Narrative Inquiry - Volume 21, Issue 2, 2011

It is in the explanation of conflicts that narratives of confrontation are most clearly deployed. In the definition of the problems, in the roles embodied by the different subjects, in the lexical choices made when referring to territories or symbolic objects, we establish differences in terms of how such confrontations are (to be) understood. These narratives are articulated through structures which work to construct the origin of the problem, the solution, the victim or aggressor and so on. Applying a narratological analysis, the aim of this article is to offer a set of key elements for understanding news constructions of the — essentially political — conflict among nations and regions within Spain. Starting from a study of five cases and a comparison of ten TV news items from both the Spanish (TVE) and the Catalan (TVC) public-service channels concerning recent conflicts, the authors attempt to throw light on the ways in which different and divergent conceptions of the same set of problems are presented from a “national” point of view.

While much narrative inquiry is concerned with issues of self and identity, doing study on the processes (the how) of self-making offers ongoing challenges to methodology. This article explores the creation of a dialogic space that assisted young adolescents to write about themselves and their daily lives using email journals as an alternative to face-to-face interviews. With the researcher acting as a listener-responder, and in the absence of researcher-designed questions, a dynamic field was opened up for participant-led self-making to emerge over a six month period of self-reflective written expression. The article describes a shared email relationship based on a dialogic pattern of thinking, writing, listening and response intended to foster participants’ voices as ontological narratives of self. Findings show the use of email journals created a synergy for self-disclosure and a safe space for self-expression where the willingness of participants to be themselves was encouraged. The self-representations of a specific group of gifted young adolescents thus emerged as written versions of “who” they are — offering data that differs from interview approaches and contributing to discussion of the value of ontology narratives.

This essay provides a rationale of how Performance Analysis and Narrative Positioning within research on Physically Disabled Professionals’ Personal Narratives can provide insight into the role of the body in the analysis of professional narratives. Through analyzing the participants’ open-ended narratives as performances in which the narrators draw upon performativities to reconcile the absurdity associated with their deemed ‘unprofessional’ bodies legitimately occupying a professional space, the author traces the emergence of embodied professional heroes in four variations: the Super Hero, Warrior Hero, Tragic Hero, and Rogue Hero, each which illuminates the importance of the body in the construction of personal narratives of professionalism. In conclusion, the author calls for attention to the potential performance of the Anti Hero across personal narratives that emerge in unmarked bodies in order to attend the underlying performativities and discourses of power within all narratives of professionalism.

This article seeks to present and exemplify to the qualitative researcher the term intertextuality as a concept and as a method that may offer a framework for the analysis and interpretation of short narratives or life stories. Intertextuality as a central concept in the study of culture is particularly suitable for qualitative research, central to which is the subjectivity of the narrator, the story, and the listener/researcher, as well as the relative and indeterminate dimension of knowledge. However, using intertextuality as an interpretative method in various types of texts mandates the researcher’s awareness and abilities in areas that this article discusses. In light of the methodological objective of the article, we selected narratives that represent different types of intertextual linkage on different interpretative levels, on different levels of complexity, and on different levels of ideas. The intertextual reading to be demonstrated detects the combination of various types of cultural components in the narrative as a means of representing the world of the narrator; it takes into account a possible macro context in the narrator’s story, its style and structure, the narrator’s implicit personal interpretation, and the researcher-interpreter’s option to reread the narrative.

This qualitative study explored the ways in which mothers of children with Down syndrome interpreted their experiences of motherhood. The narratives of 19 mothers were analyzed. The findings indicate that their identities as mothers were negotiated in the context of the sociocultural meaning of disability and dominant narratives on motherhood. In institutional and interpersonal discourses, they became positioned as other. Their narratives shed light on their resistance to otherness, their contextualized understanding of mothering a child with Down syndrome, and the ways in which they negotiated access to the constructed category of normative motherhood. The study suggests that a conceptual shift is needed in understanding the familial experience of raising a child with Down syndrome. Moving away from assumptions of negative outcomes for these families, professionals need to acknowledge the embeddedness of their experiences in sociocultural beliefs and practices that devalue children with disabilities.

This paper discusses Bruner’s contributions in the field of narrative. I offer a review of the main ideas developed by Bruner in the second half of the 1980, stressing the innovation of narrative approach in order to reconsider the epistemological and methodological foundations of psychology and other social sciences. Finally I conclude with some reflections on autobiographical narratives in relation to agency and the role of narratives regarding social and academic spaces.

In this contribution I discuss the link existing between autobiographical memory and autobiographical narrative and, in this context, the concept of coherence. Starting from the Bruner’s seminal concept of autobiographical self, I firstly analyze how autobiographical memories and autobiographical narrative influence each other and, somehow, mirror reciprocally and then I present some results of my previous studies using a methodology consisting in “narrating-transcribing-reading-narrating.” The results show that self narratives can have positive effects on the narrators if they are provided with a tool to reflect on their memories. Moreover these results show that autobiography in its double sides — that of memory and that of narrative — is a process of continuous construction but also that this construction is deeply linked to social interactions.

In a renewed call for interpretive psychological science, this paper argues for narrative as an integrative concept to interrogate mental experience and human development in social and political context. Master narrative engagement is defined as the process by which individuals engage with and internalize competing storylines of history and identity perceived as socially compulsory. Narrative science is concerned with individual responses to these master narratives and the extent to which elements of them become integrated into autobiographies. A narrative approach is posited as better able to capture the reality of lives in context and to enable possibilities for social and political transformation than variable-centered experimental science, which continues to dominate psychology.

