Unpacking biographical narratives : investigating stories of artistic careers in Northern Jutland, Denmark

Abstract

The chapter describes a research project on artistic career patterns in Northern Jutland,Denmark. It discusses how the interpretative work of a biographical researcher might change over the course of time, as more and more layers of interpretation are identified. Such layers need to be gradually unpacked by the researcher, as they are not immediately visible. One of the main obstacles for such a multilayered interpretative work seems to be the problem of incommensurability of or movement between alternative paradigms that Thomas Kuhn discovered. Such incommensurability makes the translation of discourse or movement from one paradigm to another difficult. Incommensurabilities can be found both within the narrated stories or interviews, different available theoretical and methodological approaches and between current theory and the empirical material itself, suggesting that interpretative work is a higly complex activity which needs to be studied for its own sake.