ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we build upon the theoretical interventions described in the previous chapter and seek to illustrate how our interdisciplinary frame has been translated into a coherent methodological approach. At the heart of our research is an attempt, animated by a desire to keep epistemology and method entwined, to uncover the deep meanings underlying young people’s narrative accounts of the everyday, of the cultural ordinary, of anomie and even the sub-ordinary in comparative urban contexts. Of central importance for us was to develop a range of methodologies that could capture what Ricoeur referred to as a social imaginary:
that body of collective stories, histories and ideologies which informs our modes of socio-political action. Social imagination, he argues, is constitutive of our lived reality [. . .]. The social imagination serves both an ideological role of identification and a utopian role of disruption. The former preserves and conserves; the latter projects alternatives.