In the spirit of Jerome Bruner’s call for the study of individuals’ appropriation of cultural meanings, this paper outlines a “generative” theory of identity based on study-of-lives interviews conducted with young adult Americans and Moroccans. This theory holds that multiple self-representations tend to be integrated by structurally-ambiguous key symbols and metaphors whose meanings can change via figure-ground like shifts in the salience of their features — and that identity-formation employs some of the same cognitive structures as tonal music to organize personal meanings. This “generative” theory of multiple identities complements McAdams’ story structure model and Hermans’ dialogical model.

This essay defines narrating in terms of trouble — narrators’ interaction in the structure of narratives, with the (often troubling) contexts around narratives, and management of expectations and possibilities in the process between narratives. I frame this discussion about the narrating process as an urgent concern for designers of developmental research and practice in the rapidly changing, diverse human environments of this global era. Since narrating in a tool for individual and societal sense-making, developmental activities engage relational complexity and tension.

This chapter depicts a personal and a professional trajectory caused by the narrative turn in the social sciences. It went from an original enchantment to a more distanced and nuanced approach, but in the end the narrative take established itself firmly in social studies, in this chapter exemplified by organization studies. Of great importance were the charismatic guides to the narrative, such as Jerome Bruner and Alasdair MacIntyre, who translated narratology’s main notions for the use of social scientists.

In this article, I re-examine Jerome Bruner’s vision of narrative psychology that he laid out over two decades ago. In particular, I argue that narrative inquiry must focus on identities located in sociocultural contexts of transnational movement and migration. The contact of self with multiple forms of otherness — both subtle and violent — play a significant role in identity formation. I discuss two examples from the Somalian and Indian diaspora to show how the study of these fractured, shifting, and hybridized identities provide a very valuable site from which narrative psychology has an opportunity to remake itself as a field that continues to be relevant in a world that is rapidly becoming transnational, diverse, and global.

This paper is a reflection on the potential of narrative video games for human sense making and perspective taking. Such games are considered in the context of storytelling and reflective action as the two core foundations of human sense making. I propose that narrative video games allow a form of player storytelling at the intersection of the game’s grand narrative and reflective action in a virtual world. I further propose that such games have the potential to create empathy for other people’s situations and perspectives in life.

Alasdair MacIntyre played a large role in alerting those outside literature departments to the central role of narrative in very aspect of experience. In this he shares certain assumptions with Bakhtin. Both argue that we cannot think without putting events — especially the ongoing event of our lives — into a sequence of some kind. Bakhtin differs from MacIntyre in recognizing that there is a problem in thus universalizing narrative: If everything is narrativized, how can we discriminate between good and bad stories? Bakhtin’s concept of ‘novelness’ is a general theory of narrative, not just a theory of the genre of the novel. Novelness stresses the importance of openness, shared authorship, and other features that provide a set of categories for distinguishing between stories that are faithful to the dialogic nature of human existence and those that seek to deny that nature through various strategies that insure premature closure in a false unity. In an age when the Humanities are little valued by society at large, the in depth knowledge of narrative that defines the textual humanities can provide help to other disciplines that are only now beginning to sense the importance of story.

In this paper I review some of the key elements of Alasdair MacIntyre’s conception of narrative identity. I focus on his notions of tradition and unified self, which have been interpreted by some critics as signs of a political conservatism and elitism. My argument proceeds by reviewing the critiques offered by Galen Strawson and Hilde Lindemann Nelson, both concerned with the conflict between tradition and choice. While Strawson and Nelson believe that traditions are oppressive at least to some individuals, MacIntyre offers a more complex understanding of tradition, emphasizing that traditions embody conflicts. In proposing a different reading of these concepts, one I claim is more accurate, I suggest that MacIntyre’s concept of narrative selfhood can serve as foundation of a political theory that is utopian in a standard liberal way.

We focus on four major tensions pervading much narrative inquiry to date, tensions that threaten to divide the field into alienated enclaves. Of specific concern are psychological vs. social explanations of narrative, structural vs. process orientations to research, approaches that celebrate experience vs. those that textually deconstruct experience, and accounts that center on singularity of self-narratives vs. incoherent multiplicity. Finally, we open discussion on a relational constructionist account of narrative, with an eye toward reconciling these disparate orientations.

In this article, we identify the contributions to narrative approaches that emerge from a communication perspective. We elaborate on an approach to narrative that centers on the joint, interactive aspects of narrative construction and discuss why it is useful for navigating around two pitfalls encountered by narrative scholars: (1) the psychologist’s fallacy and (2) the problems of finalization in narrative.

This paper raises doubts about the necessity of narrative to selfhood or unified agency, but suggests that there may nonetheless be an important role for autobiographical narrative in (provisionally) fixing the meaning of events, actions, and experiences within a life.

As the narrative turn enters its fourth decade, the task of identifying the limits of narrative and of exploring alternative approaches to interpreting the self and social world is growing in urgency. This article calls for scholars in the medical humanities to undertake this project through critically (re)engaging the work of Galen Strawson, Paul Atkinson and Crispin Sartwell.