None so deaf as those that will not hear

My good friend N (and she is a great friend), also doing a PhD at 50+, described doing conferences as 'talking at a load of bored academics who then grill you mercilessly'. I must say that has also been my experience. It has also been the case that I get questions that totally floor me because they seem to have nothing to do with what I was taking about. What I have come to realise is that most people bring their own frame of reference and will ask questions within that paradigm (I have tried to avoid this word but, darn it, it is spot on here). So for example, my work is situated within what can broadly be termed 'narrative research'. So I was once asked about what 'genre' I thought the stories I am writing belong to. Well that threw me coz they don't belong to any genre. I would be horrified to think I was shoe-horning these rich and wonderful and complex tales into some pre-ordained framework. I was even more horrified when it was suggested they were 'fairy stories'. When I got back from conference I spent days researching this 'genre' and could not comprehend what might have prompted this observation.

What this tells me is that when writing my thesis I will have to make sure I explain my view that stories are stories. I do think that we draw on prevailing cultural discourses to tell them and these in turn are dependent on even broader historical circumstances (or 'zeitgeist' if you will). We also tell the stories according to certain specific collaboratively generated but individually enacted scripts (Ivor Goodson gives the excellent example of the script of the 'scholarship boy'). Taking account of this turns life stories into life histories in my view. And this is a country mile away from saying this turns a story into an example of a particular 'genre'. How disrespectful to the storyteller.