Constructing Narratives of Continuity and Change

A transdisciplinary approach to researching lives

Hazel Reid, Linden West

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317909286
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this volume, academics and researchers across disciplines including education, psychology and health studies come together to discuss personal, political and professional narratives of struggle, resilience and hope. Contributors draw from a rich body of auto/biographical research to examine the role of narrative and how it can be constructed to compose a life story, considering the roles of significant others, inspirational, educational and fictional characters, and those in myth and legend.

The book discusses how personal narrative, often neglected in social and psychological enquiry, can be a valuable resource across a range of settings. Reference is made to the evolving role of narrative in education and health care, medicine and psychotherapy. This includes how particular narratives are hardwired into culture in ways that stifle personal and social understanding. Rather than providing a 'how to' guide, the book illustrates the range and power of narrative, including poetry, to re-awaken senses of self and agency in extremis. Each chapter draws on specific research, describing the context, explaining the methodology, and illuminating important findings.

Discussing implications for research and practice, this book will be key reading for postgraduate and doctoral students in auto/biographical and narrative studies, and across a range of disciplines, including education, health and social care, politics, counselling and psychotherapy. It will be of interest to academics teaching research methods, and those developing biographical and auto/biographical narrative research.

Chapter 1

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Narratives of change and continuity

Their transdisciplinary and subversive potential

Linden West and Hazel Reid

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Introduction

Narratives, so we assert in this book, are central to our ways of making sense of the world, of ourselves, and of the interactions between the two; between history and biography, between cultures and particular lives, and between the narrator and her audience. We find it difficult, now, to imagine a world without narrative, as Elinor Ochs (1998) has so eloquently reminded us: it is in fact impossible to imagine any world without narrative; of not being able to tell the story of our day, for instance, or talk about a film we have seen, or a book we have read, or an incident at work, or of the insolence of the manager in the office, or the authoritarian apparatchik. All this demands storytelling if only to liberate the emotions. Moreover, it is difficult to imagine ourselves without interior narratives, however limiting or potentially liberating. Stories cut to the quick of our humanity.

It may also be that cultures themselves – liquid modernity in Zygmunt Bauman’s (2000) framing, or a runaway world, as Anthony Giddens (1999) puts it – evoke the necessity for people to tell stories, in more individualised forms, as inherited local and familial templates weaken, and individuals have no clear markers in negotiating lives and bringing meaning to them. Jobs may simply disappear as whole communities get de-skilled at the click of a hedge funder’s mouse, or in the digital algorithms programmed into the computer, or the smartphone of the speculator. Continuities between the past and present, between one generation and another, seem to unravel, and all that is solid, or so it appears, like work, or the wider fabric of a life, can fracture. Biographies become sites for managing potentially destabilising events, often without confident reference points, certainties, or, for many, educational resources.

Globalisation brings in its train – or is a consequence, perhaps, of – shrinkages in time and space, via communication technologies as well as ease of travel; movements of capital, and the instabilities of economies and whole ecologies can be threatening, and feel out of control. Mass media and virtual worlds may even colonise inner space, psyches, with enticing images of what might be, perhaps, if we consume more or manipulate our image, the presentation of self, in particular ways. However, telling stories might also be a way, not only of coping, but maybe of some liberation, if we find space with empathic people willing to listen and share; or, alternatively, we may grab at what powerful others say and accept their definitions of who we are and should be. We may respond to the enticing possibilities and bewildering discontinuities of late or postmodernity by grabbing at seductive ideas; that, for instance, the other is to blame for stealing our jobs or our housing and for corrupting our cultures. Building an identity, shaping a biography, and finding some moral compass, or knowing what to believe, in such worlds, becomes a reflexive necessity, in conditions of not knowing, uncertainty, without confident inherited templates to draw on. We may grab, in our stories, at facts and apparent ‘truths’; or, at an extreme, at fundamentalism, of whatever kind, as a way of negotiating this cultural and inner anxiety.

