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In evidence-based practices, narratives are the vehicle through which medical knowledge is shared and clinical judgment is grounded. This paper explores narratives as a sanctioned social practice that help a group of clinicians in a healthcare institution in New Zealand build and negotiate expertise and accountability, as they discuss clinical cases. To this end, the paper investigates narratives in six staff meetings, which were video and audio recorded. The paper presents a discursive analysis of the functions of narratives in this context to show how narratives are interactional achievements that are pivotal to clinical decision-making and to building and contesting professional stances. Finally, the paper reflects on the value of narratives as shared resources that are sometimes revisited and reframed over time and that help construct a common thread of history that becomes part of the cultural capital of the organization and positions clinicians as core members of their community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research exploring the use of narratives in medical interviews has primarily examined the history-taking phase to illustrate the ways in which physicians and patients discursively collaborate to organize and interpret patients' illness experiences (Eggly, 2002; Halkowski, 2006; Stivers & Heritage, 2001). In this paper, the scope will be expanded to demonstrate that narrative accounts are interwoven and unfold across various phases of the medical interview, not only the history-taking phase, and are utilized in a variety of ways to collaboratively accomplish specific social practices. A narrative as talk-in-interaction approach is used to examine narrative accounts using audio-recordings of naturally occurring medical interview data (US, American English). This paper examines the ways in which narratives are locally occasioned to do a variety of things (e.g., raise difficult topics, actively resist treatment, reinforce identities), including influencing the treatment decision making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with the relationship between story ownership – so who owns a story, tellership – so who has the right to tell it, and functions of workplace narratives as well as the broader social practices at work. Drawing upon discourse and narrative analyses, the paper investigates specifically how the negotiation of meaning visible in the often incomplete and fragmented but naturally-occurring narratives points to the discursive struggle over the construction of self within the specific parameters of the notion of professionalism. The paper identifies the facets of story ownership and discusses how each one can be affected by such regulatory forces of the social practices of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a corpus of 100 authentic telephone-mediated interactions from a British credit union, this paper is the first to examine narrative practices in debt collection encounters. It demonstrates that the credit union's debt collector routinely invites and supports indebted individuals' narratives using alignment and affiliation. Through a small stories approach, the paper therefore highlights that an organisation's core values and principles can be seen "in action" in the ways that a professional orients to lay-people's stories in professional-lay discourse. In this case, the collector's narrative practices are emblematic of the credit union's consciously ethical, responsible, and debtor-centric approach to collecting debt. The analysis also shows that indebted individuals perform important interactive work through their narrative accounts in terms of mitigating responsibility for their debt, constructing blameless and acceptable identities, and implicitly encouraging (or explicitly instructing) the collector to affiliate with their stance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses issues related to narrative, cognition, and culture within the framework of foreign- or second-language (L2) narrative discourse, using a methodology of connecting the story- and language-related qualities of narrative discourse. The term "coherence" refers to whether or not a text makes sense at a global level, whereas "cohesion" describes the linguistic relationships among clauses in a narrative, such as how its surface linguistic elements are linked together at a local level. The paper (1) examines oral narratives, (2) reveals how both coherence and cohesion serve as the twin engines of narrative, and (3) emphasizes the significance of noting not only the narrative content/structure but also the appropriate use of linguistic devices, to identify language-specific ways of expressing affective elements in narrative. That is, the paper suggests the importance of developing conceptual understanding of L2 forms (e.g., grammatical variables) and their stylistic significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to discuss difficulties with telling the truth in non-fictive narratives (e.g. trauma stories, rape narratives, asylum-seekers' narratives). In order to do that I analyze, among others, various discourse fictionalization strategies, such as emplotment, narrative substances (Nss), vague predicates, and approximate references. I argue that these strategies are conditioned by the very nature of language, and therefore are present in all types of statements – literary as well as scientific. Referring to the concept of alethic pluralism, I also discuss how it is possible that the use of fictionalization techniques in non-fictive stories does not necessarily transform them into fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores discursive narratives as inextricably linked to the construction of identity, place and history by a number of interviewed individuals. From an interactional sociolinguistics (cf. De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2012) perspective, the study explores the context of the East African diaspora (Georgiou, 2006; Manger & Assal, 2006 among many others) as the interviewed participants are all Zanzibar-born individuals for whom the relationship with the island and its history is crucial to their construction of selfhood. The study analyses the narrative voices (De Fina & Georgakopolou, 2008) of those individuals who decided to leave Zanzibar at the time of the 1964 violent political upheaval never to return and those who, on the contrary, decided to go back after a lengthy period abroad. However, more than establishing a division between these two groups, the paper highlights how these individuals take a different positioning (Bamberg, 1997) towards Zanzibar and its history and construct a range of identities in the context of the interview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the analysis of a series of workshops conducted in Italian multicultural classrooms, involving children aged 9–12. The workshops were based on the collection of photos representing the children's memory and were designed to enhance dialogic facilitation of narratives in the classroom. Starting from the collected photos, a facilitator promoted the interactional production of narratives of memory and identity. The workshops were entirely video-recorded for purposes of analysis. First of all, the paper presents the theoretical background of the analysis, including the concepts of narratives, memory, social use of photography, facilitation of children's agency, and intercultural communication. Secondly, it includes one example of the analysis conducted on the basis of the transcripts of the video-recorded workshops showing the ways in which narratives of children's memory have been facilitated during the workshops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comprehensive theoretical review suggests that tellability can be used to understand life stories, how stories are constructed, the social context shaping storytelling, and how stories function as a mode of thought. However, the complex and multi-dimensional nature of tellability has been overlooked. This study analyzes one Chinese teacher's storytelling of six entrepreneurs' stories as an example, aiming to demonstrate that tellability is structurally embedded within an entire story. Interpreting the stories with reference to the classroom setting reveals that entrepreneurial narratives are tellable because they institutionalize culturally salient values and beliefs about entrepreneurship, they are pedagogically meaningful, and they provide an epistemological tool for listeners to constitute their future reality. This paper argues that an analysis on tellability, informed by multiple theories and recognizant of its structural, social, ontological and epistemological nature, is effective to understand teachers' storytelling in classrooms and unpack the meanings of stories in more detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 30 years we have seen a welcome growth in the understanding of narrative as a complex and broadly defined set of concepts. While the complexity of children's narrative development has been brought to light by researchers and theorists across multiple fields of study, reflecting this growth by comprehensively analyzing narrative complexity still remains a challenge. One reason for this ongoing challenge is the isolated, disparate focus of the approaches, either in analyzing solely story structure, content, or function. Few approaches combine these disparate dimensions to comprehensively analyze children's narratives. In response, we build on research from the past 30 years to develop the Two-Lens Approach, a holistic theoretical framework for analyzing the form, content, and context of children's narratives. This paper presents and applies this approach in an effort to start closing the gaps among the field of narrative analysis and narrative theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents some of the theoretical-epistemological assumptions and methods which underpin Narrative Analysis in Brazil. In the niche we have carved out for ourselves, we combine (auto)ethnographic techniques with analytical tools which draw on both narrative analysis and sociolinguistics, as well as discourse analysis more widely speaking. In this paper, we especially seek to address what we consider the symbiotic relationship between the aforementioned field of study and contemporary transdisciplinary social research. This is done by showcasing examples of narrative research carried out in Brazil, particularly those motivated by sociopolitical concerns. Moreover, we aim to contribute to the debate ignited in post-truth times by the performative view we take of language, and so to speak narrative, by contemplating the practical repercussions of innovations stemming from the current state of affairs within the context of our own investigations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I lay out some of the main theoretical methodological principles that underlie a narratives-as-practices approach and discuss three foci that emerge from current research and pave the way for future investigations. In particular, I focus on mobility, connectivity, time/space anchoring and chronotopicity as both characteristics of narrative and research areas which allow for an integration of the focus of interactional approaches on emergence with a consideration of the historical and social embedding of narratives into practices. I review recent research that has contributed to this trend in narrative studies and discuss some of the limitations of current work and areas that need further investigation. I advocate for an expansion of research on a wider variety of practices, attention to the characteristics of narrative genres, and in general a stronger critical engagement with ways in which narratives participate in social processes involving power and inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sex work is often interpreted through master narratives that see women as victimized and