Centre for Narrative Research research seminar, University of East London
Tuesday 4th December, 2012, 12-1, Room EB1.44, Docklands Campus
Terri Kim, Brunel University:
A biographic-narrative approach to mobile academics crossing boundaries:
rethinking the relationship between creative knowledge and positional knowledge.
All welcome! c.squire@uel.ac.uk for further details.
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An interesting and thought provoking seminar on narrative research took place recently, in the busy first week of teaching at UEL. Members of staff from the fields of psychology, psycho-social studies, social work, cultural studies, education and refugee studies, presented to a diverse audience, an eclectic range of empirical research findings and pedagogical applications of narrative approaches. All the presentations provoked lively intellectual debate and raised fundamental philosophical questions at the very heart of narrative research. One “narrative” that ran through these discussions concerned the question of emotion and affect, of how the narrative researchers make sense of emotion, often when these narratives of affect are often “unspoken” and in the case of Giorgio Donna’s research in Rwanda “unspeakable”. How do we make sense of those narratives that cannot be spoken or articulated? How do we make sense of the contradictions, the good and bad narratives? What narratives do we chose to privilege over others and how do narrative researchers enable the voices of the participants to be heard?
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To Think is To Experiment: A Day for Postgraduate Narrative Researchers
The Centre for Narrative Research has been organising the postgraduate research day, To think is To Experiment' for 10 years. This year it was the tenth anniversary of CNR's formation as a research centre at the University of East London. As part of commemorative events, To Think is To Experiment was dedicated to the doctoral research at CNR.
We invited CNR's past and current PhD students to present their narrative work on 18 May 2011. Linda Sandino, Mastoureh Fathi, Solveigh Goett, Gudrun Loehrer, Jacomijne Prins, Denise Proudfoot and Nicola Samson responded our invitation and presented their research.
It was a day full of stimulating presentations and intense conversations on the multiplicities in narrative research. The presentations were rich and thought- provoking in content and form, and revealed the variety of research questions that narrative approaches could be applied to as well as the variety of narrative interpretations.
Linda Sandino's talk,''Both sides of the story': narrative identity and the curatorial imagination' was the second Siyanda Ndlovu Memorial Lecture. Sandino presented her analysis of a life history interview with a curator of fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum whose work encompasses “radical” forms of curating (radical) fashion within the context of an established, historic museum and collection. While focusing on the concept of 'radical' in this narrative, Sandino explored the function of narrative as a space for reaching meaning.
Mastoureh Fathi's presentation on her doctoral research with educated Iranian women living in Britain revealed the cultural and political complexities involved in translation in the research context. Fathi underlined the argument that these complexities make translation not only linguistic but also a cultural performance of narration.
Textile artist Solveigh Goett told us the stories of her pieces which she collected in her cabinet of domestic wonders. In her project 'Mirabilia Domestica', Goett explored the narratives of small things which create a space for meaning making, memory work, enchantment, evocation and flights of the imagination.
Gudrun Loehrer's research on the depiction of nudity on early 19th-Century American paper money presented an interdisciplinary perspective that brought together political, historical and narrative arguments.
Jacomijne Prins’ research on intra-group identity construction and negotiation among Dutch-Moroccan young adults led to an interesting discussion on the continuous re-construction of narratives within interaction in research context.
Denise Proudfoots presentation focused on her research story in which she listened to narratives of mothers living with HIV in Ireland. Her research aims to explore the challenges faced by the mothers with HIV. Several interesting questions were raised about the influence of these challenges on the constitution of stories.
Nicola Samson presented some of the issues that have arisen for her as a narrative researcher who undertook life story interviews with neighbours in her street for her research on women’s experience of belonging.
Among others, there was one narrative argument that permeated through all presentations and following discussions. That was the context that makes all the analysed narratives be heard and analysed in particular moments of history. What constitutes narratives and how narratives are constructed in research contexts were the questions that were repeatedly exchanged between speakers and participants of the event.
