ABSTRACT
The reflexive turn in the social sciences, its contingent knowledge claims, its imaginative recreation of life worlds and micro-social processes, and its use of free-association interpretation carries a responsibility to expose its principles of textual production to critical scrutiny and counter-argument. In the absence of truth and validity, there is reasonable interpretation – what Freeman (1993) calls veracity – and the philosophical, theoretical and political positions on which it is premised. The collage of voices (authorial and informant), images (visual and textual), urban spaces and practical lives featured in this volume are the product of theoretically and politically driven decisions. These decisions are complicated by the multiple layers of intertextuality that drive multi-disciplinary research teams in which individual student-researchers operate their own understanding of the research in the field in ways which articulate their experiences, personal/professional conceptions of themselves as interviewers/ observers, and ways of managing interaction with informants.1 Research fields are textured by a collage of practical and intellectual activity as well as the social relationships between researcher and researched: activities in which researchers’ biographies are neither central nor incidental and mostly opaque.2 In involving ourselves in the lives of others in the course of research, we change them and we change ourselves: we help them write their story in specific terms and we rewrite our own in the process. If research is a highly edited activity, then so are its products which are subjected to further processes of scrutiny and selection in the production of a final text. The ensuing chapter represents an attempt to discuss some of the principles of Bedlam’s production.
