Narrative Inquiry - Volume 24, Issue 2, 2014

Depicted as someone without agency, with no free will and completely in the hands of the trafficker, the ideal trafficking victim can be seen as diametrically different from the guilty prostitute. By analysing how responsibility and victimhood are negotiated in forensic interviews with alleged adolescent trafficking victims, this article scrutinises this image by asking how victim-status is handled when questions turn to sex and prostitution and which interactive and narrative conditions, related to agency, stake and interest, apply for talk in this specific institutional setting. Our findings suggest that in order to sort out the “real” victims, the interviewer need to pull apart the two categories victim and prostitute even if there may be substantive problems with this clear-cut distinction since the categories tend to blend together. Further, talk about sex can be problematic for the interactants as it may undermine the victim narrative instead creating a subject with interests.

This paper investigates conflicting narratives available to lesbian and gay couples as a result of marriage and civil partnership. Whereas marginalisation may have made stories of exclusion particularly resonant for same-sex couples, marriage and civil partnership offer scope for new stories around inclusion and equality. Drawing on empirical research with married and civil partner same-sex couples in the UK, US and Canada, the paper contrasts couples’ atrocity stories with new stories about acceptance and inclusion. The paper argues that these new stories should be seen as triumph stories that point towards a tangible impact arising from marriage equality and civil partnership. However, the presence of atrocity stories alongside these triumph stories provides evidence of a more limited policy impact. In conclusion, the paper highlights the relevance of atrocity stories in an emerging area of public policy, as well as the likelihood of triumph stories being relevant in other contexts.

Moral discourses, which operate to create difference among people, construct and reconstruct a “suicide stigma” whereby the suicide-bereaved are stigmatized in their social contexts and thus prevented from communicating their experience of loss. Departing from a performance-based pragmatic approach, this article uses Bamberg’s (1997) positioning theory to analyze a young woman’s performed memoir as her way of resisting this stigmatizing position. Following her mother’s suicide, the daughter-narrator breaks the silence, renegotiates meaning and claims her normalcy — and that of people like her. The audience members, who partake in the emotional and relational aspects of her grief, are positioned as witnesses. They represent society and “the moral court of law”, and are endowed with the power to liberate the narrator from her guilt. This article showcases how the narrative format of a performative memoir can enable a process of de-stigmatization and in addition work to empower and help normalize the stigmatized experiences of others.

In this paper we examine how the features of an on-going experience are identified as having subsequently reportable properties. Using transcripts of the audio track of a video posted on YouTube purporting to capture the movements of a UFO (or at least, ostensibly anomalous lights in the sky), the analysis examines how the participants exhibit and negotiate their understanding of the object/lights, how they evaluate the evidence provided by the video in comparison to what they can see, and the way that another’s failure to see the same phenomenon is managed to ensure that the absence of corroboration does not undermine implicit claims about its objectivity and potentially anomalous features.

Visual representations are powerful vehicles for the transmission of collective memory and the processing of traumatic events (Zelizer, 1998). But how do images create narrative, particularly in context of a traumatic past? This paper analyzes two visual narratives created by national truth commissions in Guatemala and Peru. Drawing from various theories of visual narrative and visual grammar, mainly Eisner (1985), McCloud (1993), Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006), and Cohn (2013), this paper analyzes how each project used visuals — photography and illustrations — to create the building blocks of narrative: characters, setting, and plot. It compares and contrasts the two projects in terms of how they depict the main actors in the conflicts, as well as the main events and the overall visual narrative structure. Finally, this paper discusses the potential benefits and drawbacks of each medium as a post-traumatic tool.

The introduction of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination has resulted in a proliferation of discourse about HPV-related health risks, with a particular emphasis on the link between HPV and cervical cancer. Using a discursive narrative approach, we critically examine how young women navigate and construct their identities in relation to discourses on HPV vaccination, and the master narratives of risk, medicalization and individual responsibility for health that inform these discourses. Drawing on positioning theory, the narratives of three women who accepted, declined and were undecided about vaccination are presented to illustrate how they actively and uniquely negotiate their identities in relation to the positions idealized by HPV vaccination discourse, and in the context of their intimate relations and everyday lives. These findings fundamentally challenge dominant techno-scientific perspectives on health risk that underpin the majority of research on HPV vaccine decision-making, and health promotion research more generally. We suggest that discursive narrative approaches can advance critical understanding of how health risk discourse, and emerging technologies aimed at reducing health risks, are implicated in promoting neoliberal constructions of healthy citizenship that frame health risk management as an individual responsibility and moral obligation.

