Introduction

Introduction: What is narrative research?

Corinne Squire, Molly Andrews and Maria Tamboukou

Final draft; published version appears in Doing Narrative Research, Eds M.Andrews.

C.Squire and M.Tsamboukou, London: Sage, 2008.

I live in terror of not being misunderstood (Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic As Artist’)

In the last two decades, narrative has acquired an increasingly high profile in social

research. It often seems as if all social researchers are doing narrative research in one

way or another. Yet narrative research, although it is popular and engaging, is also

difficult. How to go about it is much discussed. People working in this field are

frequently approached by students and colleagues, in and outside academia, asking

questions like, ‘Should I request respondents to tell stories or not?’, ‘What happens if

my respondents don’t produce any narratives?’, ‘What is a narrative, anyway?’ and,

most regularly, ‘What do I do with the stories now I’ve got them?’ Narrative data can

easily seem overwhelming: susceptible to endless interpretation, by turns

inconsequential and deeply meaningful.

Unlike many qualitative frameworks, narrative research offers no automatic starting or

finishing points. Since the definition of ‘narrative’ itself is in dispute, there are no

self-evident categories on which to focus, as there are with content-based thematic

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Introduction

approaches, or with analyses of specific elements of language. Clear accounts of how

to analyse the data, as found for instance in grounded theory and in Interpretive

Phenomenological Analysis, are rare. There are few well-defined debates on

conflicting approaches within the field and how to balance them, as there are, for

example, in the highly epistemologically-contested field of discourse analysis. In

addition, unlike other qualitative research perspectives, narrative research offers no

overall rules about suitable materials or modes of investigation, or the best level at

which to study stories. It does not tell us whether to look for stories in recorded

everyday speech, interviews, diaries, tv programmes or newspaper articles; whether to

aim for objectivity or researcher and participant involvement; whether to analyse

stories’ particularity or generality; or what epistemological significance to attach to

narratives.

Despite these difficulties, many of us who work with narratives want to continue and

develop this work. Most often, perhaps, we frame our research in terms of narrative

because we believe that by doing so we are able to see different and sometimes

contradictory layers of meaning, to bring them into useful dialogue with each other,

and to understand more about individual and social change. By focusing on narrative,

we are able to investigate, not just how stories are structured and the ways in which

they work, but also who produces them and by what means, the mechanisms by which

they are consumed, and how narratives are silenced, contested or accepted. All these

areas of inquiry can help us describe, understand and even explain important aspects

of the world. It is our hope that this book will contribute to this multilevel, dialogic

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Introduction

potential of narrative research.

In the rest of this Introduction, we explore further the popularity of narrative research,

its diverse histories and its theoretical contradictions, in an effort to describe both its

complexity, and the possibilities for working productively within that complexity

Narrative research: popularity and diversity

Narrative is a popular portmanteau term in contemporary western social research. The

crowd of much-used summary and outline texts about narrative research (Clandinin

and Connelly, 2004; Elliot, 2005; Freeman, 1993; Holstein and Gubrium, 1999;

Langellier and Peterson, 2004; Mishler, 1986; Ochs and Capps, 2001; Personal

Narratives Group, 1989; Plummer, 2001; Polkinghorne, 1988; Riessman, 1993a,

2007; Roberts, 20011; Sarbin, 1986; Wengraf, 1999) exemplifies its popularity. So

does the recent burst of empirically-based texts focused on specific studies, (Andrews,

2007; Emerson and Frosh, 2004; McAdams, 2006; Mishler, 1999; Squire, 2007;

Tamboukou, 2003), the rich crop of narratively-themed collections of essays

(Andrews et al., 2004; Bamberg and Andrews, 2004; Brockmeier and Carbaugh,

2001; Chamberlayne et al., 2000; Clandinin, 2006; Patterson, 2002; Rosenwald and

Ochberg, 1992) and the increasing number of books addressing narrative in specific

domains such as development, health, sexuality and social work (Daiute and

Lightfoot, 2004; Greenhalgh and Hurwitz, 1998; Hall, 1997; Mattingley, 1988;

Plummer, 1995; Riessman, 1993b).

