Doing Research with Documents of Life (Literary Methods in the Social Sciences)

This book presents Documents of Life (DoLs) as a research framework, offering both scholarly insight and practical guidance for conducting this kind of work. DoLs are everyday materials that illuminate the organisation of ordinary lives and their social worlds.

Addressing key methodological questions in autoethnography, it brings together critical socio-cultural autoethnography (CSA) and DoLs through the innovative use of facet methodology (FM). This approach enables analytical engagement with texts across the social sciences while remaining attentive to narrative form, integrating literary studies within sociological inquiry through the DoL approach to an accountable/dialogical storytelling. Grounded in relational ethics and a critical humanist orientation, the book remains in dialogue with people and their accounts, recognising connections between the sociological and the literary, as well as the historical and the cultural. These strands are brought together through a sustained empirical focus on those who go to war (including the author, a former soldier) and those engaged in different, but equally consequential, struggles.

The book will be of strong interest to PhD and postgraduate students seeking guidance on conducting autoethnographic research, in addition to scholars in sociology, anthropology, philosophy, politics, gender and masculinity studies, memory studies, organisational studies, and the social sciences more broadly.

Derek Wesley Morris holds a PhD in socio-cultural studies from the University of Edinburgh, UK.