ABSTRACT
One of the most remarkable phenomena of contemporary culture seems to be the epistemological change in social and human sciences, that is, the renewed emphasis in different academic fields “on human agency and its efficacy, on context and the embeddedness of human experience, and on the centrality of language to the negotiation of meaning and the construction of identity in everyday life” (Davis 2002: 3). Beginning in the 1960s, diverse shifts in Western thought, epistemology, technology, and social practices began to feed this “narrative turn,” a turn that moved away from Marxian class analysis that focused on macro structural views of social relations, and instead began to privilege human agency, biography, subjectivity and consciousness (Riessman 2008: 16). Specifically, Langellier points out four main movements which shaped this turn: critiques in social science of positivist modes of inquiry, and their realist epistemology, the “memoir boom” in literature and popular culture, the new identity movements—emancipation efforts of people of color, women, gays and lesbians, and other marginalized groups, and the burgeoning therapeutic culture—and exploration of personal life in therapies of various kinds (Langellier 699). 1
