Embodied narratives. Connecting stories, bodies, cultures and ecologies

Auto/biography and life history methods in adult education research can generate deep and rich insights into human life and learning. The book celebrates the complexity and interdependence of the many aspects and levels of learning and life that are kept separate by the hegemonic view of learning and research, which is overly functionalist, reductionist, dis-embodied and dis-connected. Life history and biography are powerful narrative methods that can be used to cast a light on the connections between emotions and meaning, between contents and contexts, body and physical space, subjectivity and social structures, by linking the micro (individual), the meso (relational) and the macro (social/cultural) in adult education and lifelong, lifewide, lifedeep learning, as well as in the development of a richer and more systemic knowledge. The book contains 14 selected chapters from a conference of the ESREA Life History and Biography Netwwork, held in Odense (DK), in 2012, then re-edited and re-written to represent the variety of studies that are developed nowadays in Europe and in the world, on these themes. The book also contains a postscript by Nora Bateson.