Deterritorializing collective biography

In this chapter, we “deterritorialize” collective biography through the introduction of textual in(ter)ventions that invoke multiple genres of text and move us to new interpretive spaces. Collective biography has a long history in feminist research, emerging initially from the work of Haug and colleagues (1987) and developing in various iterations over time. In 1991, Lather identified it as a productive emergent methodology for disrupting subject-object relations and for bringing the body into research, enabling groups of researchers to collectively analyse how their modes of thinking and being in the world had been “colonized by dominant patterns of thought” (p.95). The post-structural turn to discourse and its constitutive effects have further influenced the methodological practices of collective biography, particularly in education through the work of Davies and colleagues (e.g., Davies, 1994; Davies & Gannon, 2006, 2009, 2011, 2012).