Key Idea: Re-selfing
In our study of lifelong learning the Learning Lives project a pattern of re-selfing could be discerned among certain groups. Re-selfing refers to the capacity to generate new visions of selfhood in response to life transitions. This capacity allows a flexible response and a practised facility to develop new courses of action when the context of a life changes significantly as through say redundancy, illness, retirement or bereavement.
Other key ideas
Developing Narrative Theory: life histories and personal representation
Read about Re-selfing in the chapter: Narrativity, Learning and Flexibility: towards the narrative future:- In the concluding part of this chapter, we look into the future to speculatively view patterns and perspectives as they might impinge on life...
- Commenting on this view, Lifton makes the following point
- Sennett argues that having studied new social and workplace patterns
- In his remarkable study of American life, Robert Putnam has documented a similar kind of atrophying of American public purpose. He contrasts the...
- Bauman characterizes the loss of meta-narratives and public purposes, and indeed of private meaning and coherence, as a condition of...
- In this sense, the different modalities of narrativity discerned herein pose differentiated prospects and challenges for the capacities needed...
- Yet the spectrum of description to elaboration, and from closed to open, is complex. The multiple describers (see Figure 1) learn to move...
- In contrary form, armchair elaborators are constantly ‘in the process of becoming’ and are in that sense open, but whilst always...
This book looks at the contemporary need to study life narratives;...