Lecture: Narratives and Social Experience of Migration

In sociology, the origins of the use of (auto)biographies, private documents and collective stories as a source of information can be traced back in the work of Thomas and Znaniecki: The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918-20) is an attempt to study social changes introduced by the experience of migration (at an individual and a social level), based on ‘narratives’ such as letters, diaries, life-histories.

In the narrative method, personal documents and accounts are considered as the privileged locus for accessing individual experience, and to determine elements that — generalisable or not — are attributable to the social context.

However, there are different ways of conceiving the relationship between subjective experience and social organisation (of both practices and sense), related to different ways of understanding the “social”, as well as the “subjectivity”.