Postmodern Interviewing

Interview roles are less clear than they once were, and in some cases, the roles are even exchanged to promote new opportunities for understanding the shape and evolution of selves and experience.

Postmodern Interviewing offers readers an exploration of the postmodern interview, a conversation with diverse purposes in which the communicative format is constructed as much within the interview conversation as it stems from predesignated research interests. It provides cutting-edge discussions of emerging horizons, featuring reflexivity, poetics, and power, along with discussions of new ways of gathering experiential knowledge. Employing concepts from anthropology, family studies, history, and sociology, the contributors present the ambitious new directions in which the interview has gone, such as:

• How the interview process is refracted through the lens of language, knowledge, culture, and difference
• How the dividing line between fact and fiction is blurred to promote richer understanding
• How standardized representation has given way to representational invention

By exploring these exciting developments, readers will be exposed to the engaging opportunities for understanding the shape and evolution of selves and social worlds that are made possible through changes in the interview process.

This volume is comprised of chapters from the Handbook of Interview Research (Gubrium and Holstein, SAGE, 2001). The companion volume, Inside Interviewing (SAGE, 2003), is also comprised of chapters from the Handbook.