Thatcher transforms the artist interview from a transparent vessel of biographical information into an object with its own material and institutional biography. Interviews are performative and co-constructed encounters that continue to change after the conversation ends: recordings become transcripts, transcripts are edited, excerpts circulate in print or broadcast, and later repetitions alter both the artist’s position and the interviewer’s questions. Her diachronic method is particularly powerful because it refuses the fantasy of a definitive statement. An artist can revise, contradict or reframe earlier positions, while the same interview can acquire new authority through publication, citation and archival preservation. Thatcher’s emphasis on production chains—interviewer, artist, producer, editor, transcriber, publisher, broadcaster—also relocates authorship from a dyad to a network. The work bridges oral history, media archaeology and art historiography, showing that evidence about artistic life is inseparable from the technical forms and institutional passages through which speech becomes record.
Nilsen, A. (2023) Biographical Life Course Research: Studying the Biography-History Dynamic. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44717-4.
Nilsen reconstructs biographical research as an inquiry into the dynamic between individual lives and historical conditions rather than as the recovery of self-contained personal narratives. Her decisive contribution is temporal stratification: biography is intelligible only through the interaction of individual timing, family time, cohort position, institutional change and historical period. The life course is therefore neither a fixed developmental sequence nor a retrospective story of self-realisation. It is a contextual trajectory whose transitions acquire meaning through their relation to changing structures. Methodologically, Nilsen defends biographical interviews, lifelines and mixed forms of evidence while resisting both causal reductionism and an unrestricted constructivism in which factual distinctions dissolve into narrative. The book provides a rigorous bridge between qualitative longitudinal research and historical sociology. Its relevance extends beyond sociology because it offers a precise way to study persistence and change without converting duration into destiny: the same life can be followed through different phases while preserving the asymmetry between event, memory, narration and historical circumstance.
MontageCitizenship, ZoningCustody, ObligationDebt
MontageCitizenship understands citizenship as a montage of documents, images, permissions, archives and recognitions. ZoningCustody indicates how urban space administers belonging through limits, uses, exclusions and territorial custodianships. ObligationDebt introduces the ethical debt that every form of belonging maintains with bodies, places and previous memories. The triad reads politics through spatial inscription. To belong is not only to possess a right; it is to be composed, situated and obliged. Socioplastics turns citizenship into a material operation where archive, zone and debt intersect. The subject appears as montage under custody.
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