Engaging Biographies Creatively: Methods, Analytical Perspectives and Reflexive Practices

The growing interest in creative methods in the social sciences, partly driven by decolonial critiques, has led diverse research traditions to integrate non-textual and non-verbal techniques, including embodied and art-based practices, to explore additional dimensions of social life. Biographical research has actively engaged with this turn, drawing on interdisciplinary insights while further developing elements already present in its early development.

Creative practices in biographical research not only expand data collection techniques; they reconfigure the epistemological foundations upon which social theory is built. By mobilising bodily, sensory, and performative modes of inquiry, these approaches enable more processual and layered understandings of biographical trajectories. They capture ambivalence, temporality, and embodied experience often missed by conventional narrative methods, moving beyond linear life histories towards fragmented, relational constructions of subjectivity. In doing so, they challenge dominant assumptions about agency, identity, and social integration.

At the same time, creative engagements with biographical material further enhance reflexivity regarding the researcher’s role, particularly around power asymmetries and representation. Their dialogical and co-productive nature can foster more symmetrical research relationships while making visible the silences sometimes still shaping sociological knowledge. Overall, they offer the potential to enrich empirical research and rethink key sociological categories.

This panel brings together contributions critically examining these methodological and theoretical shifts, with particular attention to how creative approaches may further expand the analytical scope of biographical research and deepen its contribution to contemporary sociological debates.