Looking Back, Looking Forward

Responding to the honor of the festschrift, I name and honour those who guided me, especially my mentor, Elliot Mishler. I describe a path from initial fascination with the idea of a “story” to my subsequent work that expanded the study of narrative in the human sciences. Efforts to understand how individuals interpreted—made sense of—events and situations that had interrupted their lives led me to discoveries about narrative form, apparent only after close textual interactional analysis. Recently, the appeal of narrative has mushroomed; I urge scholars not to lose sight of features that distinguish it from other forms of discourse

Topic Modeling and Text Analysis for Qualitative Policy Research

This paper contributes to a critical methodological discussion that has direct ramifications for policy studies: how computational methods can be concretely incorporated into existing processes of textual analysis and interpretation without compromising scientific integrity. We focus on the computational method of topic modeling and investigate how it interacts with two larger families of qualitative methods: content and classification methods characterized by interest in words as communication units and discourse and representation methods characterized by interest in the meaning of communicative acts. Based on analysis of recent academic publications that have used topic modeling for textual analysis, our findings show that different mixed‐method research designs are appropriate when combining topic modeling with the two groups of methods. Our main concluding argument is that topic modeling enables scholars to apply policy theories and concepts to much larger sets of data. That said, the use of computational methods requires genuine understanding of these techniques to obtain substantially meaningful results. We encourage policy scholars to reflect carefully on methodological issues, and offer a simple heuristic to help identify and address critical points when designing a study using topic modeling.Peer reviewe

(Re)visitando a la madre (des)naturalizada : búsquedas y encuentros entre personas adoptadas en Chile y sus madres de origen

Este artículo es resultado de los proyectos FONDECYT N°3170338 "Adopciones en Chile: la construcción de narrativas sobre los orígenes y la identidad", REDI170133 "Investigación Interdisciplinaria sobre Políticas Reproductivas y Parentales", Programa Coope-ración Internacional (PCI), ambos financiados por la Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (CONICYT) de Chile; y del Proyecto I+D CSO2015-64551-C3-1-R "Del control de la natalidad a la ansiedad demográfica: comunicación, secreto y anonimato en las tecnologías reproductivas del siglo XXI", MINECO/FEDER.En este artículo se presentan algunos resultados de una investigación cualitativa que explora y analiza las narrativas de un grupo de personas adultas que fueron adoptadas en Chile, que han buscado sus orígenes y que han establecido contacto con sus madres de origen. En sus narrativas, las personas entrevistadas adhieren, tensionan y/o desafían los principios y discursos que conforman las políticas y prácticas adoptivas hegemónicas, resignificando de formas diversas su experiencia de adopción en el proceso de (re)construcción de sus identidades y de reorganización de sus relaciones de parentesco. Se discuten las tensiones y ambivalencias que se juegan en los procesos de búsquedas de orígenes y los desafíos asociados.This paper presents some results of a qualitative research that explores and analyzes the narratives of a group of adults who were adopted in Chile, and who have searched for their origins and made contact with their birth mothers. In their narratives, the people interviewed adhere to, strain, and/or challenge the principles and discourses that make up hegemonic adoption policies and practices, resignifying their experience of adoption in various ways, as they (re)build their identities and reorganize their kinship relationships. It discusses the tensions and ambivalences that play out in the search for origins and the challenges associated with it

Giving an Account of One’s Pain in the Anthropological Interview

In this paper, I analyze the illness stories narrated by a mother and her 13-year-old son as part of an ethnographic study of child chronic pain sufferers and their families. In examining some of the moral, relational and communicative challenges of giving an account of one’s pain, I focus on what is left out of some accounts of illness and suffering and explore some possible reasons for these elisions. Drawing on recent work by Judith Butler (Giving an Account of Oneself, 2005), I investigate how the pragmatic context of interviews can introduce a form of symbolic violence to narrative accounts. Specifically, I use the term “genre of complaint” to highlight how anthropological research interviews in biomedical settings invoke certain typified forms of suffering that call for the rectification of perceived injustices. Interview narratives articulated in the genre of complaint privilege specific types of pain and suffering and cast others into the background. Giving an account of one’s pain is thus a strategic and selective process, creating interruptions and silences as much as moments of clarity. Therefore, I argue that medical anthropologists ought to attend more closely to the institutional structures and relations that shape the production of illness narratives in interview encounters

Virology Experts in the Boundary Zone Between Science, Policy and the Public: A Biographical Analysis

This article aims to open up the biographical black box of three experts working in the boundary zone between science, policy and public debate. A biographical-narrative approach is used to analyse the roles played by the virologists Albert Osterhaus, Roel Coutinho and Jaap Goudsmit in policy and public debate. These figures were among the few leading virologists visibly active in the Netherlands during the revival of infectious diseases in the 1980s. Osterhaus and Coutinho in particular are still the key figures today, as demonstrated during the outbreak of novel influenza A (H1N1). This article studies the various political and communicative challenges and dilemmas encountered by these three virologists, and discusses the way in which, strategically or not, they handled those challenges and dilemmas during the various stages of the field’s recent history. Important in this respect is their pursuit of a public role that is both effective and credible. We will conclude with a reflection on the H1N1 pandemic, and the historical and biographical ties between emerging governance arrangements and the experts involved in the development of such arrangements

What Might Have Been Lost

This article examines the role of “independent” folk music (indie-folk) in personal identity formation. It builds upon Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity, which argues (i) that it is through the mechanism of narrative that people build a more or less coherent life-story, and (ii) emphasizes the role of art (most notably literary fiction and poetry) as a mediator in the comprehension and regulation of transitory life experiences. This article aims to apply these insights to studying the role of indie-folk, a narrative art form adhering to the traditional understanding of folk music as a genre rooted in oral tradition, in the construction of personal identity. Studying the daily use of indie-folk songs by audience members through in-depth interviewing, it shows that (i) the reception of indie-folk music results in ritualistic listening behavior aimed at coping with the experience of accelerating social time; (ii) that respondents use indie-folk narratives as resources for reading the self, and (iii) that indie-folk songs provide healing images that are effective in coping with the experience of narrated time as discordant. In arguing for the central role of narrative in identity formation, this article aims to contribute to existing research on music as a “technology of the self” (DeNora). It specifically emphasizes how narrative particles are tools and building blocks in identity construction, a process characterized by the oscillation between narrative coherence and disruption

Navigating a river by its bends. A study on transnational social networks as resources for the transformation of Cambodia

This article explores in what ways first generation Cambodian French and Cambodian American returnees create and employ the social capital available in their transnational social networks upon their return to Cambodia. The triangular interdependence between the returnees, their overseas immigrant communities and homeland society is taken as a starting point. The central argument is that Cambodian French and Cambodian American returnees build different relationships to Cambodia due to: (1) the influence of their immigrant communities in the countries of resettlement; and (2) the contexts of their exit from Cambodia. Regarding debates on the contribution of returnees to an emergent nation, findings in this multisited casestudy bring forward that ideas of return held by the three parties involved may force remigrants into transnationalism in both host and home countries. Findings also demonstrate that social capital may be seen as a resource or a restraint in the lives of returnees