Insider or outsider? Issues of power and habitus during life history interviews with menopausal Iranian women

Abstract

Conducting my fieldwork among religious menopausal women in Iran raised the question of the position of the researcher in life history research. This chapter set out to reflect on the shifting power dynamics in life history interviews and argues for the need to go beyond a focus on intersectional categories per se, to look at the broader social landscape of power and its process. I do this by employing a Bourdieusian perspective, which considers the symbolic and cognitive elements by emphasising on the social practice. So, I emphasise the power dynamic within the interviews could not be explained only by identity categories and how they intersected, but needed to include how the actors deployed them in their social practice i.e. in the interview situation.