Editorial Introduction: Special Issue – “Biographical Sociology”

Brian Roberts (PhD) is Visiting Professor in Border Studies at the University of Glamorgan, UK. He is Vice-President, Biography and Society RC38, ISA and a Board Member, Biographical Perspectives on European Societies RN, ESA and on the editorial boards of Qualitative Sociology Review, Auto/Biography and Family and Community History journals. His publications include Policing the Crisis (1978) (Macmillan) (with S. Hall et al.); Biographical Research, (2002) (OU); Micro-Social Theory (2006, Palgrave, in press); and The Researcher’s Experience of Research (2006/7, Sage, forthcoming). His research interests include: narrative and life history; time and memory; and communal studies. He is currently writing a book on communal change in a former mining valley in S. Wales, and developing projects on: ‘Composing Sexual Stories’ and ‘Migration and new identities in S. Wales’. He has been a visiting researcher/lecturer in Denmark, Sweden and Poland.

Riitta Kyllönen is Researcher at the University of Tampere, Finland. Her research interests include methodological and epistemological issues in qualitative research, and feminist research. She has worked in several international projects on the welfare state, family and the labour market. Among her articles in English are, ‘It’s in the way you use it’: Biography as a tool in professional social work, in Chamberlayne, Prue and Joanna Bornat and Ursula Apitzsch (eds.) (2004) Biographical Methods and Professional Practice, (The Policy Press) and ‘Interpreting the needs of lone mothers’, European Journal of Social Work (1999). Currently she is working on a comparative project on elderly care ‘Squaring the Care Circle’ in Finland and Italy (funded by the Academy of Finland, SA1211195). She is co-authoring a book on care and writing articles on transnational care, and issues of fieldwork in a comparative perspective. She has been as a (visiting) researcher in several Italian Universities, and in the Mannheim Centrum of European Social Research (MZES), Germany.