Huilen, schrikken, lachen, kortom, meereizen met de ander. De meerwaarde van levensverhalen binnen sociaal-wetenschappelijk onderzoek

Samenvatting

Crying, Getting Frightened, Laughing, in Short Travelling with the Other. The Value of Life Stories in Social Science Research. In this paper, I show how collecting life stories contributed to understanding the life of Iranian women political activists in exile, in the Netherlands and the US. In my research, conducted between 1995-2000, I listened to 20 life stories of Iranian women in both countries who were politically active in leftist organizations during Iran's 1979 revolution. These women experienced internal exile after 1981 in Iran and became external exiles when they fled the country. The context of the new country in which they have lived for several years has had a decisive impact on how they view the past, the present, and the future. As an internal exile in Iran and external exile in the Netherlands since 1988, I have been very much involved in this research. The combination of this involvement and the use of the life story method have contributed to ways in which these women felt the space and freedom not only to express themselves verbally but also to be able to communicate through their emotions. It became possible to go beyond the expressive level in the stories to include emotional communication as one of the bases for analysis. 9 References. Adapted from the source document.