Prof Tony Jefferson: The Free Association Narrative Interview (FANI)

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Join us in our APS online reading group, as we listen to Emeritus Prof Tony Jefferson’s reading of Panic and Perjury and FANI method

We are incredibly happy to invite you to join us for our next APS online reading group! We are welcoming Tony Jefferson to share his important work on the Free Association Narrative Interview  (FANI) Method as a key methodology for psychosocial research.

Tony Jefferson is an Emeritus Professor at Keele University who has researched and published widely on questions to do with youth subcultures, the media, policing, race and crime, masculinity, fear of crime, racial violence and psychosocial methodology. He worked with Stuart Hall and others to produce Resistance Through Rituals (1976/2006) and Policing the Crisis (1978/2013). His books on Policing include Controlling the Constable (1984/2023) and Interpreting Policework (1987/2023), both co-authored with Roger Grimshaw, and The Case Against Paramilitary Policing (1990/2023).

His fear of crime project, with Wendy Hollway, produced the novel Free Association Narrative Interview (FANI) method and a subsequent book, Doing Qualitative Research Differently (2000/2012). Teaching psychosocial criminology with David Gadd produced their jointly authored text, Psychosocial Criminology (2007). His latest book is Stuart Hall, Conjunctural Analysis and Cultural Criminology (2021). He has held Visiting Professorships in the United States, Australia, Denmark and Sweden and was a one time European editor of the journal Theoretical Criminology.

To prepare for this reading, please read:

‘Panic and Perjury: A psychosocial exploration of agency’ by Hollway and Jefferson, 2005

https://oro.open.ac.uk/22982/

Abstract:

The primary aim of this article is to explore the predicament of one man, Vince, in difficult circumstances, in order to produce a psychosocial analysis that could contribute to the understanding of agency . In the process we note the role of what we prefer to call affect, rather than emotion, in most contexts. If emotions are, as Blackman and Cromby (2007: 6) suggest, ‘those patterned brain/body responses that are culturally recognizable and provide some unity, stability and coherence to the felt dimensions of our relational encounters’, it is perhaps unsurprising that, because we are focusing on unconscious dynamics in this chapter, the term affect proves more relevant to our analysis than the emotions of anger and shame that are, arguably, the core suppressed emotions in the account. Vince himself never talked in terms of specific emotions, but rather, in line with Blackman and Cromby’s definition that ‘feelings register intensive experiences as subjective experience’ (ibid), of how he was experiencing his painful world. In highlighting his embodied ‘sickness’, and the accompanying anxiety, we focus on the affective dimension. In this usage, anxiety is an affective state.