Online seminar series - New Methodologies: Narrative, Time, and Everyday Experiences - Session 2

The end of the "time of the streets": temporality in the life course of a Russian ex-gangster

Organised by Dr Brian McDonough, Solent University

In this article I present the analysis of time as expressed in two biographical narratives by a man whose youth was lived at the crossroads of historical eras, and in the space of the streets, where life was changing in response to wider macro-societal processes.

Tsigan is a former member of a large street gang in a Russian city of Kazan. The first interview with him took place in 2005, when Tsigan had spent four years in his gang (he left it in 2006), and the second in 2022. I address the different times in Tsigan’s life – his childhood, youth and adulthood, his time on the streets, his decision to leave the gang and his reflexions and memories of his past as reconstructed through the narratives presented at two different points of his biography. I show how his memory of the time in the gang has dramatically changed by the second interview, as he looked retrospectively on his former self from the vantage point of his current law-abiding life.

Using Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope, I show how his first chronotope, that of exciting time in “Gangland”, was replaced by the second, completely different chronotope, that of “adventure of ordeal”

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Call for contributors

This online seminar series centres on innovations in research methods and methodologies and is open to scholars with novel approaches to researching narrative, time, and everyday experiences.

Drawing on how we can best understand peoples’ experiences and the places and organisations people encounter, this interdisciplinary seminar series brings together scholars from social and human sciences who have developed or adapted new methodologies for understanding everyday life, with a particular focus on making sense of narratives and time.

Contributors who have a novel method or approach to doing research are particularly welcome, as well as those with unique approaches to unravelling the stories of peoples’ lives, by showcasing the rhythms or flow of human activity, or even its measurement, such as the ordering, sequencing, or close examination of everyday life.

If you are interested in contributing to the series, please email brian.mcdonough@solent.ac.uk.