Introduction to Biographical Methods

Abstract

The genesis of the collection was a day conference at the University of Nottingham organised by members of the team of the ESRC-funded Pedagogic Quality and Inequality in University First Degrees project, which is a mixed method project that systematically and critically explores how to evaluate the quality of undergraduate degrees in different universities in socially-just ways (see http://www.pedagogicequality.ac.uk/ for further details). The aim of the day was collaboration with potential lecturer and student users of the project findings. The focus of discussion was the notion of ‘quality’ in relation to the trend of using student biographies in the teaching of university sociology (McLean and Abbas, 2009). The concrete outcome is this collection intended to contribute to arguments about whether, in Bernstein’s (2000) terms, biographical methods are a recontextualisation of ‘pure’ sociology which disadvantages some students or whether, on the contrary, it gives all students access to powerful knowledge.