subjected to stigmas and negative attitudes. This paper offers an insight into narratives that challenge or can be seen as an alternative to these narratives. Data are from a sample of 15 interviews with women who show an interest in sex work, conducted in a netnographic context. While widespread master narratives about sex work tend to revolve around the notion of commodification, these alternative narratives present scenarios in which sex work is interpreted as a complex activity of networking and self-promotion. The women's narratives describe how sex work can have positive implications for the development of careers, social impact and female emancipation, and is morally coherent. Arguably, they can be important in understanding the stories that instigate and sustain sex work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Powerful narratives exist about the nature, practice and validity of narrative inquiry. It is storied, for example, as complex, time-consuming and unappreciated by the conservative sociology academe. As a new PhD candidate I planned to undertake a straight thematic analysis. However, it became evident that an alternative approach was required. This paper tells a story about my struggle to comprehend narrative analysis and find the arc of my participant's stories. Because writing 'my sexual story' provided a particular turning point in this journey I also recount this here, in addition to an outline of the analytical framework I developed to interpret my data. I argue that narrative analysis is not easily learned through traditional scholarship: texts, journal articles, supervisors and conferences. Rather, a lingering, challenging -- but ultimately highly rewarding journey may be required. It is my hope that this paper will provide insight and assistance to the novice narrative researcher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper purports to present a method that allows to obtain and analyze letters written by older adults to their real or imaginary grandchildren. This enables an insight into their individual life experience. The study used a narrative paradigm. Letter texts were obtained from 128 older adults from Poland, both male and female. Data was analyzed with mixed methods combining qualitative content analysis (using inductive analytical categories described in originally created Coder Completion Sheet) with frequency count. The analysis allowed a systematic description of content (themes in wisdom legacy) and the differentiation of two major formal patterns in the letters: (1) the narrative mode (storytelling); (2) the argumentative mode (legacy without narrative examples: advice, warnings, and wishes). The outcomes demonstrate the letter technique may be recommended for future research in psychology, narrative gerontology and for used in applied psychology also. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends Pentland and Feldman's (2007) narrative network method and uses it to more clearly understand how new technology affordances and digital spaces impact storytelling and enactment during and immediately after a crisis. To do this, I (a) examine the meaningful roles human motivation and feelings play in online storytelling and enactment, and (b) analyze how context impacts storytelling and enactment, and therefore the construction of narrative networks. Specifically, I analyze a series of Facebook messages exchanged during a recent, very publicized campus crisis to reveal the nonlinear digital stories that are co-constructed online to keep others informed. I demonstrate how crisis-affected populations capitalize on the affordances offered by social media to enact stories, correct stories, and ultimately to aid in sensemaking and sense-giving after a crisis event. Implications of new technology affordances for creating and updating narratives throughout times of high uncertainty are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents an analysis of genetic scientists’ accounts of a 1992 scientific breakthrough. Members of the research team were interviewed in the course of a wider study of the history of the discovery and its implications for clinical practice. The isolation of the genetic basis for myotonic dystrophy was an important milestone in the development of contemporary genetic medicine and a significant event in the lives and careers of the scientists involved. Despite the significance of some key publications on scientists’ discovery accounts, the paper argues that there has been a neglect of scientists’ narratives and accounting practices, despite the increased visibility of narrative analysis in the social sciences, the increasing sophistication of qualitative research methods, and the expansion of qualitative research on scientific work and practice. The paper outlines a number of themes in the scientists’ autobiographical work and their methods in recounting the discovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper relates to recent discussions in narrative research focusing on the actual everyday practices of participants when telling and taking up stories. The field of practice under consideration is that of criminal case work. First, I shall introduce very briefly the status of narrating in criminal case work. Second, I will discuss the double meaning of positioning and positionality used in this paper. After introducing the data and the broader methodological context of the underlying fieldwork, I will show how in lawyer–client meetings narratives are called upon and cited in order to achieve a coherent strategy understandable to both lawyer and client. The purpose of the paper is more a theoretical-conceptual than an empirical one. I want to show that in criminal case work narrative is on the one hand a central means to establish plausibility while on the other hand most of the time told in fragments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, narrative analysis has experienced what can be identified as a small stories turn. Specifically, some researchers, especially