Similar to previous years, the tenth To Think is to Experiment served as a constructive space in which postgraduate narrative researchers with different experiences and approaches exchanged ideas and questions.
All programmes and abstracts can be viewed on the CNR website. http://www.uel.ac.uk/cnr/
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The UCL Centre for Museums, Heritage and Material Culture Studies recently co-organised with the Mellon Foundation a series of ‘oral interventions’ about ‘Voices in (and around) the Museum’ :
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/people/staff/byrne/usercontent_profile/pictures/Mellon_Poster.pdf
The series asked a range of interesting questions about the voice, both literally and metaphorically, and its deployment as an affective strategy that could enhance and engage visitors’ experiences. Broadly, the talks centred on ‘how voices emanating from objects and subjects in the museum impact on the institution’s traditional remit of researching, collecting and displaying objects’. As someone researching curators’ lives, de-privileging the object is welcome, but I continue to be troubled by the question of what kind of narratives objects are supposed to voice? Why are narratives displaced onto the object? Is this a museum and collector’s fetish?
The idea that exhibitions and displays are narratives is commonplace, as is the idea that objects contain stories, usually memories, either official, or private. Titles of exhibitions are like book titles that indicate the subject (as it is also the title of the catalogue): ‘The Cult of Beauty’ (V&A), ‘Devotion by Design: Italian Altarpieces before 1500’ (The National Gallery). But it’s not objects that tell stories; it’s people who use objects to tell stories. So why do we continue to submit to the idea that objects tell stories?
Linda Sandino, CCW University of the Arts /V&A Senior Research Fellow
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To an uninitiated outsider, the Netherlands appears to be the land of straight lines evoked in an Escher or a Mondriaan. A walk beside a canalized river presents us with few features that might distract us from the need to carry goods by water as efficiently as possible. Similarly, Dutch academia likes to apply an efficient positivist brush of wetenschap (science) to the landscapes it researches: the ‘subjects’ of this research are preferably investigated alongside control groups, and results are analyzed statistically to ensure validity. Anything else just wouldn’t be considered scientific? Fortunately, at the inaugural Spring Symposium on Narrative Research, keynote presenters Matti Hyvärinen (University of Tampere) and Brian Schiff (The American University of Paris) demonstrated that narrative research is firmly grounded in the traditions and conventions of qualitative research.
Just as it is possible to leave the beaten track and find oases of natural growth in the unexpected meanders of Dutch rivers, it is also possible to find oases of exceptional practice in qualitative research. One such site of growth is the Dutch Network for Narrative Research (NNN), which provides a welcome platform for the discussion and development of the narrative research discipline in the Netherlands. I use the term ‘discipline’ to underline the rigorous nature of narrative research methodology. Narrative research draws conceptually from theory and methodology in a variety of fields, notably Psychology, Sociology and Linguistics. Anneke Sools, chair of this intriguing symposium, puts it this way: “A wide scope is needed to give meaning to the detail”.
The most transparent value of narrative research is its ability to ‘give a voice’ to the individuals or groups being studied. Narrative approaches allow participants to express their experience in terms that they had not previously considered, either because their everyday experience is too familiar for them to be able to examine it critically, or because the experience is subject to social taboo. We are reminded of Risseeuw’s metaphor at this point: “The fish don’t talk about the water”. Narrative research can open the door to personal transformation, and consequently it has the potential for empowerment, as exemplified in the research reported by Karin Willemse (Erasmus University Rotterdam) and Corinne Squire (University of East London). In quite different settings – Willemse in Darfur, Squire in urban London – these researchers have succeeded in co-creating narratives with participants which gave the participants access to ‘imagined future identities’. This work is reminiscent of the work of the Luttrell’s classic Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds in which these possible futures may have remained ‘unimagined’ without the intervention of the narrative research process.
