Beyond the giving and taking of accounts: Time, space and the social in educational research with youth

Abstract

This chapter discusses the complications and possibilities that arise when we consider the ways in which any accounting of, for and by youth is embedded within time, space and the social. As we realize how identity is dependent upon contexts and places, and the ways in which historical and personal memory act to filter how we understand the world and ourselves in it, the impossibility of articulating a full account of oneself becomes more evident. Likewise the task of investigating the experiences of others is bound up in the same complexities. This chapter then examines the implications of these issues for the engagement of youth in educational research, focusing in particular on youth and researcher narrative and memory, the visible and material, and researcher as insider/outsider.