Aside from this current ubiquity within social research, ‘narrative’ is also a term

5
Introduction

frequently heard in popular discourse. Often, these popular uses of the term work to

connote a particularly acute understanding. Politicians or policymakers suggest they

are doing their jobs well because they pay close attention to people’s everyday

‘narratives,’ or because they themselves have a joined-up ‘narrative’ of what they are

doing. .’ JJournalists claim a good understanding of events by spelling out for their

audiences the underlying ‘narrative.’ Citizens are urged to achieve better

comprehension of difficult circumstances by reading or hearing the ‘stories’ of those

affected – for example, the World Health Organisation portrays the HIV pandemic to

us through individual ‘Stories of Tragedy and Hope’

(http://www.who.int/features/2003/09/en/ ). Sometimes, though, public ‘narratives’

are treated with suspicion, as obfuscators of the ‘realities’ they gloss and hide.

In addition, however, the term ‘narrative’ is used descriptively in popular discourse,

as it is in academic humanities disciplines, to indicate the line of thematic and causal

progression in a cultural form such as a film or a novel. Here again, ‘narrative’ may be

a good thing – exciting, compelling, insightful – but it may also be criticised - as

overcomplex, oversimple, too long, too conventional.

Both in popular culture and in social research, then, ‘narrative’ is strikingly diverse in

the way it is understood. In popular culture, it may suggest insight into – or

concealment of - important biographical patterns or social structures – or, simply,

good or less-good forms of representational sequence. In social research, ‘narrative’

also refers to a diversity - of topics of study, methods of investigation and analysis,

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Introduction

and theoretical orientations. It displays evelops different definitions within different

fields, and the topics of hot debate around these definitions shift from year to year.

On account of this prolixity, many accounts of narrative research begin by exploring

the field’s different contemporary forms. This Introduction is no exception, but it

approaches the task a little differently. It sets out two overlapping fields within which

narrative research’s diversity appears: those of narrative research’s history, and its

theory. For, we shall argue, narrative research’s incoherence derives partly from its

divergent beginnings, and partly from the theoretical faultlines that traverse it.

Where does narrative research come from? Historical contradictions

The antecedents of contemporary narrative social research are commonly located in

two parallel academic moves (Andrews et al., 2004; Rustin, 2000)1 The first is the

postwar rise of humanist approaches within western sociology and psychology. These

approaches posed holistic, person-centred approaches, often including attention to

individual case studies, biographies and life histories, against positivist empiricism

(Bertaux, 1981; Bruner, 1990; Polkinghorne, 1988; Sarbin, 1986). The second

academic antecedent to contemporary narrative social research, is Russian structuralist

and later, French poststructuralist (Barthes, 1977, Culler, 2002; Genette, 1979,

Todorov, 1990) postmodern (Foucault, 1972; Lyotard, 1984), psychoanalytic (Lacan,

1977) and deconstructionist (Derrida, 1977) approaches to narrative within the

humanities. These approaches had effects on social research in the English-speaking

world from the late 1970s, initially through the work of Althusser, Lacan and

7
Introduction

Foucault, film and literary critics, and feminist and socialist theorists, as it appeared in

translations, and in journals such as Ideology and Consciousness and mf, and in books

like Changing the Subject (Henrique et al., 1984) and later, in the US, Gergen’s

(1991) and (Sampson’s (1993) work.2 Such work was often interested in story

structure and content. But unlike the humanist narrative move within social research,

it was concerned with narrative fluidity and contradiction, with unconscious as well as

conscious meanings, and with the power relations within which narratives become

possible (Parker, 2003; Tamboukou, this volume) It assumed that multiple, disunified

subjectivities were involved in the production and understanding of narratives, rather

than singular, agentic storytellers and hearers, and it was preoccupied with the social

formations shaping language and subjectivity. In this tradition, the storyteller does not

tell the story, so much as s/he is told by it.

Despite the theoretical differences, there are many convergences between these

humanist and postructuralist traditions within current narrative research. Most

researchers are affected by both conceptual histories. For example, Wendy Hollway

and Tony Jefferson use what they have called ‘free association narrative interviewing’

(2000) to map individuals’ biographical accounts of crime in the community. They

also apply psychoanalytic understandings of fractured subjects to these individual

biographies, and draw on poststructural formulations of the uncertainties of language3

(fn apparent in for instance Hollway’s earlier work on Changing The Subject).

