Past, Present and Future of Biographical Research : a Dialogue with Gabriele Rosenthal

Within the so-called biographical movement (Bertaux 1981), which from the early 1980s has contributed to re-orient sociological perspectives to grasp the embeddedness of biographies in social macrostructures, mechanisms and processes, especially the mutual relations existing between the experiential world of people’s lives and societal developments, the work of Gabriele Rosenthal stands among the most inspiring ones. Combining a conceptual and methodological reflection with extensive field research, both in Europe and in the Global South, she has aimed at valuing the histories and stories of people often marginalised by sociological research. In this interview, Gabriele Rosenthal offers ian account of the development of biographical research in the sociological debate. Her work is aimed at stressing the close links existing between biographical methods and the most outstanding tradition of social theory – such as social constructivism, interactionism, phenomenology, Grounded Theory, figurational sociology and the interpretive paradigm, as she mentions below. Furthermore, Gabriele’s research has had as a recurrent focus the social constellations of circumstances which often constraint people into relatively powerless and hard to hear and to tell positions. Her studies on the experiences of Holocaust survivors as well as Nazi perpetrators and their influence on the subsequent generations as well as her works on migration, violence, ethnicity, collective and armed conflicts and trauma have had a strong impact on several generations of researchers.