Engaging With Lived Experience: Towards a Sociological Biography of a Sociological Category

Abstract

Although addressing the lives, perceptions, and practices of others, sociological research has an ambivalent association with the category of lived experience. Despite its use not always being accompanied by a precise definition, lived experience appears prominently in much academic research and teaching, descriptively standing in for direct firsthand engagement with a wide range of issues. But we know little about how it is implemented in research in contemporary academic sociology. Analysing the content of six years’ worth of British Sociological Association (BSA) journal articles that contain ‘lived experience’ (n36), the aim is to illuminate how sociologists practically deploy the category in their published research. Addressing questions of definition, method, authority of knowledge claims, and coherence of topical inquiry, a central contention is that in the articles reviewed lived experience – despite its often taken-for-granted character – does crucial categorical work with respect to how sociological research is produced and framed.