Text and Contexts: A Pragmatic Approach to the Interpretation of Biographical Interviews

According to the methodological concept of interpretive social research, analysing biographical narratives is conceptualised as a process of re-construction. Methodological writings usually concentrate on theoretical arguments for this approach (“why”) and present more or less idealised methodical steps for the procedure itself (“how”). Of course, they can hardly show exactly “how it works”. In my paper I will focus on the question what we are really doing by “re-constructing” the meaning of a text. I will suggest a notion of “co-construction” which draws attention to the contexts that are made relevant by the interpreter when she or he produces an interpretation (or better: various ‘readings’) of a text, e.g. a transcript of a biographical narrative interview. I will introduce a model reflecting on some text-context relations which play an important role in the research practice and will exemplify them by using the case provided by the session organisers.