Stories, from the perspectives of this book, matter greatly in negotiating experience, and in finding some meaning and a compass by which to live a life, however difficult and taxing. Yet stories are no isolated, individual affairs but reflect and constitute the dialectics of power relations and competing truths within the wider society. They can also serve, as noted, as sites of resistance, as a means to challenge dominant regimes of truth. Jerome Bruner (1990) has observed that culture, its myths and scripts, including what it is, or ought to be, to be human – penetrates psyche, as much as being ‘out there’ – entering deeply into our intimate relationships and intra-subjective life; shaping what we think and feel about ourselves, on the basis of gendered, classed, sexual, raced or ideological templates, as well as family scripts. Notwithstanding, we can challenge these and tell new stories, in potentially empowering as well as subversive acts. This is a theme at the heart of our collection: of the possibility of managing who we are and might be, in the stories we tell, and of understanding ourselves in new ways, including composing some agency in the flotsam and jetsam of life. Stories matter in these terms, in moments, perhaps, of liberation; or, pessimistically, in domestication, in diverse, sometimes seductive guises.

Narrative turns

It is almost clichéd to write about the narrative turn, in such a world: but it is worth mentioning, or at least to understand some of the potentially agentic forces at work in liquid cultures. Feminism and the women’s movement have an honoured place here, in celebrating stories about modes of experience too often absent from his -story, and using the spaces opening in fluidity to challenge the powerful and their stranglehold on what can be said. Black consciousness and the gay movement have also assertively brought into the frame stories of and from various edges, ones often resisted and even pilloried in dominant discourse.

Jerome Bruner has an honoured place in many people’s explanation of what we term the narrative imagination. Bruner (1990) reflected on the struggle between two modes of making sense of the world, and of people and their place within it – two master narratives, maybe – the logico-scientific and narrative modes of thought. The former seeks to verify by appeal to procedures for establishing a formal, empirical, measurable and generalisable truth; the other works towards verisimilitude, to the lifelikeness and meaningfulness of text. One works by reference to formal logic, tight and focused analysis of a narrow range of interacting variables, and by claims to transparent procedures as well as processes of empirical discovery developed by reasoned hypotheses and systematic testing. There is, as stated, a drive at the heart of the logico-scientific towards universal rather than particular truths, using, where possible, a mathematical system of ascription, modelling and explanation. The good story, on the other hand, gains its credence from engaging fully with the particulars of subjective experience, and from a process of transforming understanding by the generation of new insight and meaning. Validity, so it is claimed, lies in the quality of the process, the narrative truths generated, including its meaningfulness to others. Postmodernism and poststructuralism have a central place in this narrative turn: in celebrating multi-vocalism, dialect, a plurality of truths, letting all the partialities in, with an associated suspicion of the claims of grand narratives, on the grounds that these often embody classed, colonialist or patriarchal predilections. Our book is normatively driven by such perspectives, if to varying degrees.

Academic disciplines

The narrative turn has influenced developments across diverse academic disciplines, while at the same time – like thorns in the flesh – troubling the assumptions of mainstream academic or professional tribes. Social science, not least in ‘softer’, newer disciplines of gender, post-colonialism and queer studies has been an obvious home for narrative methods and sensibilities; as has education, health studies and even medicine, if on the margins. Trisha Greenhalgh and Brian Hurwitz (1998), for instance, among diverse others, have sought to question the ‘scientistic’, evidence-based, randomised control trial exclusivity of the story medicine often tells itself. They advocate for the humanity of narrative-based understanding, that gets lost, and damagingly so, in big science. Against accusations of story as mere anecdote, they plead that the ‘truths’ established by empirical observation of populations in clinical control trials, for instance, simply cannot be applied, mechanistically, to specific individuals or episodes of illness. The generalisations or probabilities derived from research trials, grounded in the analysis of the patterns formed by thousands of dots on scattergrams, for instance, can be profoundly reductive. Dots may represent specific people, and measures of change, but the nature of such change and what leads to what is problematic. Even if the drug is shown to be effective, across a given population, why this is so can remain a black box for big science: the placebo effect of the doctor’s care, in dis-ease, may be as important as any medicine. At the softer end of medicine, in general practice, John Launer (2002), among others, argues that stories, and re-storying, are at the heart of the GP or family doctor’s work. You can learn to tell a different story, the doctor might say, of the pain in the neck: a doctor and her patient can explore, narratively, different ways of understanding and managing such dis-ease, other than a disconnected pain that needs a drug. They can explore a particular experience of depression and of feeling not listened to, and neglected, in a relationship; or perhaps of being a single mum, and depressed, but of someone who also copes very well in keeping on keeping on, in a distressed community (West, 2001). The pain in the neck can be deeply cultural and even discursive in nature and open to other levels of understanding.

