Narrative Inquiry - Volume 28, Issue 1, 2018

This study examines a participant’s narrative in a focus group interview dealing with the evaluation of criminal justice policy – the impact of community policing training. However, rather than look at the narrative solely in the speech of the interviewee, I analyze the integration of speech and embodied conduct like gesture, gaze, and posture in the production and negotiation of professional identities. I demonstrate the applied merits of a multimodal approach to criminal justice evaluation in the mapping between denotational text and interactional positioning, a mapping that inheres in embodied stance and broader sociocultural context.

In this study I examine a corpus of former refugee narratives published by the nonprofit Refugee Council of Australia (RCOA) on their website in 2011. In order to investigate the relationship between the constituent parts and the narrative as a whole, I use critical discourse analysis to examine the strategic use of person, quantified temporal phrases, broader thematic elements, and the constitution of “former refugee narrative” as a genre. I conclude that the RCOA dominates temporality and maintains authority over the narratives through specifically applied quantification yet captures the necessary subjective and emotional material of the refugee experience to achieve the authenticity the co-narratives need to be well-received by the public. Thus, by manipulating hermeneutic composability, the RCOA evidences an objective, authoritative portrayal yet captures a subjective experience worth telling, and by manipulating intertextual gaps they appeal to the Australian nationalism implicit in the contemporary political climate.

The aim of this study is to unveil English learners’ beliefs and emotions regarding the English language education received in Catalan schools. For that purpose, data from 5 focus groups with 31 university students have been analysed through a combination of MCA and small stories analysis. The findings reveal that the participants are dissatisfied with the English language education provided, and they believe that the teachers and/or the system are to blame for their (low) level of English. In the main story analysed, boredom, demotivation, irritation and frustration are emotions attached to English learning in high school, which are also present in most of our subjects’ small stories; it is the repetition (iterativity) of small stories, beliefs and emotions across participants that leads us to the detection of a discourse of victimhood, by which students identify themselves as the victims of their English teachers and/or the education system.

To explore individual identity narratives of accommodation and resistance in relationship to dominant American social, political and cultural constructs, this paper uses the Listening Guide Method of Qualitative Inquiry (Gilligan et al., 2006) to investigate the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, gender and American identity during and post college among four second-generation, college educated, Korean American women. The analysis, drawing from the emergence of themes across interviews, found that participant women accommodated and/or resisted dominant American social, political, and cultural constructs in service of their individual Korean American identities narratives during and post college.

The learning journey of adult learners of Irish in post-conflict Northern Ireland can contain contentious elements, particularly related to (perceived) politicisation of the language during and following the conflict. Coates and Thornborrow (2005) suggest that stories involve striking a balance between deviation from norms and presenting oneself as “culture confirming”, so an apt way to explore these learners’ experiences is to elicit and analyse their narratives. A majority of the narratives contain one or more “opponents”, in the Greimasian sense, that detrimentally affected the learner’s engagement with the Irish language and would therefore invite negative evaluation. The learners, however, use a unique range of devices to mitigate, background, abstract or make implicit their evaluation. This enables them to simultaneously mark and move on from the challenge, maintain or restore equilibrium, and confirm two cultures: their traditional culture and a new post-conflict cultural formation.

Developed in the context of a larger research study on healing from sexual abuse, the present article analyzes written narratives (letters) produced by nine adolescents who have been victims of sexual assault and who successfully completed a specialized psychotherapy. Letters, directed to another child or adolescent starting their therapy in the same center, were analyzed using three integrated types of narrative analysis (thematic, structural and performative).

Key findings show that narratives exhibit messages of hope and encouragement, and adolescents view themselves as agents involved in their own transformation. In their letters, they urge other young children and adolescents to become actively involved in their own healing process. Participants stress the role of psychotherapy and therapeutic support in their recovery from sexual abuse.

Results are discussed highlighting the use of letters in clinical practice on adolescent sexual assault. Integration of multiple types of narrative analysis is discussed as a methodological support.

Previous research has argued that narrative is an evolutionary adaptation, offering advantages in terms of survival and reproductive successes. It is yet unclear, however, how narratives may promote our fitness to survive. Integrating developments in narrative theory, evolutionary psychology, communication science, and cognitive neuroscience, this article presents a Mental Simulation Model that explains the mechanisms through which narratives prepare us for potential life-threatening events in the future. The model proposes that the design features of narrative (setting, perspective, and action) facilitate various distinctive processes of mental simulation (transportation, identification, and action simulation). It is argued that these simulation processes are capable of enhancing our fitness to survive in distinct but complementary ways. The article offers testable propositions and discusses empirical implications.

This paper examines personal narratives and how they change according to the context in which they are narrated. In particular, it argues that personal narratives change as they are mediated by various discourses, genres and modes, as well as by the peculiarities that emerge when speaking and writing in different languages and when undertaking translation. It uses a case-study approach to analyse the different narratives told by Islamic State’s Yezidi female survivor, and United Nations Goodwill ambassador, Nadia Murad, in different contexts in 2014 and in 2015. In 2014, when two Western mass media outlets interviewed Murad, her narrative was compacted and less detailed. This shifted in December 2015 when Murad testified about her ordeal before the Security Council. Mediated by the discourse of the latter and by the genre of testimony, Murad’s narrative became more detailed, and transformed from a description of a personal suffering into a call for action.

This article examines the concept of experientiality in conversational storytelling from an ethnomethodological perspective, introducing a case in which the narrative mediation of experience fails. The recipient misses the experiential point of the story in the flow of interaction, which stems from other reasons than a failure in sense-making or cognitive comprehension. I discuss my findings with Monika Fludernik’s influential theory of Natural Narratology, according to which all narratives concern experiential exchange between the teller and the recipient, which travels from one consciousness to the other through natural cognitive parameters grounded in real life schemata. Applying conversation analysis, I focus on scrutinizing the details of the turn-by-turn unfolding activities of the participants. My analysis demonstrates that Fludernik’s conception of naturality falls short in capturing the relevancies of naturally occurring storytelling. Ignoring the reflexive intentionality of telling and reception makes Natural Narratology ill-equipped to grasp the dynamics of experientiality in everyday narration.

This study examines the evaluation of place in orientation sequences of narratives of internal migration to the Southern United States. Unlike other narratives of displacement, narratives of internal migration foreground talk about the here and now in which tellers evaluate place as an important aspect of narrative meaning-making. The current study draws on five narratives of internal migration told during research interviews about growing up bilingual in the South to examine how the South (and other places) are evaluated by young bilingual adults in the region. This study demonstrates how evaluations of place provide a resource for constructing narrators’ authority, moral positions, and belonging in relation to two main stereotypical narratives of the South, i.e. as a racialized and racist place or as a moral and hospitable place. The study has implications for understanding the construction of place and self identity in narrative as well as processes of migration of immigrant families within the U.S.