ABSTRACT
As humans, we use narratives and our personal stories as attempts to alleviate the existential vacuums and feelings of life’s meaninglessness that we all experience at some point. Our past and present are in perpetual motion, and are constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed in order to create a cognitive schema of our life’s theme. The use of narrative therefore highlights the very practical applications that an ethnographic method of research brings to the social sciences, by bridging division between people, and by encouraging new and alternative understandings of the chaotic and complex theories surrounding our concept of self and personal identities. Cultivating the art of listening allows researchers to gain a greater insight into the innermost regions of their respondents’ lives.
The small canon of sociological research on black men in Britain is dated and often reliant on analyses that observe black youth. Moreover, much of that work is presented through the eyes of those outside the population they observe, namely white, middle-aged and often middle-class men. For some, this can raise questions of positionality concerning ‘car wash sociologists’, and those that like to ‘talk cricket from the boundary, but seldom face a fast bowler from the crease’. Black-by-black research overcomes the many assumptions about black life in Britain, and leaves increased space to showcase an authentic and academically sound presentation of collated data. This further addresses the lack of agency possessed by black men who occupy fringe status in Britain, which often leads them to distrust those outside their group who attempt to investigate – and, in particular, to research – their culture.
