach sociology, I wrote a poem for my students based upon my colleague Mariam Motamedi Fraser’s article in The Sociological Review – ‘Once upon a Problem’ - about her experiences of researching an archive and which expresses some of the wonder, confusion and sensual experience of doing research.