Similarly, Mark Freeman (2004) traces the life histories of individual artists, but at the

same time he positions these life histories within the modern western narratives of art

8
Introduction

that ‘write’ these lives, and he also pays attention to the unconscious structures of

meaning that traverse life stories.

More generally, humanist and the postructuralist traditions of narrative research are

brought together by their shared tendency to treat narratives as modes of resistance to

existing structures of power. This tendency may involve, for instance, collecting the

oral histories of working class communities. It may mean investigating the

auto/biographical expression of women’s subject positions: how women write within

the contexts of their lives, and how other women read their texts within the conditions

of their own lived, subjective place within power relations (Stanley, 1992; Hyden,

and Overlien, this volume; Tamboukou, 2003). It may stimulate a linguistic study of

the storytelling sophistication of African American adolescents (Labov, 1972). Some

narrative researchers use extensive life histories, in order to understand how personal

lives traverse social change (Chamberlayne et al., 2002; Andrews, 2007). Others

deploy narratives to try to change people’s relations to their social circumstances. This

is the terrain of narrative therapy and other therapies that use storied material, as well

as of some community research that enables collective storytelling. (Sliep,

1988Wren). Still other researchers analyse the conditions and effectiveness of

community and ‘public’ narratives (Plummer, 1995, 2001; Gready, this volume).

Politics thus seems at times to bring the two historical trends in narrative research

together (Squire, 2005). Nevertheless, their theoretical assumptions about subjectivity,

language, the social, and narrative itself remain in contradiction. Current syntheses of

9
Introduction

the two often involve, for instance, a maintenance of a humanist conception of a

singular, unified subject, at the same time as the promotion of an idea of narrative as

always multiple, socially constructed and constructing, reinterpreted and

reinterpretable. These contradictions do not go unnoticed. But many researchers think

it more important to do useful and innovative work across the contradictions, rather

than trying to resolve conflicting positions which are historically and disciplinarily

distinct, as well as logically incommensurable.

Theoretical divisions in narrative research

The historically-produced theoretical bricolage in narrative research is largely

responsible for the current wide variability in how researchers conceptualise what

narrative is, how to study it, and why it is important -as material, method, route to

understanding psychological or social phenomena, or all of these. The following

section of the Introduction sketches some obvious and some less obvious theoretical

division in contemporary narrative research.

One of the most well-rehearsed differences, is between research focused on the

spoken recounting of particular past events that happened to the narrator, the person

telling the story – classically described in Labov’s (Labov and Waletsky, 1967; see

also Patterson, this volume) work on event narratives – and experience-centred work

(see Squire, this volume), exploring stories that range in length from segments of

interviews, to many hours of life histories, and that may be about general or imagined

phenomena, things that happened to the narrator or distant matters they’ve only heard

10
Introduction

about. This second kind of narrative research encompasses varying media, too: not

just speech, but also writing - scraps of letters, laundry lists, extensive multi-volume

diaries – visual materials - photo albums, video diaries – and narratives inhering in

objects and actions - the arrangement of objects on mantelpieces, the everyday

activities of shopping, cooking and eating (*; Seale, 2004). Such expansion of

narrative data seems to some to give the term ‘narrative’ such a broad a meaning so

broad as to rob it of descriptive, let alone explanatory power (Craib, 2004). Yet

throughout this second field of work, the life experiences that infuse the data

constitute the primary topic, the true ‘narrative’ (Bruner, 1990).

What is shared across both event and experience-centred narrative research, is that

there are assumed to be individual, internal representations of phenomena – events,

thoughts and feelings – to which narrative gives external expression. Event-centre

work assumes these internal and individual representations are more or less constant.

Experience-centred research stresses that such representations vary drastically over

time, and across the circumstances within which one lives, so that a single

phenomenon may produce very different stories, even from the same person.

A third form of narrative research, which addresses the co-nconstructed narratives that

develop, for instance in conversations between people, or email exchanges, does not

fit into either of these two initial fields of ‘event’ and ‘experience’-oriented narrative

research. This third field may operate with the assumption that its more ‘social,’ co-

constructed, stories are expressions of internal cognitive or affective states. However,

11
Introduction

most often, it views narratives as forms of social code, addressing stories as

dialogically constructed (Bakhtin, 1981) and not as expressions of internal states.

