Narrative Inquiry - Volume 22, Issue 1, 2012

While certain branches of Quakerism are well known for the silence of their worship, such branches also practice highly valued speech events. In this article, I explore one such speech event, the telling of one’s “spiritual journey” by members of a Quaker meeting. From an ethnography of communication perspective, drawing on cultural communication and cultural discourse theory, I examine the cultural premises that underlie this practice of narrative telling, informing both the story told and the situated narrative performance. This analysis reveals the way in which the interactional event of telling journeys among Friends serves as a model of practicing Quakerism for others and is central to the process of community formation. In addition, I suggest that the same premises that inform the telling of “spiritual journeys” also underlie engagement in silent worship and a distinctive style for conducting Quaker administrative meetings.

This article compares swearing in novels with swearing in everyday talk based on a representative sample of British and American prose fiction and a several large corpora of natural conversation. Swearing allegedly makes fictional dialogue more realistic, but up till now no one has attempted a systematic comparison of fictional and natural conversational swearing. Fiction writers incorporate swearing into their dialogue to delineate characters and to signal emotions, sometimes setting it off from non-swearing talk and commenting on it in various ways. Traditionally, the author’s own voice contained no swearing. By contrast, in conversational narratives, tellers use swearing to obtain the floor, to evaluate action, to mark climaxes and closings, in addition to portraying their characters as swearing. Moreover, in conversation, tellers may hear their listeners swearing along with them, not only to support and evaluate, but also to oppose and even complain about their telling performance.

In this article, I suggest that narratives’ importance for social change may be understood by examining specific elements of narrative syntax — key rhetorical tropes within stories, and story genres. I argue that these stylistic elements generate social connections that themselves support and stimulate social change. I use Young’s (2006) theorisation of responsibility and global justice in terms of connection, to suggest how narratives may support or generate progressive social change. I then examine narrative tropes and genres of similarisation and familiarisation at work in narratives produced around the HIV pandemic, and the limits of those tropes and genres for supporting and catalysing social change.

In response to the renewed importance of authenticity in contemporary culture, academic studies of authenticity are flourishing. This work contributes to the scholarship of authenticity, by exploring how authenticity is constructed in narratives of sexual identity. This work examines the narratives of 32 women who were once partnered with women and identified as queer, lesbian or bisexual and subsequently became involved with men. Although the women in this study find themselves in a position with few available scripts to make sense of the change to a partner of a different gender, they work to construct their narratives around the central theme of consistency, while grappling with notions of agency. To create authentic sexual identities, they rely on several scripts, taking into account not only what they consider authentic but also what their audience will recognize as such. The women in this study maintain that both their attraction to women and their attraction to men are authentic. Both experiences are presented as connected to some sense of internal consistency.

The turn to narrative as a form of therapy has become a common practice with individuals telling their stories in private and public forums in hopes of finding healing and recovery for a wide variety of mental health disorders. With the emergence of the internet and the proliferation of new media forms, narrative practices have evolved concurrently. An examination of the digitally mediated narratives I call e-stories, on mental health community websites can provide a window into how people use psychological concepts in narratives to do mental health work in everyday life (Edwards & Potter, 1992). This case study of the HealthyPlace online journal community shows how e-stories play a significant role in self-identity construction and ideological reproductive work in relation to mental illness and recovery. This research examines autobiographical introductions posted on twenty-eight journal homepages to explore how everyday people use psychotherapeutic coherence systems — lay versions of expert knowledge — to demonstrate expertise and authority while organizing experiences into a socially sharable narrative, characterizing self-identity in terms of illness and health simultaneously. These e-stories reveal the power of language to serve as a tool to negotiate community membership, reproduce ideologies about mental health and recovery, and employ narrative devices online to represent self-identities of people as “screwed up, but working on it.”

Drawing on recent work on digital narratives of personal experience in online genres such as email, social networking sites, and blogs, the present study explores narrative features in 100 online consumer reviews of hotels. Focusing on negative reviews, or “Rants,” from popular consumer travel platform, TripAdvisor, the article examines both canonical and genre-specific structural features of narratives, as well as some of the discursive resources used by online narrators to engage their audiences, and to draw them into their stories. Specifically, the study explores the use of story prefaces and related forms of second person address, represented speech and mental states, and deictic shifts, and suggests that narrative features such as these are useful in attracting the attention of an audience amidst a vast universe of online information.

In current Western consumer societies, the poor are excluded and occupy stigmatized positions. By analyzing an interview with a poor man, I look at how stigma is discursively negotiated through the interplay between individual and social dimensions of narratives. First, the interviewee resists the interviewer’s ‘poor man’-category projection by setting up alternative groups. Second, he invokes and aligns with dominant discourses regarding the necessity to own consumer goods and find a work-life balance, by which he constructs the identity of an empowered “bricoleur” (cf Gabriel et al., 2010). These findings are then related to Goffman’s theory of stigma and information control (1963) and to the inextricable link between the performed nature of narratives, their individual and social dimensions and their local and global contexts.