Bamberg (2004, 2006), Georgakopoulou (2006, 2007), Bamberg and Georgakopoulou (2008), have argued that the analysis of small stories that have been previously overlooked in favor of large-scale autobiographical narratives presents a valuable contribution to our understanding of identity construction and display. This paper builds on and extends the discussion of small stories as sites for identity construction by demonstrating how various small stories — retellings, hypothetical narratives, near-narrative structures as well as short past-oriented narratives — all construct a coherent family identity that includes pets as members. While a number of previous studies considered narrative as a key site for exploring how family members construct social identities, they primarily focused on individual family members and centered their analyses on traditional past-oriented narratives often limiting their settings to dinner-table conversations or interviews. In contrast, this study, drawing on prior studies of discursive construction of a shared family identity (Gordon, 2007) and pets as family members (Tannen, 2004), demonstrates how a shared family identity that includes pets emerges in diverse small stories that are embedded in on-going conversations and occur in a variety of places: a car, a dining room, a living room. This paper also shows how small stories about pets simultaneously create a shared family identity that includes pets and situate this family within a larger social discourse, or Discourse (Gee, 1996, 1999), of treating pets as family members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows that story is an English cultural keyword and a key interpretive tool of modern Anglo culture and that it is linked with a family of concepts which have no semantic equivalents in other languages and are unique conceptual artefacts of Anglo culture. It argues that if we can pinpoint these concepts we can also pinpoint the shared values and assumptions reflected in them. It shows that this can be done with the help of the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) methodology developed over many years by the author and her colleague Cliff Goddard — a methodology which has been previously applied effectively to many other semantic domains, across a wide range of languages. Further, the paper argues that because the uniqueness and centrality of the English story has until now gone unnoticed, many semantic components associated with it have been projected onto other languages, which has lead to the positing of spurious human universals and to claims such as “story is a basic principle of mind”. The paper draws attention to the fact that a unique English cultural keyword (story) has played a significant role in the “narrative turn” in the humanities and social sciences, and discusses some of the implications of this fact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, interest in examining the diverse functions and features of oral narratives told in workplace contexts has grown alongside the body of research investigating the role of language in enacting politeness in the workplace. Yet, to date, there has been little integration of these two strands of inquiry. This paper forges a link between linguistic politeness and some social functions of institutional narratives. Specifically, the micro-analysis of one narrative taken from a corpus of teacher/supervisor feedback sessions demonstrates how the narrator, a novice teacher, negotiates the telling of a complaint narrative to her supervisor along with the politeness demands embedded in the local context of telling. I argue that the speaker’s contradictory evaluation of her situation interacts with linguistic politeness (i.e., the need to mitigate a “face-threatening act”) in the situated telling of this narrative. Finally, in the spirit of recent work on narrative, which calls for increased attention to context in narrative activities, this paper highlights the importance of considering the interrelationships among factors such as face work, recipient design, production circumstances, and institutional roles and relationships among speakers, in the analysis of institutional narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest in the narrative construction of identities has become widespread in social research. Much of this research focuses on the grander narratives we tell about ourselves, the big retrospectives elicited from interviews. However, if identification is conceived as an ongoing performance accomplished locally in and through everyday interactions then it is the narratives that emerge in this context that become the focus of interest. “Small stories” are the ephemeral narratives emerging in such everyday, mundane contexts, which it is argued constitute the performance of identities and the construction of self. Drawing on Bamberg’s Positioning Analysis, this paper examines the construction of identities in a “small story” told by two student teachers, showing how this enables the participants to make claims about their developing professional identities. The paper also examines positioning analysis and its ability to link these locally produced identities to wider discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discursively analyzes an extended personal narrative from a life history interview with a Mexican woman immigrant in California, in which the teller details the varying reactions of family and community members to her younger sister’s unmarried pregnancy in a Mexican village at a time of increasing emigration. In analyzing the narrator’s account of these events, the paper focuses on her orchestration of multiple discourses and social voices, arguing that through her juxtaposition of competing gender ideologies, the teller performs a traditional “good woman” identity, while at the same time creating discursive space for other girls and women to make different choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper is a study of narrative and its