Abstract
Lena Inowlocki
University of Frankfurt/M
Making sense of religious belongings. Reconstructing reflexivity in autobiographical narratives
When do we do research on phenomena among a group of people, and when do we assign seemingly given notions of group membership to the people we study? In my paper, I would like to discuss different examples of research “among” groups of people and “about” groups of people. Sometimes a phenomenon is seen as interesting for narrative interviews that derives from a problem discourse in news media and politics such as, for example, on the younger generation in migrant families in Western Europe and on “integration”. This can result in studies such as on “Muslim youth”, which is in fact a container category created by social scientists and mistakenly naturalized. Also in health related studies and in criminology, “groups” are studied that have very little in common except a label assigned to them on the basis of an assumed national or ethnic background. I would therefore propose sampling strategies based on analytical categories of different kinds of belongings and the reconstruction of their subjective meaning, to study kinds of knowledge and forms of praxis in relation to gender and generation. What we can explore and discover through narrative interviews largely depends on how we constitute and consider our sample. In our reconstructive analysis, we can also learn how the subjects of our study reflect on their biographical experience in the context of debated and disputed belongings of citizenship, ethnicity, (religious) communities, and others.
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