On the basis of a thorough comparative analysis of the Forum contributions to the last issue of “Narrative Inquiry” (21:2), it is possible to focus on some patterns which indicate the development of a new paradigm in this field of study and practice. These patterns lead us to understand narrative as co-constructed, dialogical, educational. ethical, multi-perspectival, relational, political, provisional, social and situational and place it in a non exclusive confrontation with other forms of meaning making within the different fields of human experience.

Social science writing can be construed as a form of discourse that puts meaning into motion. This article reviews the cultural conditions that inspired the burgeoning interest in autoethnography, the kinds of truth to which it aspires, and the opportunities it opens to invite readers into conversation with the possibilities of happiness in the presence of human suffering. Autoethnographies attempt to make social science something more than an end in itself.

In this article I discuss how conversational narrative is used to frame and manage social relationships. I refer to theories and questions that sparked my research and describe how I came to take my stance as participant observer. My role as participant influenced ongoing decisions about collection and analysis of conversational material. In turn, these decisions influenced the research outcome. Here I introduce story exchange types, analytic units devised to study how we enact social relations through conversational narrative. To illustrate, I give two brief examples; one experience is reciprocated, the other is not. While these examples provide only a partial glimpse into various social transactions, taken together they represent a pivotal difference: participants use or refuse stories as they engage with others in talk. My position corroborates the work of scholars who argue for an interactive, dialogic approach to the study of discourse. All participants in conversational discourse transmit cultural norms. Through everyday talk we construe “reality” for ourselves.

The narrative turn in social and human sciences has led us to consider identity as a narrative phenomenon. We can classify most of the approaches that have been developed by the emphasis they put on the “subject” in the analysis. For some, the subject is the first person singular, who puts into order and constructs an internalized life story so as to give purpose and coherence to different life experiences. For others, the emphasis is on the relationship between the first and second person, the I-you, in conversational situations located in time and space. Still others argue that narratives — repertoires of behaviour and identity — are shared artefacts, of historical origin and their content is social, political and cultural (i.e., “we” and “they”). However, in all these approaches there is agreement that narratives of identity are cultural products, inseparable from the social, institutional, geographic and cultural forces which comprise what I call funds of identity. The aim of this article is to suggest the need to adopt a qualitative multi-methodological approach aimed at studying these funds of identity, thus complementing the general use of in-depth interviews.

As narrative therapists and researchers we are interested in how conversations invite co-authoring and co-editing possibilities to develop self-narratives preferred by our partners in dialogue. ‘Problem saturated stories’ acquire their dominance and self-defining plausibility through unquestioned personal and cultural conversations. Questions and responsive dialogues, however, can invite consideration and elaboration of previously implausible plotlines and discourses pertaining to self-narratives. Accordingly, we report on processes and outcomes from research conversations with volunteers who self-identified as having been sexually abused, and who joined Sarah in co-authoring and co-editing ‘small stories’ of healthy intimacy after the abuse.

This paper discusses the problematic consequences of labeling Bruner and MacIntyre’s work under the heading ‘narrative turn’. I argue that their focus on narrative was secondary to larger projects with more important implications for psychology which have unfortunately garnered less attention and have yet to be realized. Bruner’s intent was to establish meaning-making as the central concept of psychology. MacIntyre’s concern was with establishing grounds for moral living. Identity was conceived of as a crucial explanatory concept in the psychosocial construction of meaning and\or the good life. Understanding narrative however, although considered important, was not the primary goal of their efforts. I propose refocusing on these original goals and on identity processes, be they narrative or paradigmatic, as they are involved in the ongoing organization of interpretive and evaluative meaning systems that are the grounds for intentionality and agency.

In seeking to better understand English language learners and their imagined identities, which is the central focus of our article, scholars have drawn extensively on the work of Norton and colleagues. This work has foregrounded the language learner as a participating social agent with complex and changing identities. It is this agentive sense of self that is linked, in narratives, to larger socio-cultural and historical social practices. Our interest here lies particularly in the effects of migration on language learners. With this in mind, we advocate that classroom communities be fostered wherein a range of narrative identities, as sense-making practices, are respectfully harnessed as resources for learners of diverse linguistic histories, to create more socially just and responsive “possible worlds”.

This article addresses recent contestations of the role of narrative inquiry in the field of identity analysis and in qualitative inquiry more generally. In contrast to essentializing tendencies in the field of narrative inquiry (which have been contested under the headers of narrative exceptionalism, narrative imperialism, and narrative necessity), I am reiterating my proposal to theorize narrative inquiry as narrative practice (formerly ‘small story approach’) within which narratives and narrative inquiry present a more modest but thoroughly viable contribution.