relation to the construction of conflicting identities in interaction. The paper is concerned with a group of young Greeks who categorise themselves as members of a particular subculture, but also construct a number of other, often conflicting, identities through the stories they tell in the course of their conversations with two researchers. By focusing on the many narratives these people volunteer to recount to the researchers, the paper aims to delve into narrative positioning and its relation to the plurality of emerging identities in the specific encounters. Particular emphasis is placed on the young people's attempt to delegitimate established figures of power and authority in order to legitimate their own group and present a positive image of themselves. By providing a detailed discussion of identities as constructed in situated discourse, the paper also aims to stress the dynamics of identity construction in context. (Narrative positioning identity construction, Plurality of identities In-group relations, Delegitimation, Category affiliation) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twentieth-century study of narrative featured many successes and one grave failure. Narratology taught us the basics of how to study the structure of narrative, but proves to be a dead end in the study of texts. This was clear soon after Gérard Genette's groundbreaking studies, but later works such as Paul Ricoeur's fail to get beyond narratology. This paper therefore claims that narrative theory has not changed since its inception several decades ago, even though the need for such a change is broadly supported. Attention has been paid to expanding narrative methods to other fields like medicine and education rather than further developing the theory. I advocate a more serious consideration of contemporary literature to renew narrative theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I approach day care centers as stages upon which various small stories are constructed and performed by young children and other interlocutors. The aim of the article is two-fold. Methodologically, the paper is a tentative application of Erving Goffman's dramaturgical perspective onto narrative research with children. Empirically, the aim is to explore day care centers as narrative environments that constitute children's lives and identities. I anchor my analysis and interpretation of research material, collected in two groups of children, in three perspectives. Firstly, I focus on the spatial practices of the day care centers, framing the construction of small stories. Secondly, I deal with the production of small stories between cultural routines and active reconstruction. Finally, I draw attention to children's identity construction as a continuous process influenced by a variety of individual, material, contextual, cultural, and interactional factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a comparative analysis structure and frequency of discourse markers in two kinds of oral narratives: objective, emotionally neutral ones on the one side, and highly emotional, spontaneous ones on the other. The results prove that emotionality plays a crucial role in the structuring of oral narratives as well as in the type of discourse markers employed in them. Objective oral narratives show a higher number of discourse markers, whereas highly emotional ones present a higher variety of discourse markers, as well as a higher frequency of other pragmatic markers, in order to guide the listener through the multiplicity of side stories and the broken structure they show. In short, this work highlights the relationship between linguistic activity (language in context or use) and linguistic form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws upon the orientation 'blog' posts from a current PhD study focusing on identity formation in young people undertaking their final year of secondary schooling within the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE). It critically investigates how participants define the 'purpose' of their engagement with the study and the subjectivities they employ in those interactions. The online blogs designed for this study are intended to create a space in which participants are able to act a-synchronously and discuss their 'day-to-day' experiences of the VCE. A key focus of this paper is to explicate the nature of this activity as performative, that is, participants contributing to blogs actively consider the nature of their engagement and construct an implicit 'Other' - a relationship that is informed by the purpose for participating in the research. Utilising Deleuze's concept of 'becoming' (1987) along with a narrative methods framework (Riessman, 2008), it investigates the concept of 'Other' and will trace the process of 'becoming storyteller' as an active performance in Blog participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on time, space, and identity relations in narratives of Muslim women in an Islamic student group in Colorado, who use autobiographies of how their faith developed for countering stereotypes of Islam and Muslims in post 9/11 America. In these faith development narratives, these women, who were born and raised in Islam, strive to dispel the often abstract media claims of Muslim women being oppressed by Muslim men and by Islamic doctrines, as well as being behind the times, stagnant in the past, or simply anti-modern, antisecular, or anti-American. In narrating how they have progressed from unknowing children socialized into Islam to knowledgeable adults, the women decontextualize, and thereby idealize, Islam to stress their agency and individuality. The women resignify Islamic rituals, such as the salat (praying five times a day), sawn (fasting during Ramadan), and hijab (wearing the head scarf), by delinking them from the often criticized materialistic and pure-repetitious nature characteristic of religious rituals of the pre-modern. Instead, they project these rituals as self-disciplining and self-realizing