Even around English Departments, where any notion of objective disinterested research will elicit incredulity, the idea that I am conducting a case study of my daughter seems to raise concerns on the one hand, about being too interested, too close, too biased in effect, and on the other hand that studying the academic career of the child of a two-professor family will end up being a privileged outlier with little application to the lives of most students, a question about generalization.

I set out to do linked case studies of Nora, her husband Ben, and their friend and colleague Matt because I had rich access to all of them, especially to Nora’s lifespan development across domains and to a collection of many documents from her childhood and youth. I also invited them to participate because the three of them collaborate daily around science and life in deeply entangled ways not visible on official disciplinary maps.

When I have given talks on this research, I have often used a kind of formulaic line to address the first issue, saying:

I recognize that it is tricky in many ways to be analyzing someone so close. However, like any long-term bout of participant observation, everyday life can afford a thickly contextualized view of trajectories of participation.

Actually, I don’t really see closeness and caring as a methodological problem. And what I now think is really tricky methodologically is representing participants’ lives based on a few short interviews, a couple of hours of talk, in a narrow range of settings. At this point, I want to hear more in defense of those common methodological practices.

My text points to other sources for common methods. One resource that may stand out in the list is “memory.” Of course, participant observation always relies on memory (even interpretations of recorded interviews often depend on memory to construct nuances and sense). And, of course, we know memory is constructive, built in light of present contexts and goals. However, I would argue that the documented narratives I tell here about Nora are not thin descriptions that hang on isolated uncertain events that miraculously become important a decade later. The challenge I have actually faced is choosing from among densely supported examples to present this story of lifespan becoming.

I will return to the question of general implications for this research in the conclusion, but here I will just suggest that this case simply stains connections in human life trajectories that are harder to see when individuals are only encountered briefly in institutional settings. If you question the theoretical relevance of this story, are you suggesting that home and community experiences of other young people are irrelevant, that their emerging interests, affects, and identities are irrelevant, to who they are becoming?