Episode Description

In this episode of Talking about Methods, Professor Linda Mulcahy talks to Dr Kate Rossmanith about unstructured and narrative interviewing. Kate walks us through her experience of working with persons who have been entangled in the criminal justice system as offenders, victims or family members of victims. She tells us why she never asks, ‘What happened?’ and shares the single question she prepares for her unstructured interviews. She talks about the difficulty of holding somebody’s experience while not appropriating their pain, data that feels like quicksand and how to sit with complex unstructured material as a researcher.

Readings recommended by Kate Rossmanith 

• Jackson, M. (2017) ‘After the Fact: The Question of Fidelity in Ethnographic Writing,’ in Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean (eds) Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 48-67
• Tumarkin, M (2014) ‘This Narrated Life: The Limits of Storytelling,’ Griffith Review 44, 183–92
• Wettergren, A. (2015) ‘How do we know what they feel?’ in H. Flam and J. Kleres (eds) Methods of Exploring Emotions, New York: Routledge, pp 115–24.

By the Speaker:

Rossmanith, K. (2024) ‘Imagining Closure as a Proprioceptive Problem’, Emotions: History, Culture, Society 8, pp. 297-308

Rossmanith, K., (accepted, in press) ‘Beyond Story, Voice and Narrative: Methods to understand victims’ experiences in the process of justice’, in Holder, R., Michel-Luviano, V. & Bosma, A. (eds.), Research Handbook on Victims, Rights and Justice, Edward Elgar Publishing