There is, of course, a long, established focus on narrative and its significance within psychotherapy, but there are other areas of health care where narrative methods are utilised, aside from general practice; in narrative or reminiscence work with older people, for instance (Viney, 1993; West, 2001). Liz Viney, for example, identifies four crucial roles for stories in the lives of older people. First, stories help people develop and maintain a sense of identity: we know best who we are when we tell stories in which we have active roles; second, stories provide guidance in our lives, preparing for the future and dealing with a past; third, they enable us to impose some narrative order on chaotic events, what Freud termed narrative truth; and, fourth, when others listen to our stories, and value what we say, we can feel empowered. Some of the darkest moments can be at the stage of life when, it seems, no one listens, or appears interested in our stories; then we may feel most existentially alone, especially when others we have known have died or are otherwise unavailable, and when no one else seems interested. What may be precious to us may be incomprehensible to others: like a film, a book, or a moment of magical interaction with a person we once loved, but all a long time ago.

Jeremy Holmes (1996) has written that ‘autobiographical competence’ – the capacity and confidence to compose one’s own story – is central to psychological health. The word ‘narrative’, he notes, derives from gnathos or knowing. Narrative, he suggests, ‘turns experience into a story which can be temporal, coherent and has meaning’ (Holmes, 1996: 150). It creates, potentially at least, links between past, present and future. Raw material is translated into symbolic form, which allows the sufferer some detachment from what may be painful, even horrific experience. The recognition of the role of narrative in mental health has of course a long history. Freud argued for the therapeutic power of story and the importance of a narrative truth in ‘the talking cure’. If a story makes sense, symbolically, of experience, even if some of the facts are historically elided or distorted, this can constitute a royal road to meaning and healing.

In education – sometimes under the label of life stories, or auto/biography, or life history – narrative-type studies have blossomed, if also against a trend towards evidence-based practice or calls for more scientific forms of educational research (in the hope, perhaps, of making education more like medicine, via randomised control trials and precise measurement of specific variables in the classroom). Of course, we enter deep, complex and contested territory here, as Damasio (2000) and others have taught. Change in structures of the brain – as new and lively neural networks form, dynamically – in the teaching of phonics to primary-age children or in the use of some formal types of instruction, might be considered evidence of cause and effect, and of the triumph, perhaps, of particular pedagogic methods. Yet this may be equally due to very complex interactions, above and beyond the particular teaching technologies or styles; such as the quality of relationship between a pupil and teacher, or because parents get more involved, or there is better interaction in the classroom, thanks to reflexive work by the teachers. Such ‘evidence’ does not eradicate the need for interpretive stories; rather it enhances their importance in making sense of complexity.

