Narratives and the Gift of the Future

In this paper, I address the assumption that narratives work normatively, and argue instead that narratives are as important for registering particularities and differences that evade normalisation. Such singularities can be understood as moral appeals from the future. I draw on notions of deconstruction as a future-and ethics-oriented technology, to suggest that narratives can work similarly, and I give some examples from my own recent study of visual autobiographies

Visual Autobiographies in East London: Narratives of Still Images, Interpersonal Exchanges, and Intrapersonal Dialogues

Este artículo muestra cómo un estudio de talleres autoetnogáficos visuales, realizados con diversos grupos sociales en el este de Londres, nos brinda conocimiento sobre la naturaleza narrativa de las imágenes fijas y la co-construcción de narrativas a través de una serie de niveles contextuales, incluidos aquellos de interacción personal, y diálogos interiores con uno mismo y con audiencias imaginadas.El artículo sostiene que este tipo de investigación puede apoyar, y quizá extender las reformulaciones contemporáneas de "narrativa" en el campo verbal, en tanto involucra la participación de narrativas múltiples, co-construidas, temporalmente inciertas y a menudo contradictorias e incoherentes. También sugiere que las narrativas de imágenes fijas y su producción dialógica indican las construcciones narrativas fragmentadas, diferidas y diseñadas, que sería útil explorar, dentro de las formas más convencionales de narrativa.URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs130214Wir zeigen in diesem Artikel, in welcher Weise eine Studie zu visuellen Autobiografie-Workshops, die mit unterschiedlichen sozialen Gruppen im Osten Londons durchgeführt wurden, zu unserem Wissen über den narrativen Umgang mit Bildern und die Ko-Konstruktion von Narrativen auf unterschiedlichen Ebenen beigetragen hat: der Ebene interpersoneller Interaktion und der Ebene innerer Dialoge mit sich selbst und mit imaginiertem Publikum. Aus unserer Perspektive kann ein solcher Ansatz die Untersuchung verbaler Narrationen stützen und erweitern, da er einen Zugang zu multiplen, ko-konstruierten, zeitweise unsicheren, oft widersprüchlichen und inkohärenten Narrativen eröffnet. Zugleich gewähren Bilder Zugang zu dem fragmentierten, verzögerten und konstruktiven Charakter konventioneller Narrationen und zu deren dialogischer Produktion.URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs130214This article reports on how a study of visual autobiographical workshops, conducted with social diverse groups in East London, provides us with insights about the narrative nature of still images, and the co-construction of narratives across a number of contextual levels, including those of interpersonal interaction, and internal dialogues within the self and with imagined audiences. The paper argues that such research can support and perhaps extend contemporary reformulations of "narrative" in the verbal field as involving multiple, co-constructed, temporally uncertain, often contradictory and incoherent narratives. It also suggests that the still image narratives and their dialogic production indicate the fragmented, deferred and montaged narrative constructions that could usefully be explored within more conventional forms of narrative.URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs13021

Narrative Relations and Associations: Catherine Kohler Riessman's Research Dialogism

In this paper, Esin and Squire provide their individual and collective reflections on the influence of Catherine Kohler Riessman's dialogical approach in research. Each researcher reinterpreted the dialogism in Riessman's approach in their own work, focusing on differing elements of it. While Esin examines her experience of relationality, reflexivity, and positionality in her work, Squire discusses her adoption of the approach to develop methodological interdisciplinarity in social science research. The authors then reflect on their dialogue in researching multimodal narratives, historical positioning in and beyond narratives, and power relations in the context of research

Partial Secrets

The ability and right to have secrets may be a condition of social ethics (Derrida, A Taste for the Secret), but at the same time the nature of secrets is that they undermine themselves. Once told, secrets are no longer secret but are known. Even to name them as possibilities is to bring them into view as objects of knowledge. Secrets are thus always in some ways partial secrets, but their “openness” also connotes the lack of certainty of any knowledge about them, their evasiveness, their lack of fixity, and hence, their partial character and openness to change. In this article, I explore partial secrets in relation to a 2011 interview study of HIV support in the United Kingdom, where HIV’s relatively low prevalence and high treatment access tends toward its invisibilization. I suggest that in this context, HIV is positioned ambiguously, as a “partial secret,” in an ongoing and precarious tension between public knowledge and acceptance of HIV, HIV’s constitution as a condition of citizenship attended by full human rights, and HIV’s being resecreted through ongoing illness, constrained resources, citizenly exclusion, and the psychological and social isolation of those affected

