This is the same course that ran in Manchester earlier this year, in April 2014. It is for those having no knowledge or experience of BNIM but wanting to find out a bit about it.
If you attended that April course, and/or if you have also experimented even a little (even if just informally) with BNIM, then we recommend that you consider attending instead the Second Workshop, which runs on the second day, December 4th, the Lived Experience of Trying BNIM.
BNIM – the biographic narrative interpretive method – has been growing and developing for almost 2 decades. In that time, some 70 Ph.D. BNIM-based theses have been completed in well over 40 universities in the UK and around the world, and many post-doctoral research projects have been completed. Its power is increasingly recognised in applied and commissioned research.
Both BNIM’s interviewing practice and its interview-interpretation practice are highly systematised and deliver the detailed descriptions and depth-understandings in a whole range of diverse fields.
A short guide and detailed manuals, five-day trainings and email tuition, and a dedicated email list are all available.
The best introduction however is hands-on experience.
In this workshop, Tom Wengraf provides participants with hands-on experience both of the two-subsession BNIM interview and of the BNIM-panel analysis central to BNIM twin-track interpretation methodology.
BNIM is concerned with the ‘lived experiencing’ of its interviewees either over the whole of their lives or over a selected life-period. The BNIM interpretation methodology involves reconstructing current lived experiencing, but also the lived experiencing in previous phases or at earlier moments, of a particular situated and self-situating subjectivity.
With an intrinsically psychosocial (or rather, psychosocietal) approach to situated subjectivities, you can use BNIM to illuminate a relatively sociological understanding of situations as experienced or a relatively psychological understanding of subjectivities as co-constituted by past situations and as co-constituting present situations. Or both!
On its own, or in combination with other methods, BNIM is a very flexible and widely-used tool. This course provides you with an experience-based understanding of how it works and what its uses can be.