Based on the Extended-Elaboration Likelihood Model and the Entertainment Overcoming Resistance Model, this study examines the relationships between several variables believed to moderate or mediate narrative effects, including (a) prior issue/topic involvement; (b) plot engagement (transportation); (c) character affiliation/alignment (sympathy and empathy); and (d) narrative-consistent behavioral intentions. The results based on respondents who viewed a movie detailing the abuse of hearing-impaired individuals indicate that prior involvement predicted narrative transportation and emotions (both sympathy and empathy); narrative transportation predicted emotions; and narrative transportation and sympathy predicted narrative-consistent behavioral intentions. The respondents who viewed the movie (707 respondents) were more likely to show narrative-consistent behavioral intentions than those who did not (323). These results have important theoretical and practical implications.

This article examines storytelling (narratives) in interaction at a Japanese American museum. The analysis draws upon audiovisual recordings of tours led by older, male Japanese American docents. It examines ways docents tell stories — primarily of vicarious experience — in educating visitors on Japanese-American history, and ways they use a range of verbal and non-verbal communicative practices that invite visitors’ engagement in the telling as a social and sense-making activity. We categorize two types of communicative practices: elicited and non-elicited. Elicited practices include (1) interrogative and polar questions, which are further divided into (a) known and (b) unknown information questions, and (2) other-repetition + list intonation. Non-elicited practices include affective talk and gestures in recounting past events. We show ways that visitor engagement varies in relation to elicited and non-elicited practices. Finally, we discuss storytelling as a vehicle for displaying and positioning the self and others in relation to stance and identity, and in working towards the goals of the museum.

This study adopts a social semiotic approach to model the dynamics of character emotion and the discursive mechanisms of viewer engagement in film narrative. Drawing upon the systemic functional semiotics (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004), this paper proposes a metafunctional framework to elucidate how film characters’ emotions are ideationally construed, interpersonally enacted, and textually organized as a “prosody”. The explication of emotion prosody provides an explicit framework to explain the multi-dimensional, dynamic construction of narrative discourse. With the metafunctional model of emotion prosody, the fundamental mechanisms of viewer engagement, namely, allegiance, empathy and expectancy, are elucidated in a coherent discourse-based framework. Compared to schema-based cognitive film studies that focus on viewers’ emotional reactions, the social semiotic discourse analysis provides a more explicit and analytically reliable framework to explain the multi-dimensional construction of film narrative and the discursive mechanisms of viewer engagement.

Using Gubrium and Holstein’s (2009) approach to narrative analysis, I examine how couples and I co-authored and co-edited shared meanings while talking about “we-ness.” I pay particular attention to my role as researcher and how I was active in inviting these conversations. I also attend to how participants and I developed joint meanings, negotiated individual and relational identities, and managed couples’ public image through processes of collaboration and control; specifically, by indicating agreement, navigating disagreements, and passing over alternative stories. Participants observed that talking about we-ness, with one another and with me, increased their sense of closeness. Thus, orienting to moments of togetherness and discussing past, present, and future experiences as a couple had implications for their understandings of “we” and “us.” I discuss the implications of my results, inviting researchers and therapists to consider how they may be active in shaping meaning- and identity-making conversations with participants and clients.

This article aims to explore narratives as sites for identity construction by employing the concept of positioning to analyse some of the discursive processes through which identity construction is accomplished in institutional contexts. Our specific foci are i) the ways in which individuals position themselves in relation to larger collectivities in their narratives about being expatriates living and working in Hong Kong, and ii) how they construct their professional identities in the tension that may arise due to their membership in different social groups. Drawing on data from a corpus of interviews with professionals in multicultural workplaces in Hong Kong, we provide an in-depth analysis of two case studies of expatriates who take very different stances towards their company and the cultural groups with whom they interact, and who, as a consequence, construct remarkably different identities for themselves, the people they work with and also their organisation. Our analyses illustrate some of the intricate ways in which identities are closely intertwined with and feed off individuals’ membership in different collectivities, which surfaces especially when zooming in on the different levels of positioning in the interviewees’ narratives.