Abstract

The (auto)biographical research has drawn the attention from many researchers in several areas. They support the epistemological potential of this method, but it is still delusional or marginal for many academicians. This article aims at discussing how this type of investigation is inserted in Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s “emerging paradigm” denomination (1995). Also, we seek to comprehend how life history and narrative inquiry have struggled, in the last decades, between mistrust and seduction. It is a bibliographical research starting from the works of Santos (1995) on the crisis of the dominant paradigm and the emergence of a new paradigm – a more fluid one accepting subjectivity. It criticizes the science neutrality and states that every knowledge is also self-knowledge. The acceptance, although having some setbacks, of researches using life history in the academy is not, but, a product of this new epistemological stance.

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