Narrative Inquiry - Volume 19, Issue 2, 2009

The article discusses the relevance of narrative theory to the study of politics. It claims that the structure of narratives creates a sense of continuity, which is central to the construction of community. Following this claim, the article demonstrates the potential value of combining the study of political narratives with a study of political actions of empowering those who construct them. It presents a study of the closing statements of US presidential debates as a source of narratives related by politicians, and voting records as an indicator of the power given by the people to those politicians. This study explores the correlation between narrative structure as a textual means of constructing continuity and the power given, by the public, to politicians who produce the narratives. It shows that this correlation tends to be higher in counties located in the eastern US and in counties that tend to be more Republican. This finding, the article suggests, indicates the establishment of different Interpretive Communities in the US.

In this article it is argued that two forms of narratives need to be incorporated into narrative research. The first is ontological narratives, which are akin to life histories. The second is epistemological narratives. These latter ones are the stories the researcher is conveying to the reader about a particular social world. When used together, the reader is presented with a rich and compelling telling of a particular place and time. To illustrate this, this article draws on the narrative of Alf, a self-employed craftworker, and the epistemological narrative written by the author.

Narratives told in interview have become a central tool of data collection and analysis in a variety of disciplines within the social sciences. However, many researchers, particularly those who embrace a conversational analytic or ethnomethodological approach (see among others Schegloff, 1997; Goodwin, 1997), regard them as artificial and oppose them to naturally occurring stories, which they see as much richer and interesting sources of data and analysis. In this paper, I argue that the criticism against interview narratives has been justified by the lack of attention that many narrative analysts have shown towards the interview as a truly interactional context. However, I also point to some shortcomings that derive from this opposition between naturally occurring and interview narratives and to an alternative framework in which the stress is not on the kind of narrative data used for the analysis, but rather on the kind of narrative analysis that should be adopted. I argue that our methodologies of analysis cannot fail to take into account the way narratives shape and are shaped by the different contexts in which they are embedded and propose the study of narrative genres as a way of looking at the reciprocal influence of narratives and story-telling contexts. I illustrate this point looking at accounts as a genre.

In recent years, interest in examining the diverse functions and features of oral narratives told in workplace contexts has grown alongside the body of research investigating the role of language in enacting politeness in the workplace. Yet, to date, there has been little integration of these two strands of inquiry. This paper forges a link between linguistic politeness and some social functions of institutional narratives. Specifically, the micro-analysis of one narrative taken from a corpus of teacher/supervisor feedback sessions demonstrates how the narrator, a novice teacher, negotiates the telling of a complaint narrative to her supervisor along with the politeness demands embedded in the local context of telling. I argue that the speaker’s contradictory evaluation of her situation interacts with linguistic politeness (i.e., the need to mitigate a “face-threatening act”) in the situated telling of this narrative. Finally, in the spirit of recent work on narrative, which calls for increased attention to context in narrative activities, this paper highlights the importance of considering the interrelationships among factors such as face work, recipient design, production circumstances, and institutional roles and relationships among speakers, in the analysis of institutional narratives.

A relational approach is proposed which provides a framework for connecting levels of analysis/phenomena relevant to narrative identity. Because it is grounded in a systemic relational metanarrative, the relational approach does not preference any one level. Small story and big story are both viewed as integral to the larger identity project. A third analytic level, the middle story, is suggested as a bridge between small and big story. As one example of the approach, systemic analyses of narrative stability for two university students are presented, based on interviews conducted over four years. These analyses conceptually connect middle-level processes with big stories and illustrate principles of circular causality. The final portion of the paper discusses implications and requirements of the relational approach, and other ways that it might be applied.

Narrative analysis has emerged as a central analytical force in furthering a critique of colonial discourse. This article examines the relationship between narrative and discourse, by offering a comparative analysis of indigenous narrative, in the context of Australian and Malaysian history and contemporary museum practices of representation. I argue that indigenous knowledge is underpinned by narratives that enable a radical reconceptualization of existing epistemological and philosophical practices to viewing the world. This knowledge reflects various narratives of resistance about indigeneity that challenge traditional understandings of difference, revealing the ways indigenous people make sense of the past and construct their own narratives. My intention is to explore the tensions of place, space and memory through a reflection on indigenous resistance narratives. I examine different knowledges of place and “country”, suggesting there are parallels between indigenous people’s cultural knowledge in Australia and indigenous people’s knowledge in Malaysia. Western preoccupations continue to ignore this cultural knowledge and, in doing so, they eclipse broader awareness about issues of significance for indigenous communities.

Mother-child storytelling was used here as a first step toward exploring language socialization through the narrative discourse of Russian-speaking non-Orthodox Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in two host cultures. This study examined five groups of mother-child dyads: Russian-speaking Ashkenazi Jews living in Ukraine, Israel, and the United States and two Russian-speaking Jewish immigrant groups living in the United States and Israel. These five groups of mothers and their three to five-year-old children were asked to tell a story using a wordless picture book. This study sought to examine the themes of home present in narrative discourse across these groups. More specifically, this research attempted to explore the ways in which the narrative process may facilitate and/or obstruct the necessary skills children need to be socialized into their cultural communities (Ochs, 2002; Ochs & Schieffelin, 2008). Measures included quantitative analysis of the length of narrative, use of questions, character speech, emotion qualifiers, and switches in language use for mothers and their children as well as narrative expressions of issues of loss common among immigrant groups. Findings are discussed in terms of how narratives reveal the language socialization practices of immigrants, including linguistic choices made to use native or host goals and styles and thematic expression of their immigrant experience.

This article investigates the use of co-constructed narrative strands to better understand the function of institutional narratives in teacher education. It uses data drawn from a large ethnographic study of talk in interaction in teacher education coursework. The analysis demonstrates how a series of similar small stories functions together to create a larger message about social categories in schooling. Narratives created by preservice teachers, through shared understanding of category systems like gender and disability, penetrate stories told in coursework and impact understandings of students in schools.

Wikis, websites designed for the communal creation of media content, have previously been theorized using the work of Levy (1997) as knowledge communities. In this conception, wikis are seen as storehouses of data that communities can use to organize and explicate their encyclopedic “communal intelligence.” In this paper, I expand on Levy’s argument to examine the narratological possibilities of wikis. Using as examples fan-created wikis for the cult television shows Lost and Heroes, I show that these media-based wikis highlight the fan community’s interactive construction of a narratological database. Using the interactivity omnipresent in wikis, fans articulate a new conception of narrative construction, a conception I term “narractivity.”

Narrative-Based Decision Theory (NBDT) describes how narrative thinking leads to concrete action. The first premise is that narratives enable the narrator to make sense of the past and present and allow him or her to make plausible forecasts about the future. The second premise is that the narrator can evaluate the desirability of the forecasted future in light of his or her values and preferences. The third premise is that when the forecasted future is undesirable the narrator can create and implement plans of action aimed at ensuring that the future, when it arrives, is more desirable than what was forecasted. Two kinds of decisions bind these three premises into a unified theory: decisions about the desirability of the forecasted future and decisions about a plan’s potential for remedying things when it is decided that the forecasted future is undesirable — in effect, the plan’s desirability. Both kinds of decisions are made using a single mechanism, the discrepancy test. The NBDT viewpoints on the properties of narratives, on the properties of decisions, and on the properties of the decision mechanism are discussed.