ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses an associated 'critical humanist' position involves, comments on different kinds of documents of life as a form of data. It builds on ground-breaking work on documents of life by Ken Plummer, with the contributors, including Plummer himself, extending many of the original ideas and concerns, challenging others, and incorporating a range of new thinking. The result provides a richly-textured set of engagements with documents of life theory, methodology and research practice. Narrative and biographical inquiry scholars broadly agree concerning the importance of these everyday kinds of texts or life documents, while there are different approaches to how they might be analysed. This is to see people as fully and reflexively agents in the making of social life and not as 'cultural dopes' who mindlessly accept social directives, to use Garfinkel's (1967) term. Its simplifications bear little resemblance to, for example, critical humanist thinking as discussed by Plummer and other documents of life researchers, including the contributors.
