ABSTRACT
Educational exegesis comprises the study of individuals and collections of individuals living together and immersed in the brute facticity of society. Thus biography or biographical study is the sine qua non of understanding how education systems function, of how society is reproduced and constructed through schooling, and of how knowledge of and within such systems is made available. However, biography has to confront two dilemmas. The first of these concerns the relation between autobiography and biography, and the second, the inter-relationship of structure and agency. Biographers come face to face with autobiographical texts situated in time and place. These autobiographical texts, collected in the course of extended interviews, are reconstructions by participants of their own fragmented lives and are thus bricollages. They are made coherent by an act of methodological closure agreed between participant and researcher, these closure devices always having a history and conforming to the arrangements made for textual production at particular moments in time. These methodological agreements are furthermore, negotiated; that is, relations of power enter into these accounts of peoples’ lives.