The field of narrative studies is now vast and transdisciplinary (Andrews, 2014; Horsdal, 2012; Merrill and West, 2009; Reid and West, 2011). There are books on narrative and everyday life, exploring how stories and imagination come together in daily lives, influencing not only our thoughts about what we see and do, but also our contemplation of what is possible and what not. Without imagination, we are forever restricted to the here and now, as Molly Andrews has argued (Andrews, 2014). Yet our imaginations are always influenced by our particular experiences, which we recount to ourselves and others through stories – both told and untold. Andrews has examined how story and imagination are interwoven in the diverse spheres of academic scholarship, in ageing, education and politics. She has examined the role of narrative imagination when listening to different ‘others’, asking if it is ever possible to understand suffering one has not known. She explores what kind of stories influence our thinking about who we are becoming in our ageing selves. In a chapter on education, she looks at the dynamics of the teacher-student relationship and the stultifying effect of some educational practices and policies on the imagination; the goal of responsible education, she argues, should be to instil in students a sense of global citizenship, which relies upon the ability to imagine difference. Marianne Horsdal (2012) has sought to link bodies, minds and stories, and whole people, in dynamic interaction. She offers a temporal dimension, through a focus on life story narratives. She draws on Paul Ricoeur to note how we create meaning in temporal movements, through a focus on a time span, short or long. As an educator, she employs neuroscience, linguistics and adult education to make a case for ‘narrative competence’, where we can intervene in the flow of time and move beyond the fleeting present, connecting with past and possible futures, more agentically, in making sense of what happens.

Creating good enough space, where people can develop narrative competence, is not simply a matter for therapeutic or formal educational settings, but is vital to the health and dynamism of all people in whole cultures. Finding space to practise active citizenship, for instance – for exchanging stories with the other and for negotiating difference – may be considered essential to building more inclusive democracies (Biesta, 2011; Marquand, 2004). In such ways narrative work can be seen to represent a subversive as well as transdisciplinary project. In the final resort we think narrative is or should be about subversion: of disciplines, of boundaries between self and other, of simplistic readings of big science; and of the current politics of narrative, in which some stories matter greatly and others are disparaged. Some stories matter, quite simply, more than others, as power circulates, while the experiences of many may be difficult, even dangerous to articulate to self, let alone others; or there is no good enough space to do so. We are all ‘storied’, to an extent, by powerful and normalising myths: to think and feel in particular ways, and oftentimes to construct our experience in a manner acceptable to the gaze of the other. Yet in telling new stories we may recognise and challenge the gaze, and forge more of an authentic, self-authored account. The relationship between representation (the story) and reality (experience) is far from simple and linear. Stories, as Foucault and others have taught (Foucault, 1979; White and Epston, 1990), ‘constitute’ as well as ‘reflect’ experience: reality and representation are not easily prized apart, for better as well as for worse.

Narrative and its problems

Yet narratives are also deeply problematic, as suggested. This is not simply the case for those captivated by a more ‘scientistic’ or neo-liberal mind set. There can be the danger, for instance, of reducing everything to text, or nothing but text. Of course, this might depend on what we mean by text, and of what is inside and what outside the frame. Freud and the dynamic unconscious might be one area of challenge: render...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• 1 Narratives of change and continuity: their transdisciplinary and subversive potential
• 2 Auto/biography: a relational journey
• 3 ‘Moments of being’ and the search for meaning: epistemological and methodological challenges for the autoethnographic researcher
• 4 ‘A very elementary transformation of one’s existence’: narrating moments of political change
• 5 Learning democracy and fundamentalism: narratives of change, recognition and disrespect
• 6 Whose story? Whose memory? Multiple readings of oral history life accounts from the socialist era
• 7 Identity formation and re-formation within Christian Fundamentalism: journeys of faith – interrupted
• 8 Stories of resistance and resilience: journeys to engagement with the UK Global Justice Movement
• 9 Family beliefs and practices around academic ability and social mobility: narratives of contradiction, continuity and resistance
• 10 How do career guidance practitioners talk about their class, gender and racialised identities?
• 11 What is career about if not biography? Examining the ‘shift’ to constructivist and interdisciplinary approaches in career counselling
• 12 Poetry written from the words of people given a diagnosis of dementia: a narrative analysis
• 13 ‘Those letters keep me going’: epistolary spaces and resilience-building processes in US soldiers to sweetheart war correspondence, 1942 to 1945
• Afterword: Telling stories of change and continuities, the transdisciplinary and subversive imperative
• Index