Notes on Contributors
Alan Bainbridge
began working in Higher Education in 2001, having previously taught in secondary schools for 18 years. He is interested in the contested space between psychoanalytic thought and practices and education in its widest sense. He has written on how life history influences the development of educational professional practice and is currently using ideas linked to the Marxian and Freudian fetish to explore education processes. He is also interested in the interconnection between human learning and the “natural world”. He is a co-coordinator of the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA) Life History and Biography Network.
Hervé Breton
is Associate Professor in Education Sciences at the University of Tours. He is a member of the research team Education Ethics Health (EA7505) and President of the International Association of Life Stories in Adult Education (ASIHVIF). His research work questions and examines the effects of descriptive and narrative practices on the processes of self-formation and the formalization of experiential knowledge.
Adrienne S. Chan
is a Professor in the School of Social Work and Human Services, at the University of the Fraser Valley, Canada. Her research focuses on working with Indigenous peoples, racialized groups, and feminist and narrative storytelling processes. She is particularly interested in antiracism, diversity, social justice, institutional change, and addressing normalized discourses within higher education.
Rob Evans
was born in London and studied Russian and History at Leeds and Tübingen. After working in adult, further and higher education as a freelancer he taught Academic Writing in English at the University of Magdeburg, Germany until 2019. His main research interests include biography research methods, the language of narrative, memory, conversation analysis and discourses of learning. Publications include books, chapters, journal articles, and edited books and journal special issues, most recently Before , beside and after the Biographical Narrative (Nisaba Verlag, 2016) and a chapter in Discourses We Live By (edited by Hazel R. Wright and Marianne Høyen, Open Book Publishers, 2020).
Fergal Finnegan
works at the Department of Adult and Community Education, Maynooth, National University of Ireland where he co-directs the Doctorate in Higher and Adult Education and the PhD in Adult and Community Education programmes. Before becoming an academic Fergal was a community adult educator and literacy worker for a decade and these experiences have strongly shaped him My research interests include biographical methods, social class, access and equality in higher education, popular education and social movements as well as critical realism and Pierre Bourdieu. He is active member of the European Society Research on Education of Adults (ESREA) for a decade and is a co-convenor of the network on Active Democratic Citizenship and Adult Learning He has a longstanding interest in critical pedagogy and transformative education and an editor of the Journal of Transformative Education and of RELA.
Laura Formenti
is Professor of General and Social Pedagogy at the University of Milano Bicocca, Italy; President of the Italian Universities’ Network for Lifelong Learning, Joint Convenor of ESREA’s Life History and Biography Network with Linden West and Alan Bainbridge; Chair of ESREA from 2014 to 2019. She developed a compositional and cooperative approach to adult education, aimed at social justice and mixing participatory and arts-based methods with biographical writing, embodied experience, critical reflection, and Socratic dialogue. She co-edited books on Stories that Make a Difference (2016), Embodied Narratives (2014) and wrote with Linden West (2018) Transforming Perspectives in Lifelong Learning and Adult Education: A dialogue (2019 AAACE Cyril O. Houle Award). She is working internationally on various projects on sensobiographic methods, feminist methodologies in museums, migrants’ trajectories of inclusion, and empowering professionals in Residential Child Care through competence-based training.
Marianne Høyen
is Associate Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark, and has significant experience teaching adults, frequently those who work in educational settings. She is a Bourdieu specialist interested in the sociology of the professions and, particularly, the differing views on nature that professionals hold. An interdisciplinary academic (her PhD was situated within the philosophy of science and addressed professionals’ self-understanding), Marianne’s chapter “Teaching about nature across generations” (in Formenti & West, Stories That Make a Difference, Pensa Multimedia, 2016) combined both these interests. With Hazel Wright, she co-edited Discourses We Live By: Narratives of Educational and Social Endeavour (Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, 2020).
Barbara Merrill
is an Emeritus Academic in the Centre for Lifelong Learning at the University of Warwick, UK. Her research interests include issues of class and gender in relation to the learning experiences and the learner identity of adult students, particularly in higher education, European comparative research as well as biographical narrative approaches to research. Barbara is a member of the Steering Committee for ESREA (European Society for Research on the Education of Adults) and co-ordinates the ESREA Access, Learning Careers and Identities Network.