Researchers in this field are interested, rather, in (Abell et al, 2006; Bamberg, 2006;

Georgakopoulou, 2006; Plummer, 2001; Squire, 2007) the social patterns and

functioning of stories, whether the ‘stories’ are short, disjointed sequences of

conversation or much more extensive representations that examplify broad cultural

narratives .(Abell et al, 2004; Bamberg, 2006; Georgakopoulou, 2006; Plummer,

2001; Squire, 2007).

Narrative research’s divergences over whether stories are representing internal

individual states, or external social circumstances, relates to another dichotomy. Are

narratives shaped by the audiences to whom they are delivered, and if so, to what

extent? For some narrative researchers, the most interesting features of personal

narratives lie in what they tell us about individual thinking or feeling, whether the

narratives themselves are about events or experiences (Labov, 1997;; Rosenthal,

Chamberlayne et al., 2002; Hollway and Jefferson, 2000). Other researchers are more

concerned with interested in the social production of narratives by their audiences: in

how personal stories get built up through the conversational sequences in people’s talk

(Bamberg, 2006; Georgakopoulou, 2006), or how they are tied up with the

performance and negotiation of social identities in a common space of meaning

(Phoenix, this volume; Salmon and Riessman, this volume; Riessman, 1993a, 2007).4

Some narrative researchers are occupied concerned more widely with how narratives

follow, are constrained by, or resist, larger social patterns of social and cultural

12
Introduction

storytelling (Gready, this volume; Plummer, 2001; Malson, 2004). Narrative Some

researchers may also be are also interested in how researchers’ own ‘stories’ vary,

depending on the social and historical places from which they ‘listen’ to their data

(Andrews, this volume; Riessman, 2002). These primarily social research interests are

seen in some narrative researchers who think of stories themselves as expressions of

personal states, as well as in those who treat stories as manifestations of social or

cultural patterns, though they are commonest among the latter.

Of course, researchers who are mainly interested in what seems like the simplest kind

of stories, event narratives told by individuals, also acknowledge that stories are

shaped by their listeners (Labov, 1982). But for them, these social factors are not the

defining or most interesting aspects of personal narratives. Similarly, most

biographical and life history researchers accept that social formations shape personal

stories. Indeed, they often work with this interaction, tracing the impact of social

factors on individual stories and ‘reading’ the significance of social change in those

stories. However, some biographical researchers often claim an irreducible personal

bedrock for personal narratives, based in the fundamentalss of human experience,

which are often unconscious, and therefore not fully reachable by social analysis

(Wengraf book). Such researchers are not, generally, too interested in the narrative

‘performance’ of identities in social contexts, the interpersonal construction or ‘co-

construction’ of narratives at the level of sequences of utterances or across an

interview, or the shaping of personal narratives by larger social and cultural narratives

or metanarratives.

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Introduction

This division between socially- and individually-oriented narrative research, relates to

yet another theoretical divergence: that between narrative researchers who are

interested in the agency of narratives and narrators, and those who are either

uninterested, or who argue that agency is not linked to narrative. Researchers who are

interested in narratives as individualised accounts of experience, tend to be the most

convinced of the significance of stories as ways of expressing and building personal

identity and agency (Bruner, 1990; see also Squire, this volume). Work that addresses

event narratives, or stories co-constructed in talk-in-interaction, tends to be least

interested in issues of agency, most aware of the varied and ‘troubled’ subject

positions occupied by narrators (see Phoenix, this volume; Labov, 1997;

Georgakopoulou, 2006). Narrative research that is interested in unconscious elements

of experience, is also sceptical about the possibility of individual ‘agency,’ let alone

its operation in and through narrative (Craib, 2004). Whether or not such narrative

research - event- focused, interested in coconstruction and positioning, or

psychoanalytically-inflected - operates with a conception of an agentic subject, it does

not tie that concept to an assumption that narrative ‘makes sense of’ and enables

action within lives . This assumption of a necessary link between narrative and agency

is found most strongly in approaches to narrative that focus on personal experience.

However, many researchers who are concerned with the social and cultural place of

narrative, are also interested in the socially effective ‘agency’ of personal stories.

