Overview

Based on 250 life-story interviews in seven European Union countries, Biography and social exclusion in Europe: analyses personal struggles against social exclusion to illuminate local milieus and changing welfare regimes and contexts; points to challenging new agendas for European politics and welfare, beyond the rhetoric of communitarianism and the New Deal; vividly illustrates the lived experience and environmental complexity working for and against structural processes of social exclusion; refashions the interpretive tradition as a teaching and research tool linking macro and micro realities. Students, academic teachers and professional trainers, practitioners, politicians, policy makers and researchers in applied and comparative welfare fields will all benefit from reading this book.

Full Product Details

9781861343093

Table of Contents

Reviews

a highly exciting and innovative book. This development in ethnographic methods in social research is immensely valuable and relevant to key questions in contemporary societies. Professor Walter Lorenz, Department of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork, Ireland.

Author Information

Prue Chamberlayne is Senior Research Fellow in the School of Health and Social Welfare at the Open University. She has extensive experience of teaching comparative social policy and of using biographical methods in research. She is currently engaged in applying such methods to professional training and evaluation work. Tom Wengraf, Visiting Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Social Research Methods at Middlesex University, was co-editor of The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science (2000), and his Qualitative Research Interviewing: biographic narrative and semi-structured methods was published in 2001. Michael Rustin is Professor of Sociology at the University of East London, and a Visiting Professor at the Tavistock Clinic. His recent book Reason and Unreason: Psychoanalysis, Science and Politics (2001) explores interconnections between psychoanalysis, qualitative research methods, and social policy.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available