FOREWORD: Away from Standardization

The interview is a ubiquitous mode of soliciting information for both researchers and ordinary people. As such, its form, purpose, underlying assumptions are often taken for granted. This edited volume, Interviews as Activated Storytelling, contends that interviewers and respondents are not just straightforwardly there for the asking and answering. Rather, they interact in relation to the complex contingencies and nuances of attendant social worlds. Challenging the socially sanitized view characterizing standardized interviewing, contributed chapters move beyond objectivity to demonstrate through case studies that interviews are meaning-making occasions that produce useful context-sensitive knowledge of subject matters. A priori conceptions ineluctably frame the interview process from the start and are contingently articulated throughout all interviewing. The aim is to present the diverse configurations of understanding that can be incited and discovered in the interview process. We will particularly highlight the procedural, analytical, and ethical implications of conducting open-ended qualitative interviews in terms of varied and emergent methods as well as the ongoing discovery of subjects and their social worlds.