The Routledge International Handbook on The Listening Guide Method

The Routledge International Handbook on The Listening Guide Method is about a qualitative, feminist, and voice-centred method for analyzing interview narratives and other forms of data through attentive listening to multiple voices and stories. This handbook is the first to bring together a comprehensive collection of chapters dedicated entirely to the Listening Guide, mapping its origins, showcasing its many adaptations, and highlighting insights from long-time practitioners. It offers readers both a deeper understanding of the method and practical insights for using it in their own research.

The first part of the handbook, Histories, charts the early development of the method by bringing together foundational texts. The second part, Innovations and Adaptations, features recent advances introduced by a new generation of international, interdisciplinary scholars who, drawing on diverse national and disciplinary backgrounds, engage varied populations across multiple geographic contexts and work with diverse forms of data. The third part, Methodological Journeys, offers reflections from scholars who have used, adapted, and taught the method for more than three decades, illuminating its key contributions and ongoing potential as a relational, feminist, and voice-centred approach.

The book is intended for scholars and researchers within social science and humanities disciplines, including qualitative, narrative and feminist researchers; for students at all levels of study (undergraduate, master's, postgraduate); and for more established scholars in academia and other sectors.

Carol Gilligan is Professor of Humanities and Applied Psychology at New York University and was a visiting professor at the Centre for Gender Studies and Jesus College at the University of Cambridge until 2009. She was a member of the Harvard faculty for over 30 years and held the university’s first chair in Gender Studies. Along with Lyn Mikel Brown and students and colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, she developed the Listening Guide.

Natasha S. Mauthner is Professor of Social Science Philosophy and Method at Newcastle University, where she founded the Methods Hub in 2020. She previously worked at the universities of Edinburgh and Aberdeen. She and Andrea Doucet learned the Listening Guide from Carol Gilligan as doctoral students at the University of Cambridge. Natasha later co-taught the method with Carol Gilligan at Harvard University. Her experiences using and teaching the Listening Guide in non-Western contexts have led her to reconceptualize the method through feminist posthumanist and post/decolonial frameworks.

Andrea Doucet is Distinguished Professor in Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies at Brock University, Honorary Professor at University College London, and a former Canada Research Chair in Gender, Work, and Care. She and Natasha Mauthner learned the Listening Guide from Carol Gilligan during their doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge and later collaborated to develop it further. Her work in ecological and feminist epistemologies, feminist care ethics, and Indigenous community-based research underpin her current writing on the Listening Guide as a care ethics method.