Approaches to Narrative Research

This paper outlines major social research perspectives on narrative, and proposes a pragmatics of narrative research. Narratives are an increasingly popular focus of social research. The paper critically examines narrative focuses, from the microlevel of event narratives, through narratives of experience, to larger cultural narratives. It investigates methods that address narrative syntax, meanings, and contexts. It looks at ethics; data selection, gathering, transcribing and analysis; and the drawing of local and more general conclusions from narrative research. It also explores the theoretical assumptions operating, often implicitly, within narrative research perspectives. As well as drawing on key research texts in the field, the paper uses examples from the author’s interview studies of people’s stories of living with HIV. The paper ends with some study questions, and a list of primary readings

Narrating resistant citizenships through two pandemics

Covid has intensified inequalities in the UK, particularly for those already living with structural disadvantage, and despite community and popular resistance to those losses. Covid has also disproportionately affected people with HIV, especially those already living with multi-dimensional inequalities. However, many people with HIV have, as they have done before, made strong and often successful efforts to resist and to restore or reconstruct their citizenships, in opposition to dominant, dispossessing discourses during Covid times. A narrative approach offers a means of mapping these citizenly technologies. This article draws on a 2020 study conducted with 16 people living with HIV in the UK. The study explored, through telephone semi-structured interviews, the health, economic, and psychosocial resources with which these participants lived with HIV and how Covid has impacted those resources. Narrative analysis showed losses of HIV and other health resources, constituting reductions in health citizenship, resisted largely by reconstitutions of alternatives within the HIV sector; losses of economic citizenship, despite oppositional, anti-political attempts to retain it, and of psychosocial citizenship, in spite of family and friendship networks; resistant, ‘alter’ development of renewed HIV citizenships; and across fields, resistance by complaint. This study indicates that ‘de-citizening’ citizenship losses are likely to also affect other groups with long-term conditions, illnesses, and disabilities. Resistant ‘re-citizening’ technologies, while important, had limited effects. The study suggests potential future resistant effects of repeated ‘complaint’ about Covid-era citizenship losses, and the more general significance of histories of dissent for future effective resistance

Tackling problems of qualitative social research: A conversation

This paper comprises discussions from a residential symposium, "Methods in Dialogue", that took place near Cambridge, UK, in May 2005. The symposium concluded a series of seminars organised by the London East Research Institute and the Centre for Narrative Research at the University of East London and supported by the Economic and Social Research Council. Public support for social research increasingly depends on its ability to deliver scientifically valid and reliable studies to guide policy and practice. The theoretical foundations of social research, however, seem to be in a critical state. Evidence generated by both qualitative and quantitative methods is more and more seen to be conflicting, open to many interpretations. The aim of the event was to bring together qualitative researchers in the social sciences, many working in the field of narrative but also a number working with life history and auto/biography, discourse analysis, grounded theory methodology, visual methods and ethnography, to discuss the theoretical foundations of qualitative social research. The discussions addressed narrative itself as an index case for methodological debate; methodological considerations of objectivity and evidence, interpretation and context; appropriate levels of research focus and their interactions; the role of dialogue between disciplines; and the interaction between social science and the wider environment of which it is a part. Questions such as the following were discussed throughout the symposium: Who and what is social research for, and whose voices does it represent? What are social researchers' and participants' interpretative rights over their data and each other? How does thick description and the rich social interpretation it affords relate to the need for precise methods of explanation and generalisable conclusions? What special problems of research design or delivery arise when attempts are made to "empower" informants, to enable them to interrogate, and even co-construct the research story

NCRM NOVELLA - Narrative Ethics (Workshop)

This workshop engaged participants with an overview of ethical issues in narrative research, a consideration of how narrative research presents specific, unavoidable, and productive problems in the ethical arena, and some specific examples of ethically challenging research

What is Narrative Research?

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Narrative research has become a catchword in the social sciences today, promising new fields of inquiry and creative solutions to persistent problems. This book brings together ideas about narrative from a variety of contexts across the social sciences and synthesizes understandings of the field. Rather than focusing on theory, it examines how narrative research is conducted and applied. It operates as a practical introductory guide, basic enough for first-time researchers, but also as a window onto the more complex questions and difficulties that all researchers in this area face. The authors guide readers through current debates about how to obtain and analyse narrative data, about the nature of narrative, the place of the researcher, the limits of researcher interpretations, and the significance of narrative work in applied and in broader political contexts