practices very much in line with modern precepts of individuality and female emancipation. In their narratives, they reinforce the media's binary opposition between America and Islam, reducing them to caricatures of a purely secular, somewhat ignorant, state and a perfect and pure religion, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corresponding to the "narrative turn" in the human and cultural sciences, this paper advocates a "cognitive turn" in the study of literary narratives. The representation of the self in literary narratives, for example, is in some ways similar to the representation of the self represented in philosophic, psychological, and sociological theory, but the narrative models extend and enrich the understanding of the self. The tradition of literary narrative includes the monadic, dyadic, and triadic models of the self, as well as representations of agent, patient, experiencer, witness, instrumental, and locative selves. Narrative is thus a kind of worldmaking, and the making of complex worlds, such as the worlds of the self, lead towards narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper concentrates on the narrative management of the teacher-student relationship. Focusing on students' identities, the present study draws upon the social constructionism paradigm, thus considering identities as social constructs via discourse. The analysis of representative narrative extracts shows how students construct themselves as powerful enough to challenge teachers' authority which is expressed in the Initiation-Response-Feedback structure. Their resistance is indicative of their will to free themselves from their teachers' expectations, even if this can only take place during their conversations with their peers. In this context, narratives allow them to achieve interactional goals which may not always be fulfilled in class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This single story investigation explores the ontological framework for analyzing how personal stories emerge. This analysis delineates a story told by Emma in a fashion to resemble that of audience members listening to a story for the first time. This article breaks apart the traditional narrative research approach of beginning, middle, and end facilitating a renewed focus on the role of orator and audience's involvement. The purpose of this paper demonstrates how Emma as the orator builds a narrative while involving the audience and forces the listeners to consider the multiple paths she may experience. Showcasing Emma's story evolution simultaneously demonstrates a theoretical understanding of how small and big stories intersect with antenarratives and narratives. The multiple paths encourage readers to interactively reinterpret their understanding of the narrative and experience antenarrative. This exploration addresses a gap in narrative research and scrutinizes antenarrative analysis applicability through a singular oral story performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narrative methods have been extensively used to study the subjective experience of physical illness with only a handful of studies looking at narratives of madness. However, much of the research on both physical and mental illness has focused on isolating specific narrative structures and thematic categorisation. As traditional temporally linear forms of narrative are often not available to those experiencing psychological distress, there is the risk that such individuals become narratively dispossessed (Baldwin, 2005). This paper challenges the usefulness of a traditionally linear narrative approach in first-person accounts of madness, by presenting an analysis of the narrative of Mary Barnes, a resident in R.D. Laing’s Kingsley Hall in the late 1960s. In order to go beyond the confines of linear narrative research and the textual confines of discourse analysis, Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope is used to examine the different ways in which time and space are represented in the narrative, revealing not only the temporal complexities of the narrative structure, but also, through Bakhtin’s concept of unfinalizability, the meaning of the embodied phenomenological dimension of lived experience. I shall argue that by engaging with more ancient chronotopes in the throes of madness and rejecting modernist, linear conceptions of timespace, Barnes loses her finalised identity, becoming other, and, as such, is able to construct meaning out of chaos and distress, which critically impacts on her experience of recovery. Using Bakhtinian concepts as analytic tools has implications for the way researchers engage with, and construct meaning from, narratives of both physical and psychological trauma, which in turn highlights the complex, multi-dimensional nature of recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narratives matter. They shape the social world in which they circulate, reflecting and refracting the cultural limits of what narratives can be told, in what setting, to whom. From this perspective, they structure how we make sense of ourselves, as members of a community, but they also structure how we understand right and wrong, good and evil. Nowhere is this more apparent than in capital murder trials in which the narratives that are constructed are literally life and death matters. The research on narrative processes in capital trials documents how the courtroom is a place for “story-battles” where each narrative works to disqualify the other and legitimize itself, in an effort to structure jurors’ decisions. This is accentuated in the penalty phase of the capital trial where both mitigating and aggravating narratives “thicken” the narratives told in the guilt phase; in the penalty phase jurors make the decision to sentence the defendant to either life without the possibility of parole, or to death. While some research of juror decision-making shows that jurors favor the prosecution narrative and make up their minds to give the death sentence