Narrative Inquiry - Volume 34, Issue 2, 2024

This article presents an exercise in applied narratology within the context of intensive care nursing, specifically the writing of diaries by nurses for patients to fill in memory gaps and alleviate trauma. The article discusses narrative from three perspectives: (1) as nursing practice, resulting in patient diaries with narrative characteristics and purposes; (2) as analysis of this practice, in a study coupling narrative and nursing theory and practice; and (3) as the application of narratological concepts into practice through dialogues with nurses, with the aim of transferring insights gained from the analysis and enabling nurses’ reflection on their positions, practices and power as narrators for patients. The article argues that narratology can be operationalized for nursing work, and there are compelling reasons for why it should, which necessitate methodological reflexivity and mutual curiosity, trust, and learning, and considerations about how far the remit of the narratologist, as a non-expert, extends.

In recent years, strands of contemporary narrative theory have taken a turn toward a politically, socially, and environmentally conscious field of study that could be characterized as ‘engaged narratology.’ Creating and disseminating knowledge about how narratives work, these theories emphasize that narrative forms and strategies are neither universal nor neutral; they carry out, but can also challenge, systems of inequality and marginalization. They also suggest new combinations of theory and activism, pedagogical interventions, and community engagement models, offering tools to create social justice. This article outlines some of these recent developments and reflects on the possibilities of ‘engaged narratology’: how it relates to engaged research and what kinds of practices have been developed so far. As an example of engaged narratological work, it discusses the shared close reading of Roxane Gay’s book Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017) in a multidisciplinary narrative medicine classroom.

In this article, we discuss a dialogue between narrative theory, reading group practices, and analysis of reading group participants’ experiences. Hanna Meretoja’s theory of narrative agency has informed us in developing a new reading group model that aims to enhance the participants’ narrative agency, and, in turn, the analysis of the reading group experiences provides us with new knowledge on the reading group model, as well as on the theoretical approach. We explore narrative agency analysis as a tool to analyze interviews, and our analysis of three participants’ experiences illustrates how narrative agency can manifest itself in various forms. It also demonstrates that the enhanced ability to navigate narrative environments can be highly meaningful on a personal level. The article suggests that, despite its challenges, this kind of research approach, combining theory and practice, enriches and expands the possibilities of literary studies.

In this study, Greimas’s work on narrative structure is used to improve a specific practice: the research interview. In the social sciences, narrative interviewing often consists of collecting data from which a narrative is then constructed through analysis afterwards. In the interview method presented here, the interviewer instead prompts the interviewee to construct a narrative. We introduce the method, contextualize it by comparing it to previous and contemporary interview methods, and illustrate it with a small, sociolinguistic study: students (n = 12) from a humanities faculty and a science and engineering faculty at a Dutch university were interviewed about experiences with the use of different languages than the language of instruction in an international learning environment. The method allowed for smooth data collection, due to its narratively structured questioning and consequent rich data. Moreover, using narrative structures to guide the interview also facilitated easy analysis and comparison of the stories.

Computational recognition of narratives, if successful, would find innumerable applications with large digitized datasets. Systematic identification of narratives in the text flow could significantly contribute to such pivotal questions as where, when, and how narratives are employed. This paper discusses an approach to extract narratives from two datasets, Finnish parliamentary records (1980–2021) and oral history interviews with former Finnish MPs (1988–2018). Our study was based on an iterative approach, proceeding from original expert readings to a rule-based, computational approach that was elaborated with the help of annotated samples and annotation scheme. Annotated samples and computationally found extracts were compared, and a good correspondence was found. In this paper, we exhibit and compare the results from annotation and rule-based approach, and discuss examples of correctly and incorrectly found narrative sections. We consider that all attempts at recognizing and extracting narratives are definition dependent, and feed back to narrative theory.

Criminology is foundationally an applied discipline, or one whose knowledge seeks to shape some non-academic practice. Narratives – particularly the narratives of parties to ‘crime’ – are essential to criminology, but criminologists have hardly engaged with narratology. This paper tracks the progression from traditional narrative research involving harm agents and criminalized persons to a relatively new narrative criminology that is attentive to narrative forms and strategies inasmuch as it considers these as shaping harm. In addition, the paper forecasts narrative criminology’s fruitful engagement in concepts from rhetorical narratology. Interviews with men who perpetrated violence and insights from restorative justice encounters are used to demonstrate the potential value of rhetorical narratological concepts to narrative criminology and to interventions informed by narrative criminology.

This article investigates how the core features of narratives and the logic of storytelling are manifested in stories told by the developers and users of an information system and how they may adversely affect their perceptions of the ongoing implementation process. Information systems and the way they operate create a negative cycle where primarily problems possess tellability. We identify a negative masterplot dominating the narratives surrounding information system projects. We examine an ongoing public sector healthcare information system project by analysing both the written narratives of frustrated health and social care professionals on a social media channel and the oral narratives told by employees of the project organisation. These stories reveal a narrative struggle and various strategies, such as positioning, used in sense-making. We suggest that a better understanding of how narratives function could help disentangle the sociotechnical issues involving information system developers and users.

In this contribution, we place narrative theory in conversation with narrative practice to offer a small storymaking approach for engendering organizational change. Drawing on insights from counter-narrative studies, small story analysis, and communicative approaches to organizational change, we offer an applied narratology that conceptualizes organizational change as occurring in small storymaking practices. Embracing discourse and communication as constitutive of organizations, we invite narrative scholars to move beyond traditional distanced researcher positions to participate more actively in the co-creation of small stories and thus enable more participatory, collaborative organizational change practices. Rather than merely interpreting organizational stories, as in many traditional narrative studies, our applied narratology encourages researchers to invite organizational participants to co-create stories of their potential futures. Through this tension-filled practice of organizational small storymaking, narrative researchers and leaders can generate the ‘small story openings’ necessary to inspire innovative change.