Research Overview
This page is currently under construction:
Each bullet will have a link to a separate page
(with a few words of elaboration and links to articles/chapters)
The Areas
of my research interests span across four topics:
Ø
Language
Acquisition/Narrative Development
Ø
Pre-Adolescence: Gender/Masculinity
Ø
Student
Identities
Ø
Confessions
Theoretically, there are the following six clusters that are at the center of my
work:
Ø
Developmental Theory
Ø
Interactionist/Discursive Approach
Ø
Identity
Dilemmata (Dilemmas)
Ø
Narrative
Theory and Analysis
Ø
Positioning Theory and Analysis
Ø
Qualitative Inquiry
OLD
research platform (from 2001)
(Discourse <<masculinity>> and Gender)
BACKGROUND: The research that
followed my dissertation work (published in 1987 as Bamberg, "The
Acquisition of Narratives"), and the continuing collaboration
with
The investigation of children's ability to do 'evaluations' (published in
1991 in "Journal of Child Language" with R. Damrad-Frye) and the investigation of 'perspective taking’
(published in 1991 in "Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy") was a turning point and took
me into a new direction: With the support of a two-year NAE-Spencer Fellowship,
I turned to the investigation of children's evaluative perspectives in
emotionally charged situations - where they themselves were personally invested
in a variety of ways, and equally, where others had different things at stake.
These investigations were no longer centrally concerned with the linguistic
organization of plots, but much more with the narrator's choice of linguistic
forms in order to index his/her personal viewpoint. Though at first ‘viewpoint’
or ‘perspective analysis’ was taken more literally to index the orientation
from which the activity of telling was organized, it quickly shifted to the
exploration of how speakers themselves want to be understood. Thus, what
became the foreground in my investigations was the genuinely developmental
concern of how speakers organize themselves by way of narrating and
account giving, opening up the territory of identity development and
identity transformations in childhood, adolescence, in adults, and in old
age (summarized in two articles from 1997 "Language, Concepts, and
Emotion: The Role of Language in the Construction of Emotion," and
"Positioning Between Structure and Performance", and
elaborated in more recent papers on positioning).
My current line of investigation pursues this issue of identity formation
in (male) adolescents in the age-bracket between 10-15 years. In recent
years, I presented a number of papers on pilot data that were collected since
September 2000, when we began following 25 boys for a five-year period with the
aim to focus on the gradual but qualitative transition from childhood to
becoming a (male) adolescent. The theoretical concept of 'positioning', and the methodological tools of
narrative and focus-group interviewing are the guidelines in this work. Since
then, a number of conferences have been conducted and a number of conference
panels*
(as well as three dissertation projects)**
to prepare for a number of major grants to turn this pilot project into a
large-scale investigation linking the investigation of identity formation
practices in families, with identity formation practices in school and peer
activities.
click BELOW for
LINK to
Transformation from Childhood to Adolescence
The Development of Masculinity in Different
Cultures
* see for list of conferences and recent panels: <recent grant preparation activities>
|
**recent dissertation
projects |