independent of the penalty phase narratives, other research on mitigation narratives shows that contextualizing the defendant, via mitigating narratives, can overturn the power of the prosecution narrative and lead to a life, rather than a death, sentence. This research seeks to avoid efforts to associate juror cognitive processes to narrative processes and instead seeks to examine the connection between jury sentencing decisions, for life or death, as a function of narrative closure which is, in turn, defined in terms of two narrative dimensions: structural complexity and moral transparency. Using this framework, the penalty phase narratives in two capital trials are compared along these dimensions; the findings suggest that moral transparency and structural complexity provide the foundations for narrative closure in the penalty phase, as both structural simplicity and moral obtuseness are characteristic of narratives that are not adopted by the jury. While the sample size is small, the narrative data is rich, and the study, overall, is intended not to suggest a causal relation between dimensions of narrative closure and jury sentencing, but rather aims to illustrate a method for assessing narratives in relation to jury sentencing in the penalty phase of capital trials. However, at the broadest level, the paper offers a framework for examining the way that narrative works to contain violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In everyday conversation, narratives are used as rhetorical tools for managing identities, allowing participants to carve out identity positions in moment-to-moment interactions. An interesting, yet understudied, focus of these narratives involves exploring the links between the discourse identities (or narrative participation roles) and larger, social identities of participants in the narrative interactions (e.g., Georgakopoulou, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2007). In this paper, I build on this work by looking specifically at the relevance of narrative ratifications for the emergent discourse and social identities of those offering the ratifications. Following Bamberg’s (1997, 2003) analytical framework for examining narratives in talk-in-interaction, I examine how participants are positioned with respect to whose contributions they choose to ratify and how their ratifications (or lack thereof) make available certain discourse identities, which may then point to larger, social identities. Findings not only demonstrate the relevance of ratifications for identity work in narrative interactions, but also advance our understanding of certain aspects of narrative structure, in particular, sequences of narrative openings in talk-in-interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will draw from recent work in the study of counter-narratives and will apply a sociologically informed perspective to the empirical analysis of discourse. By focusing on the Black Nationalist group The Nation of Islam (NOI) this article will introduce the counter-narrative strategy of “narrative inversion.” Based on discursive analysis of textual materials from early NOI speeches, recordings, and writings, we hope to show how the NOI employed a specific framing tactic of inverting American and Judeo-Christian master narratives to create a powerful ideological schema for attracting potential members. Our analysis demonstrates that early organizers of the NOI created counter-narratives by positioning themselves in direct opposition to the pervasive master narrative of white superiority. We will compare the NOI’s countering strategy to that of Martin Luther King’s moderate civil rights movement and show how the NOI was also able to capitalize on the more restrained messages of racial integration, non-violent protest, and racial reconciliation emanating from the moderate civil rights movement. The discursive process of inverting more moderate messages explains, to a great extent, the movement’s early success as a radical alternative to the mainstream civil rights movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A relational approach is proposed which provides a framework for connecting levels of analysis/phenomena relevant to narrative identity. Because it is grounded in a systemic relational metanarrative, the relational approach does not preference any one level. Small story and big story are both viewed as integral to the larger identity project. A third analytic level, the middle story, is suggested as a bridge between small and big story. As one example of the approach, systemic analyses of narrative stability for two university students are presented, based on interviews conducted over four years. These analyses conceptually connect middle-level processes with big stories and illustrate principles of circular causality. The final portion of the paper discusses implications and requirements of the relational approach, and other ways that it might be applied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narratives told in interview have become a central tool of data collection and analysis in a variety of disciplines within the social sciences. However, many researchers, particularly those who embrace a conversational analytic or ethnomethodological approach (see among others Schegloff, 1997; Goodwin, 1997), regard them as artificial and oppose them to naturally occurring stories, which they see as much richer and interesting sources of data and analysis. In this paper, I argue that the criticism against interview narratives has been justified by the lack of attention that many narrative analysts have shown towards the interview as a truly interactional context. However, I also point to some shortcomings that derive from this opposition between naturally occurring and interview narratives and to an alternative framework in which the stress is not on the kind of narrative data used for the analysis, but rather on the kind of narrative analysis that should be adopted. I argue that our methodologies of analysis