Sometimes they pursue this interest by offering a broadly humanist assertion of

14
Introduction

individuals’ and collectives’ potential to make changes, alongside a loosely

poststructural account of shifting systems of representation and representations’ their

interactive relations with material realities. Alternatively, the concept of performance

is often applied in narrative work, lifted from Goffmanian accounts of social roles,

and from Butler’s (1993) post-Goffman performativity5 , in order to retain a potential

for agency within a theoretical framework that puts it in question. This is a good

example of contemporary narrative research’s finessing of theoretical

incommensurabilities, in this case by ignoring the different concepts of the subject in

play around ‘performance’ or-at best – hoping to resolve them by what has become

known as ‘strategic essentialism,’ that is, the which allows one to assumption of e

agentic subjects where politically expedient.6

These kinds of lived-with contradictions in narrative research, refer us back to the way

in which narrative research’s the emancipatory aims of narrative research often bring

together historically and theoretically distinct traditions of narrative work. Certainly,

some researchers’ concern with whether narratives – and their work on them – ‘make

a difference,’ may lead them to adopt an optimistic position on narrative agency that

seems at odds with their theoretical commitments to, for instance, the socially

constructing powers of language, and that can be too simple really to address the

involved and politically intractable situations within which personal narratives appear

and are studied (see Gready, this volume).

A recent articulation of the divisions within narrative research has taken the form of

15
Introduction

posing ‘small’ against ‘big’ stories (Bamberg, 2006; Freeman, 2006; Georgakopoulou,

2006). Those on the side of ‘small’ narratives argue that we need to pay more

attention to the micro-linguistic and social structure of the everyday, small narrative

phenomena that occur ‘naturally’ between people. These ‘small stories’ may concern

unfolding, anticipated, imaginary, habitual and indefinite events and states, as well as

past, singular ‘events’; they may also, for some, involve repeated content or themes

spread out across representations (see Phoenix, this volume). They occur in spoken

language, but also in writing – text messages, for example -– paralanguage, and

perhaps even in action. This emphasis on ‘small stories’ brings together the Labovian

commitment to research on ‘naturally’-occurring stories, and conversation-analytic

and some discourse-analytic commitments to studying ‘natural’ language, and applies

them to a wider and more social range of narrative phenomena than has previously

been addressed in this way, including interactions of the kind previously investigated

mostly by conversation and discourse analysts (Bamberg, 2006; Georgakopoulou,

2006). The emphasis on ‘small stories’ tends to prioritise ‘event’ over experience,

and socially-oriented over individually-oriented narrative research; but it formulates

‘event’ in a broadened way, and pays attention to the ‘social’ in its most microsocial

versions, as well as in its wider, cultural variants.

Against such ‘small story’ arguments, Wengraf (1999), Freeman (2006) and other

biographical and life story researchers defend the experiential richness, reflectiveness

and validity of ‘big stories.’ However, writers on the ‘small story’ side of the debate

do recognise the separate value of ‘big story’ research, and ‘big story’ researchers

16
Introduction

often pay attention to the ‘small’ aspects of their data. For many, the ‘big’/’small’

division may not be too significant. Moreover, Freeman (2006) points out the parallel

tendencies in some ‘small story’ research to claim it is the ‘real thing,’ and in some

‘big story’ research to claim an immanent validating identity behind its narratives.

These claims can return some proponents on both sides of the argument to the

unproblematically expressivist approach to narrative described earlier in this

Introduction.

The ‘small’ versus ‘big’ story argument overlaps with another contemporary debate,

over the tyranny of the transcript. Some narrative researchers – for instance those who

work with ‘small’ narratives, or with visual materials –criticise the hegemony, in the

narrative field, of interview-obtained transcripts of people talking, usually one at a

time, often reflexively, about their life experiences; and the large, content-based,

biographical and social interpretations that narrative researchers derive from such

materials. The criticisms thus address both the restricted narrative material privileged

by transcripts – mostly speech, rarely paralinguistic material, other media,

interpersonal interactions or other social context - and the content-based analysis that

is consequently prioritised. However, the polarity between transcript-based and other

forms of narrative research can be overstated. Approaches that are primarily

concerned with narrative structure and context (including ‘small story’ ones), also

unavoidably address content. More tThematic approaches are, increasingly, explicitly

interested in context, and in any case have to address structure and context, at least

implicitly, since the meanings in which they deal are embedded in these. As with the

17
Introduction

similar and longrunning debate about levels of discourse analysis, a dialogic approach

that advocates doing both kinds of research at the same time, is a conceivable and

helpful solution (Wetherell, 1998).

