Doing Research with Documents of Life

This book presents Documents of Life (DoLs) as a research framework, offering both scholarly insight and practical guidance for conducting this kind of work. DoLs are everyday materials that illuminate the organisation of ordinary lives and their social worlds. Addressing key methodological questions in autoethnography, it brings together critical socio-cultural autoethnography (CSA) and DoLs through the innovative use of facet methodology (FM). This approach enables analytical engagement with texts across the social sciences while remaining attentive to narrative form, integrating literary studies within sociological inquiry through the DoL approach to an accountable/dialogical storytelling. Grounded in relational ethics and a critical humanist orientation, the book remains in dialogue with people and their accounts, recognising connections between the sociological and the literary, as well as the historical and the cultural. These strands are brought together through a sustained empirical focus on those who go to war (including the author, a former soldier) and those engaged in different, but equally consequential, struggles. The book will be of strong interest to PhD and postgraduate students seeking guidance on conducting autoethnographic research, in addition to scholars in sociology, anthropology, philosophy, politics, gender and masculinity studies, memory studies, organisational studies, and the social sciences more broadly.

Derek Wesley Morris holds a PhD in socio-cultural studies from the University of Edinburgh, UK.

1 Methodologies, Reflexivity, and the Ethics of Accountable/Dialogical Storytelling 2 Understanding Me Then and Me Now: Reflexivity as Accountability 3 Constructing a Critical Socio-Cultural Autoethnography: From the Self to the Social 4 Fact, Fiction, and the Making of a Novella 5 Accountable Storytelling: The Process of Made DoL Creation and Analysis 6 Accountable/ Dialogical Storytelling and Authorial Habitus in Auto/biographical/Historiographical Novella 7 Who Sent Me to War? Power, Text, and Mobilisation 8 Memory in Motion: Andre, DoLs, and the Ethics of Reconstruction Conclusion: Ending in Attention