Jaber F. Gubrium

He chaired the Missouri Department of Sociology from 2002 to 2016. He now is emeritus professor in that department. Before that, he was a professor of sociology at University of Florida (1987-2002) and Marquette University (1970-1987). He currently is a visiting professor in the College of Nursing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

He was a Fulbright Scholar at Tampere University in Finland (1996), Alfreda Kartha Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Toronto, Queen's University, and the University of Ottawa (1996), a Leiv Eririksson Fellow at Oslo Metropolitan University in Norway (2012-13), and was granted a doctorate honoris causa by Lund University in Sweden (2017). He is founder of the Journal of Aging Studies.

Gubrium's areas of research are aging, health, care, everyday life, family discourse, human services ethnography, identity construction, social interaction, qualitative methods, and narrative analysis. He developed a constructionist approach to the life course.[1] He and collaborator James Holstein formulated an analytic vocabulary for studying identity as an institutional formation[2] and family as a category of experience.[3] The approach is methodically elaborated in relation to the complex practices of power in social interaction.

Gubrium contributed to the development of qualitative methods by conceptualizing their theoretical bearings. He has examined the everyday practices of narrativity, locating stories, storytelling, and social forms within the circumstances of their production. The aim is to locate and describe social forms (identity, family, aging, health, policy, service and care) within the practice of everyday life.

Gubrium is concerned with the practices of meaning-making in diverse circumstances, from ordinary encounters to going concerns such as residential treatment for problem children and aging in nursing homes. He works at the border of ethnography and narrative analysis, combining these to deal with the perennial problems of linking observational data with stories, speech and other narrative material.

He executed a program of research on the social organization of care and treatment in human service institutions. His research on the everyday practice of caregiving in nursing homes, originally described in his monograph "Living and Dying at Murray Manor," presents the details of care from the perspectives of the residents, the staff and family members. He paid special attention to caregiving and the cognitively impaired, in particular how the Alzheimer's disease movement transformed the meaning of senility, as reported in his book Oldtimers and Alzheimer's: The Descriptive Organization of Senility. The program extended to institutional practices across the life course.

Ethnographies of institutional settings set the basis for comparison. Earlier research on interpretive practices in a residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed children was followed by ethnographic and narrative studies of accounting practices in physical rehabilitation, a psychiatric hospital, family counseling and self-help groups for home caregivers. The program centers on narrative events and strategic storytelling in everyday life, especially in an institutional context, with attention to implications for social policy.

Along with Holstein, Gubrium is credited with introducing the concept of "the active interview" to the social science community,[4] as well as concepts for researching storytelling and other accounts in everyday life, such as "analytic bracketing," "interpretive practice," "narrative ethnography," "narrative environments," "scenic presence," "assemblages of meaning, "narrative eventfulness," "biographical work," "deprivatization," "institutional identity," "local enactment," and "organizational embeddedness".[5] Put together, the concepts provide a working configuration of ideas and categories—an analytics—for making visible and documenting the everyday organization of experience.

Gubrium has lectured at universities around the world, including:

He is married to Suzanne Kish Gubrium, who is a retired medical software developer. They have two daughters, Aline Gubrium and Erika Gubrium, and five grandchildren (Marit, Lily, Malin, Espen, and Axel). Aline Gubrium is professor of public health at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Erika Gubrium is professor of social work and social policy at Oslo Metropolitan University in Norway.