This book explores how narratives are deeply embodied, engaging heart, soul, as well as mind, through varying adult learner perspectives. Biographical research is not an isolated, individual, solipsistic endeavor but shaped by larger ecological interactions - in families, schools, universities, communities, societies, and networks - that can create or destroy hope. Telling or listening to life stories celebrates complexity, messiness, and the rich potential of learning lives. The narratives in this book highlight the rapid disruption of sustainable ecologies, not only 'natural', physical, and biological, but also psychological, economic, relational, political, educational, cultural, and ethical. Yet, despite living in a precarious, and often frightening, liquid world, biographical research can both chronicle and illuminate how resources of hope are created in deeper, aesthetically satisfying ways. Biographical research offers insights, and even signposts, to understand and transcend the darker side of the human condition, alongside its inspirations. Discourses, Dialogue and Diversity in Biographical Research aims to generate insight into people's fears and anxieties but also their capacity to 'keep on keeping on' and to challenge forces that would diminish their and all our humanity. It provides a sustainable approach to creating sufficient hope in individuals and communities by showing how building meaningful dialogue, grounded in social justice, can create good enough experiences of togetherness across difference. The book illuminates what amounts to an ecology of life, learning and human flourishing in a sometimes tortured, fractious, fragmented, and fragile world, yet one still offering rich resources of hope.

Winner of the AAACE Cyril O. Houle Award This book constructs a deepening, interdisciplinary understanding of adult learning and imaginatively reframes its transformative aspects. The authors explore the tension at the heart of current understanding of 'transformative' adult learning: that while it can be framed as both easy and imperative, personal transformation is in fact rooted in the context in which we live, our stories and relationships. At its core, transformation is never easy - nor always desirable - and the authors thus draw on interdisciplinary and auto/biographical inquiry to explore what it means to change our presuppositions and frames of meaning that guide our thinking. Using their linguistic, gendered, academic and cultural differences, the authors illuminate how the social, contextual, cultural, cognitive and psychological dimensions of transformation intertwine. In doing so, they emphasise the importance of transformation as a contingent struggle for meaning and recognition, social justice, fraternity, and the pursuit of truth. This engaging book will be of interest to students and scholars of transformative learning and education.

Winner of the AAACE Cyril O. Houle Award This book constructs a deepening, interdisciplinary understanding of adult learning and imaginatively reframes its transformative aspects. The authors explore the tension at the heart of current understanding of 'transformative' adult learning: that while it can be framed as both easy and imperative, personal transformation is in fact rooted in the context in which we live, our stories and relationships. At its core, transformation is never easy - nor always desirable - and the authors thus draw on interdisciplinary and auto/biographical inquiry to explore what it means to change our presuppositions and frames of meaning that guide our thinking. Using their linguistic, gendered, academic and cultural differences, the authors illuminate how the social, contextual, cultural, cognitive and psychological dimensions of transformation intertwine. In doing so, they emphasise the importance of transformation as a contingent struggle for meaning and recognition, social justice, fraternity, and the pursuit of truth. This engaging book will be of interest to students and scholars of transformative learning and education.

Auto/biography and life history methods can generate deep and rich insights into human life and learning. They also celebrate -- as this book shows -- the complexity and interdependence of the many aspects and levels of life that are kept separate by the hegemonic view of learning and research, which is overly functionalist, reductionist, disembodied and disconnected. Stories are a powerful means, in fact, to illuminate the connections between emotions and meaning, contents and contexts, body and physical space, subjectivities and social structures, both at a micro, messo and macro level, in adult and lifelong learning. A community of researchers who regularly meet to share ideas and methods, is involved here, building a framework -- not unique, but pluralistic and complex -- for re-thinking about narrative methods as not only addressed to words, events and meanings, as it is usually thought, but to relationships, contexts, voices, images and metaphors, urban and natural places, cultures, and ecologies.

The authors of this volume apply the methods and insights of cybernetics to the analysis and treatment of behavioural disorders. Verbatim transcripts are presented together with step-by-step explanations of the therapeutic team's actions.