Section: Research Student Profiles

Jennifer Peet

Name
Jennifer Peet
Organisation
Sociology, School of Social and Political Science
University of Edinburgh
Address
Chrystal MacMillan Building, 15A George Square Edinburgh UK EH8 9LD
E-Mail
URL
http://www.sociology.ed.ac.uk/research_students/peet_jennifer_l.
Jennifer Peet

Education

PhD, Sociology (in progress), The University of Edinburgh

MSc, Socio-Cultural Studies, The University of Edinburgh

B.A. Social Science (Peace Studies), Chapman University              

Certificate of Study on International Criminal Court, Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland, Galway          

Research Interests

  • Social Organization of Knowledge
  • Sociology of Social Problems
  • Historical, Cultural and Critical Sociology
  • Sociology of Personal Life
  • Feminist Theory and Research Practices
  • Qualitative Research Methodologies
  • Interdisciplinary Research

Research Topic

“Private Troubles and Public Issues of Aboriginal Australian Child Removals: An Institutional Ethnography of The Stolen Generation Phenomenon as a Social Problem”

My doctoral research investigates, through an institutional ethnography, the social organizing practices that work to constitute ‘private troubles’ into ‘public issues’ through an analysis of the National Library of Australia’s Bringing Them Home Oral History Project (1998-2002) (BTHOHP) interviews and it addresses highly public and political debates concerning Aboriginal Australian child removal histories throughout the twentieth century. The BTHOHP arose directly out of the 1995-1996 National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, with the removed children now known in public discourse as The Stolen Generation. Reverberations and vitriolic contestations over their removals which is embedded in wider settler and indigenous controversies over dispossession, forms of oppression and national identity, continues to mark public and political life in Australia concerning the private troubles and public issues surrounding these events.

 

The BTHOHP presents a unique opportunity to partially ‘map’ what Smith (1987) has termed ‘ruling relations’, that is, the social organizing/coordinating activity that make-up the institutional complexities helping construct such troubles and in which they become instances of a particular kind. This is The Stolen Generation as a social problem, with the intention being to expand knowledge about the removals, starting from and going beyond personal experience as a sole factor in understanding the public issue. The concept of a social problem is not taken for granted and is used here as a claims-making activity, a collective activity and not a personal condition (Spector and Kitsuse 2001). Knowledge is grounded in particular times and places, and so what needs to be explored and explained is how the many people who are differently related and have experiences which contain many differences as well as similarities end up being represented as saying the same thing, in effect producing a post/memory, ‘memory after the fact’, (Stanley 2006) about The Stolen Generation? The processes by which post/memory is organized and produced and become ‘ruling’ are empirically interrogated. I am concerned with investigating whether, in what ways and to what extent the ‘public history’ of the Aboriginal child removals is saying the same thing as or something different from the multiply located array of different people's experiences and accounts that are usually seen to ‘compose it’. An analytical approach derived from ideas about post/memory and institutional relations of ruling suggests that attention should be given to the processes of public memory - and history-making involved, exploring how individual accounts are situated within such processes, whose accounts count and in what ways, and whether and in what ways there may be silences within the resultant history. This necessitates exploring the sociological question: How do institutional relations in the context of ‘The Stolen Generation’ accounts coordinate the multiplicity and variability of people’s experiences?

Smith, D.E. (1987) The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press and Northeastern Press.

Spector, M. and Kitsuse, J. (2001 [1977]) Constructing Social Problems. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

Stanley, L. (2006) Mourning Becomes…Post/memory, Commemoration and the Concentration Camps of the South African War. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

 

Academic Teaching

  • Tutor, School of Social and Political Science 2008-2010 – engaging first and second year undergraduate students in sociology subject matter and school-wide research courses

Funding/ Awards

  • Moray Endowment Award, University of Edinburgh                               
  • College of Humanities and Social Science Bursary, University of Edinburgh              
  • School of Social and Political Science Bursary, University of Edinburgh                    
  • American Friends of the University of Edinburgh Award      

Supervisor

Liz Stanley, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre for Narrative and Auto/Biographical Studies http://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/NABS/

Memberships

British Sociological Association

Society for the Study of Social Problems

 

This page was published on 6 November 2011


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