“Realist biography and European policy”

16th April 2010 – 18th April 2010, at the Centre for Sociological Research, Catholic University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

The workshop will explore the possibilities to combine critical realist philosophy with biographical-narrative methods for a well-founded and workable toolkit for practical research in the social sciences, with immediate application to European policy studies. 

It will draw on the concepts of structure, agency, biography, and reflexivity in order to explore the interrelation between the socio-political processes taking place at the European level and the actually lived lives and practices of those concerned. For the purposes of the workshop we hope that Margaret Archer’s realist social theory can be used for a solid social scientific foundation for biographical methods, particularly since Archer’s internal conversation could be proposed as a real mechanism mediating between social structures and human agency. In addition, we hope to be able to use biographical methods in order to access and interpret the internal conversation as a key source of data for realist social science. We hope to construct an explicitly social realist foundation for research. We start with the hypothesis that there is an internal conversation that acts as a real causal mechanism mediating between social structures and human agency. It is this mediating mechanism in action that we wish to probe as accurately as possible as an explanatory source for the social dynamics at play in EU policy processes at the various levels where European social dialogue comes into play.

Meer informatie:

http://soc.kuleuven.be/web/agendaitem/1/1/nl/583