A more interesting aspect of the alleged conflict between structural, content and

context-based approaches, is that it draws attention to two other important, though

largely implicit, divisions within narrative research. The first of these relates to the

status of language in contemporary narrative research. Paradoxically, a cursory or

non-existent attention to language characterises the narrative social research field.

Narrative is always defined first of all as a kind of language. Yet research that focuses

on narrative as an expression of individual experience, or as a mirror of social

realities, tends to bypass the language of stories in order to focus on their meanings, or

the social positionings they produce or reflect. Approaches that focus on event

narratives or narratives in conversation, tend to be interested in underlying cognitive

structures, or in the social functionings of narrative, ‘what narrative does.’ For many

researchers, narrative language is again, therefore secondary. It is the transparent

window onto narrative’s universal human, possibly even biological, significance in

individual and social life, its involvement in all patterns of interaction, ethics, and

‘living in time’ (Salmon, 1985; see also Bruner, 1990; Seale, 2004; MacIntyre, 1984).

This narrative transcendentalism is very rarely defended; it is assumed to be a self-

evident truth. .The ‘small story’ argument, as well as other work that emphasises the

sociality of narrative and its separateness from agency, tends to undo this certainty

about narrative’s universality and redemptiveness. But the rapid passing-over of

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Introduction

narrative language to get to narrative ‘meaning’ or ‘function,’ is a broad trend in

current narrative research, affecting small and large story study alike. A fetishisation

of narrative language in social research, would not be a happy remedy. However, a

slower and more attentive reading of narrative language, might be (Derrida, 1985)

Another theoretical division related to the place of language in narrative research, is

that between researchers who assume that their data will contain relatively stable and

unified narratives of experience, identity and the social world, at least in a particular

time and social context; and those who are who are less convinced that such narratives

can be accessed by them, or even that they are produced. The degree to which

narrative researchers adopt this second, postmodern take on narrative, relates strongly

to their engagement with language’s complexity and non-transparency. 7 A

postmodern approach is commonly argued to compromise the political engagement

which many narrative researchers seek. However, narrative research that engages

thoroughly with postmodernism, does not necessarily exhibit such compromises.

Some narrative researchers operate with an extended version of postmodern or

poststructuralist critiques of ‘narrative’, formulating narrative research as a

poststructural enterprise, aware of narratives’ social positioning as discourses and of

the problematics of subjectivity and story ‘meaning’ (Burman, 2003; Edley, 2002;

Parker, 2003, 2004; Tamboukou, 2003) Such thoroughgoing poststructural takes on

narrative are relatively infrequent, but they are important reminders of where many

narrative researchers’ theoretical concerns with language, subjectivity, discourse and

power relations might lead, if they followed them more thoroughly.

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Introduction

One area of poststructuralist theoretical interest has given rise to an extensive debate

within the narrative field. This is psychoanalysis, particularly those forms of it that are

inflected by Lacanian and postlacanian concerns with the psyche as a form of

language, even a ‘narrative,’ in itself. In these accounts, narratives represent

unconscious emotions, as well as conscious cognitions and feelings. Consequently,

narratives are rarely not always straightforward. Often Sometimes they can work as a

forms of dissembling or ‘telling stories’ (Craib, 2004). Sometimes, you won’t get the

‘whole story’. And all stories will are going to be incomplete, since not everything

about experience and subjectivity cannot make their wits way fully into language.

Psychoanalytic takes on narrative research try (Chamberlayne et al., 2002; Hollway

and Jefferson, 2000; Frosh, 2002; Burman, 2003; Sclater, 2003) to address aspects of

experience or subjectivity such as anxiety, or desire, that fall outside narrative – that

seem difficult or impossible to represent in narrative, or to understand from a

straightforward approach to story structure or content. (Chamberlayne et al., 2002;

Hollway and Jefferson, 2000; Frosh, 2002; Burman, 2003; Sclater, 2003) 8 Debate

between these positions relates both to their different theoretical formulations of the

unconscious, and to the varied extent to which psychoanalytically-influenced narrative

researchers claim interpretive authority. Some psychoanalytic work on narrative

interprets research materials ‘as if’ they were materials from an analytic session. More

cautiously, other psychoanalytic researcherss treat their narrative data as

representations of more generally- found individual or social structures of feeling.

