Storylines: Craft Artists' Narratives of Identity - Tapa dura

In this case, the researcher's affinity with the artists' lives is clear and, to my mind, makes the work on theory more readable and more credible because it emerges from Mishler's own story...ultimately, readers can learn more about difference from a researcher like Mishler, who has carved from more than a decade's research an unusual book that is both personal and professional in scope, philosophy, and evidence.--Claire Badaracco "Journal of Communication "

What do we mean when we refer to our "identity", and how do we represent it in the stories we tell about our live? Is "identity" a sustained private core, or does it change as circumstances and relationships shift? In this book, a recognized master of research interviewing explores these questions through analyses of in-depth interviews with five crafts , who reflect on their lives and their efforts to sustain their form of work as committed artists in a world of mass production and standardization. The artist describe their families of origin and the families they have created, and the conscious decisions, chance events, and life experiences that entered into the ways they achieved their adult artistic identities. Exploring these continuities, discontinuities and unresolvable tensions in an analysis that brings new sophistication to a much-used term, the author suggest that "identity" is always dialogic and relational, a complex of partial subidentities rather than a unitary monad. More a verb than a noun, it reflects an individual's modes of adaptation, appropriation, and resistance to socio-cultural plots and roles.