Biograms, Drawings and Ethnographies As Biographical Devices: Uses, Potentialities and Limitations for the Analysis of Inequalities, Labour and Migration Trajectories in Latin America.
Biographical interviews are the fundamental support used by these studies to produce information. However, there are also other strategies that are valuable devices. These include biograms, biographical drawings and biographical ethnographies.
Biograms are life stories narrated by the research subjects themselves, and which are made at the specific request of the researchers (Abel, 1947).
Biographical drawings involve the social actor initially making a drawing that visually reconstructs his or her life and then making an oral narrative about the drawing (Riessman, 2008; Escin and Squire, 2013).
Biographical ethnographies relate the story to its narrator, to the group of belonging and to the socio-cultural context, and consider the person who narrates his or her story as a mirror of his or her time and environment (Poirier, Clapier-Valladon and Raybaut, 1983).
In this paper we ask ourselves about the particularities of each of these devices, their potentialities and limitations.
To this end, we present different fieldwork experiences in which we used these strategies: with Bolivian peasant women who migrated to Argentina to work in agriculture, with Colombian teachers who migrated to Argentina to pursue postgraduate studies, and with Senegalese young men who migrated to Argentina to work.
The use of the aforementioned biographical devices has allowed us to put into dialogue the construction of information that they enable in biographical research, with objects of study that differ in terms of their country of origin and social class, but which share an interest in gender issues, migratory processes and the world of work.