Biography and social exclusion in Europe

Prue Chamberlayne is Senior Research Fellow in the School of Health and Social Welfare at the Open University. She has extensive experience of teaching comparative social policy and of using biographical methods in research. She is currently engaged in applying such methods to professional training and evaluation work.

Tom Wengraf, Visiting Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Social Research Methods at Middlesex University, was co-editor of The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science (2000), and his Qualitative Research Interviewing: biographic narrative and semi-structured methods was published in 2001.

Michael Rustin is Professor of Sociology at the University of East London, and a Visiting Professor at the Tavistock Clinic. His recent book Reason and Unreason: Psychoanalysis, Science and Politics (2001) explores interconnections between psychoanalysis, qualitative research methods, and social policy.