Kjetil Moen
is a Lecturer and Researcher at the Faculty of Health Sciences, the University of Stavanger, Norway, where he teaches ethics and care to current and future health-care professionals. Moen is also working as a chaplain in mental healthcare at the University Hospital in the same city. His main research interests focus on relation-intensive work, in particular how working in boundary situations triggers existential and moral philosophical concerns among professionals. Moen is the author of Death at Work: Existential and Psychosocial Perspectives on End-of-life Care (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
Gaia Del Negro
has a PhD in Education at Canterbury Christ Church University (UK) and collaborates with Milano-Bicocca University (Italy). Her research interests lie in the relationship to knowing and culture in professional lives. She is passionate about auto/biographical and transformative research methodologies. She also works as teacher of Italian as a foreign language and independent social researcher in Milan. She is about to complete her training in integrated somatic practices in nature.
Richard D. Sawyer
focuses on reflexive and transformative curriculum within transnational contexts, especially those related to education, identity, and neo-liberalism. He recently developed a critical self-study methodology, called duoethnography. In 2015 he received the outstanding book award for this qualitative methodology from Division D. of the American Educational Research Association. In addition, he studies how educators begin to change their thinking and their teaching in relation to diversity. More recently, he is editing a special issue of the Northwest Journal of Teacher Education, around the theme of “A Critical Reimagination of Teacher Education for Sustainable Social Justice in a Time of Crisis.”
Laura Mazzoli Smith
is Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Durham University, UK. Her research interests are in adult education and professional learning, out-of-school learning, issues of social inclusion and equity, and education as holistically conceived. Methodologically her research uses interpretive and participatory methods including auto/biographical research, narrative inquiry and digital storytelling. She has published widely in the field of education and is currently engaged in an interdisciplinary European project to develop a narrative-based training platform for healthcare practitioners.
Paula Stone
is a Senior Lecturer in Education at Canterbury Christ Church University. Paula teaches on postgraduate programmes for pre-service and in-service teachers. Paula’s research interests, based on her biography, lie in narrative research and social inequality in education. Paula completed her auto/biographical PhD in 2018. The thesis was an exploration of the inter-relationship between class transition and education in a bid to understand the impact of both in the formation of the self and identity. Paula argues that auto/biography provides a legitimate means of illuminating the minutia of self/other encounters to challenge the discourses about the ‘other’.
Linden West
is Professor of Education at Canterbury Christ Church University in the United Kingdom and has worked in many universities. He was Visiting Professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca, the Université de Paris Nanterre, and Michigan State. He served as a member of the ESREA Steering Committee and has jointly coordinated the ESREA Life History and Biography and Transformative Processes in Learning and Education Networks. His main contemporary interest is in applying auto/biographical and narrative enquiry, and interdisciplinary psychosocial perspectives, to notions of learning, change, and transformative processes. In 2016 he won an award for his outstanding contribution to the theory and practice of transformative learning. He has authored diverse books and articles, including Distress in the City, Racism, Fundamentalism and a Democratic Education; Beyond Fragments, Adults, Motivation and Higher Education, a Biographical Analysis; and, most recently, Transforming Perspectives in Lifelong Learning and Adult Education: A Dialogue, written with Laura Formenti. The book won the 2019 Cyril O. Houle prize for outstanding literature in adult and continuing education. In 2020 Linden was inducted into the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame. He is also a registered psychoanalytic psychotherapist.
Hazel R. Wright
is a Visiting Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK where she was a Senior Lecturer in Education following an earlier publishing career. She pursues three key research areas: adult (particularly women’s) education; childhood which she accesses through contemporary children and memory work with adults; nature, space and sustainability from a human perspective. Author of many articles and chapters, she has written two monographs: Women Studying Childcare (Trentham Books, 2011) and The Child in Society (Sage, 2015). With Marianne Høyen, she co-edited Discourses We Live By: Narratives of Educational and Social Endeavour (Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, 2020).