Inspecting the Interview

Interviews are omnipresent in scholarship and public discourses. They play a crucial role in various spheres, from collecting research data to providing persons in the public eye a platform in print and online media. Interviews do not only capture a dialogue; they provide a framework in which dialogue gets staged. As such a framework, the interview protocols experiential knowledge and personal experience in certain ways, according interlocutors different degrees of authority to speak.

The volume contributes state-of-the-art research on what conclusions can be drawn from these and further reflections for a general assessment of the interview as method and form; it offers fundamental conceptualizations of the interview as a structured and mediated site of knowledge production.

Theoreticians and practitioners assembled here conceptualize the interview from perspectives in different fields of the humanities and social sciences such as linguistics, literary and cultural studies, musicology, psychology, and philosophy.

Carsten Junker, TU Dresden, Germany