Jaber F. Gubrium

Who is Jaber F. Gubrium?

Jaber F. Gubrium is a sociologist and has been the Chair of the University of Missouri Department of Sociology since 2002. Before that, he was professor of sociology at the University of Florida and at Marquette University. His areas of specialization are aging and health, care and everyday life, identity construction, social interaction, qualitative methods, and narrative analysis. He has developed a constructionist approach to the life course and, with collaborator James Holstein, formulated an analytic vocabulary for studying identity as an institutional formation and family as a category of experience. Gubrium continues to contribute to the development of qualitative methods by conceptualizing their theoretical bearings. Recent work has centered on the everyday practices of narrativity, locating stories and storytelling within the circumstances of their production.

Pragmatist in orientation, Gubrium is concerned with the practices of meaning-making in diverse circumstances of everyday life, from ordinary encounters to going concerns such as residential treatment for problem children and aging in nursing homes. Theorizing methodology, he works reflexively at the border of ethnography and narrative analysis, combining these in new ways to deal with the perennial problems of linking observational data with transcripts of stories, speech, and other narrative material. This has been applied in a long-standing 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 lived details of care from the perspectives of the residents, the staff, and family members. Special attention has been paid to caregiving and the cognitively impaired in the context of broader cultural understandings, in particular how the Alzheimer's disease movement transformed the meaning of senility and the identities concerned, which was reported in his book "Oldtimers and Alzheimer's: The Descriptive Organization of Senility."