cannot fail to take into account the way narratives shape and are shaped by the different contexts in which they are embedded and propose the study of narrative genres as a way of looking at the reciprocal influence of narratives and story-telling contexts. I illustrate this point looking at accounts as a genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narrating self-experiences inherently involves tension between real time and remembered time, between narrative event and narrated events. Narrators employ various strategies of footing and voicing to position their current “self” vis-à-vis their former selves and their audience. These characteristics are particularly pertinent in the case of significant life changes, such as learning to read and write for the first time as an adult. This paper treats personal narratives of an Israeli immigrant woman elicited during a meeting with a former literacy teacher. The encounter, forty years later, provides an opportunity for both to reestablish their relative identities and reframe their shared history. Analyzing the events — and narratives thereof — within their sociocultural contexts, reveal a delicate balance between gratitude and agency in the construction of a literate identity. These transformational narratives draw upon the Israeli hegemonic narrative of assimilation and modernization as well as the Mizrahi counternarrative of integration, creating a unique version of the consequences of (il)literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narrative research has produced an array of richly-detailed expositions of life as lived, well-interpreted studies full of nuance and insight that befit the complexity of human lives. This paper inquires into the necessity and possibilities of amalgamation of knowledge obtained through narrative research. As narrative studies, with their accompanying interpretations, accumulate, how do we “add them up?” What would a meta-analysis of narrative studies look like? The challenge that confronts us is how assimilate narrative understanding at a conceptual level in a way that does not return to a modernist frame, treating the various research reports as “facts” — but rather to treat them as situated interpretations. Conversation is offered as a metaphor and context within which knowledge is to be understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narrative research is frequently described as a rich and diverse enterprise, yet the kinds of narrative data that it bases itself on present a striking consensus: they are autobiographical in kind (i.e., about non-shared, personal experience, single past events). In this paper, I put forth a case for under-represented narrative data which I collectively call (following Bamberg 2004a, b; also Georgakopoulou & Bamberg, 2005) “small stories” (partly literally, partly metaphorically). My aim is to flesh small stories out, to urge for the sort of systematic research that will establish connections between their interactional features and their sites of engagement and finally to consider the implications of their inclusion in narrative research for identity analysis (as the main agenda of much of narrative research). I will thus propose small stories research as a “new” narrative turn that can provide a needed meeting point for narrative analysis and narrative inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narrative is one of many strategies for making texts or coming to understand the world. This paper attempts to restore narrative to that status: as one mode of writing or telling among others. The main example developed is the contrast between blues ballads such as “Frankie and Johnny,” which tell a story, and traditional or modular blues songs, which do not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a speaker's narrative and discursive work to counter the negative associations of an identity as a single woman. An analysis of extracts from one interview exemplifies patterns found in a larger body of data. The speaker's story does rhetorical work (Billig, 1987) against the dominant ‘coupledom’ narrative of a life which progresses through stages associated with the heterosexual family, including love, marriage and parenthood. Her own life narrative is structured differently. The three structures we discuss are resources which can accommodate the unique details of a particular speaker's life as a single woman while also doing work against commonly held assumptions that singleness is a deficit identity. (Deficit identity, Single women, Narrative, Discursive, Coupledom) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet augments the informational flows that organize biographies in late modernity. Sufferers of bipolar disorder (manic depression) may turn to the Internet for accessible information, to learn about others' experiences and impart their own knowledge. Personal accounts posted in the public domain become themselves part of those informational flows, and thus acquire a dual life at a boundary between private and public domains. This poses certain challenges for the investigation of computer-mediated autobiographical telling, which are identified in this paper and negotiated in an analysis of downloaded personal accounts of bipolar disorder. Two of the stories are selected for a close look. Story 1 tells about achieving long-term remission through personal resolve and psychological alternatives to medication. Story 2 tells about becoming able to talk about the illness through the achievement of a social identity as “manic depressive”. The stories' similarities, differences, and comparability with the other texts are discussed with a view to theorizing how such texts position their implied author in the illness experience. Building upon Bakhtin's idea of a text's plan and its realization, a concept of “identity commitments” as textual properties is proposed. (Narrative identity, Computer-mediated communication, Bipolar disorder, Bakhtin) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]