Such research challenges the traditional scientific view of the researcher as an independent observer. These researchers are involved in the inter-active co-creation of narratives with their participants, and they therefore need to be explicit about the identities and values that they bring to this process. Another challenge for narrative researchers lies in demonstrating the wider social value of this kind of qualitative research. If we are to be taken seriously as academic researchers, we will in the long-term need to build a convincing case for the validity of our research, specifying the criteria we apply to the validation process. Also, we will need to show that our work contributes meaningfully to understandings of the experience of certain groups in our society, and ideally that it has an explicit impact. Gerben Westerhof (University of Twente) gave us a powerful insight into the impact value of narrative approaches to mental health practice, showing how narrative can function to transform the self-image of patients. However, his need in the academic environment to combine narrative analysis with statistical data demonstrated the difficulty of taking a purely narrative approach when the academic audience also expects to see quantitative data.
Further challenges were embodied in the presentations of Fleur Basten (Campus Orleon Nijmegen) and Alexander Maas (University for Humanistics). Basten challenged us to be critical in developing the narratives of disadvantaged groups, not taking the potential empowerment at face value but first establishing a clear agenda for such research in its social context. Maas showed the value of narrative research in relation to organizational story-telling, a tool that is increasingly used during organizational change. This latter example once again emphasized the inherent tension in narrative research between the needs of the individual and the needs of the social groupings of which that individual is a member. I found myself wondering whether it is possible to create an organizational story that properly reflects the experiences of the individual employees in that organization; or will the corporate message prove dominant? Maas stressed the need for openness with such an approach, recognizing that it would be an inappropriate method in a financial climate in which change may amount to downsizing, which in practice may result in job losses.
It was a singular achievement to bring together so many branches of thought from the growing tree of narrative research. The next step will be to pursue the various themes in more detail through a series of workshops proposed over the coming two years.
References:
Luttrell, W. (2003): Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds. New York: Routledge.
Risseeuw, C. (1988): The Fish Don’t Talk about the Water: Gender Transformation, Power and Resistance among Women in Sri Lanka. Leiden and New York: E. J. Brill.
Dr K.B.J. Haines, University of Groningen, 13th June 2011
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Several years ago I was at the South Bank to hear the shortlisted candidates for the Orange Prize read out extracts from and discuss their work. This is the context in which I first came across the work of Xiaolu Guo, author of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. In this dictionary-novel Guo tells the story of ayoung Chinese woman, who has come to London to learn English, and an older English man. What is of particular interest is the manner in which this narrative is told: through the use of dictionary entries (alien, privacy, intimacy) the narrator, Z, who is also a protagonist in the novel, relates her story, showing how cultural differences take their toll on the couple’s relationship and poignantly how, over time, as she gains vocabulary and voice, he loses his. In addition, the novel is written in progressively ‘better’ English, mimicking the process of language acquisition as Z begins to come to terms with the syntax, idioms and vocabulary items of English.
Since then, I have read other works by Guo (eg. UFO in Her Eyes, Fragments of a Ravenous Youth and Lovers in the Age of Indifference) and viewed her recent film She, a Chinese and have come to see her as an innovator in terms of form and as someone who crosses boundaries in a number of senses (geographical, artistic, cultural and linguistic). a critic of globalisation as they impact upon aspects of life in China, she is no less discriminating when it comes to the sometimes illusory freedoms enjoyed in the West. I can highly recommend her work both as a writer and as a filmmaker.
Here’s the link to her homepage: http://www.guoxiaolu.com/
Fiona Doloughan is at the University of Surrey http://www.surrey.ac.uk/english/people/fiona_doloughan/. Her most recent book is Contemporary Narrative: Textual Production, Multimodality and Multiliteracies (Continuum,2011): http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=136367&SntUrl=152422&SubjectId=997&Subject2Id=927
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The Centre for Narrative Research (CNR) is the leading international centre for narrative work in the social sciences. CNR aims to generate and develop innovative narrative research of all kinds, and to bring narrative researchers from all over the world into productive dialogue.
To find out more, visit our website http://www.uel.ac.uk/cnr/
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