Lois Presser, Department of Sociology, University of Tennessee
Narrative Criminology: Theory and Methods
Visiting Narrare during the academic year 2019-2020
As a Fulbrig
ht Professor with the U.S. Fulbright program, located within the Faculty of Social Sciences at Tampere University and affiliated with Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary NarrativeStudies, I will conduct research and teach in the area of narrative criminology which I founded. I am a professor of Sociology at the University of Tennessee in the USA, a faculty I joined in 2002 after earning my Ph.D. in Criminology/Criminal Justice from the University of Cincinnati. I have published extensively in the areas of narrative, harm, identity, and restorative justice. My books include Been a Heavy Life, Why We Harm, Narrative Criminology (co-edited), Inside Story: How Narratives Drive Mass Harm and The Emerald Handbook of Narrative Criminology (co-edited). My Fulbright/Tampere project concerns the development of methods for pinpointing facts and understandings that have been rendered invisible in dominant cultural stories. My concern is with the logics taken for granted in, and the real constraints on people’s lives omitted from, hegemonic narratives. In addition to this research, I will co-teach graduate seminars and give public lectures.
Kim Schoofs, Department of Linguistics, KU Leuven
Visiting Narrare during the Autumn 2019
Kim Schoofs is a PhD student at KU Leuven within the Department of Linguistics. She obtained a bachelor’s degree in linguistics and literature (KU Brussels, 2013), a master’s degree in linguistics and literature (KU Leuven, 2014) and a master’s degree in broadcast journalism (KU Leuven, 2015). In 2016, she started working on her PhD project, under the supervision of Dorien Van De Mieroop. Kim’s PhD project aims to gain insight into new ways of scrutinizing the dialectic relation between the discursive construction of local stories and of identities on the one hand, and dominant discourses circulating in the global context on the other hand. The theoretical elaboration of Positioning Analysis is at the core of her project. In general, Kim’s research interests cover Narrative, Life stories, Identity Construction, Discourse Analysis and Interactional Sociolinguistics.