20
Introduction

Outside this psychoanalytically-inflected work, questions about the interpretive

authority of even the more cautious psychoanalytically-inflected work are frequent,

and are often accompanied by queries about the explanatory value of the

‘unconscious’ as a concept. Many narrative researchers reject psychoanalytic

frameworks on the ground that detailed analyses of story form and content can

generate equally rich and nuanced understandings, without needing to assume the

existence of an untestable ‘unconscious’ entity and set of processes (Wetherell, 2005).

But the problems of what is ‘in’ narrative that is not straightforwardly said or written,

and what cannot even be brought into it, remain. They are crucial for many narrative

researchers, working in widely divergent theoretical frameworks. Sometimes, these

difficulties are formulated in terms of storytellers’ and story hearers’ cognitively,

emotionally and socially divergent narrative worlds, that may or may not be brought

into a workable convergence (Ricoeur, 1984; Salmon and Riessman, this volume;

Hyden and Overlien, this volume). These problems have also given rise to

considerable current interest in how to analyse elements of paralanguage in narrative –

tone of voice, pauses, laughter – as well as visual elements such as eye movements,

facial expression, body posture and gestures, and more broadly, aspects of

emotionality and embodiment within narratives. Theoretically, these elements are

difficult to incorporate within existing models of narratives. Moreover, they are hard

to define and measure, and, just as much as language structure and content, they vary

across social and cultural situations. They may prove just as contentious for narrative

research as ‘the unconscious.’ Contemporary interest in themThey indicates, though,

21
Introduction

the continuing and growing division between researchers who are prepared to settle

for relatively straightforward spoken, written, visual, object or action sequences as

their materials, and those who are concerned that this specificity about what

constitutes the ‘language’ of narratives, is inadequate.

Finally the problem of what may lie ‘outside’ narrative raises another issue which

implicitly divides narrative researchers, but which is often understood as uniting them.

Narrative is almost always said to be about time- not just succession in time, but

change through time (Brockmeier, 19932001; Bruner, 1990; Ricoeur, 1984). Time,

psychically processed, is thought to make us into subjects through its articulation in

narrative. Transformation – meaning, not always, but frequently, improvement - is

also assumed to be integral to narrative: – in the story itself; in the lives of those

telling it; even in researchers’ own understandings of it.

Through this emphasis, representations of simple contingencies -events that follow

each other but that have no necessary relation to each other - are taken ‘out’ of the

narrative category. Representations of causal but not chronological or experiential

succession, are also seen as theoretical, not ‘narrative,’ in nature. Yet from a

psychoanalytic perspective, temporally separate events, and events whose relations are

not fully describable, may lie next to each other in the archaeological narrative

structures of the unconscious, without any personally meaningful succession being

available to us.9 And researchers trying to build social or psychological theory

certainly see a large difference between their models and theories, and the highly

22
Introduction

particular ‘theoretical’ causal sequences that characterise personal narratives.

For researchers who are interested in non-verbal aspects of narrative, such as

paralinguistic characteristics, moving and still images, and objects, narrative

chronology also has temporal and semantic patterns that are difficult to assimilate to

the conventional view of narrative ‘time.’ Even film, which itself tells stories in time,

involves image successions whose semantic relationships are more complex than

those in a verbally told story. IAnd increasingly, even narrative researchers dealing

with fairly ‘conventional’ personal interview data, that represent temporal succession

and that themselves unfold in time, are reappraising assumptions about progression

and transformation in narrative time. When we revisit data, for instance, it is too

simple to say that time has sequentially or experientially ‘moved on.’ We are different

people, and the pasts of the data, and our own present reading situation, are as much

‘another country’ as are materials gathered in situations unfamiliar to us (Andrews,

this volume). Describing these complexities temporally, as the copresence of past and

future in the present, for example, does not necessarily capture their multilayered

quality better than a spatialised or historical description, unless we assume

autobiographical time’s priority for narrative research.

Thus, a focus on chronological or experienced ‘time’ may close off information about

unconscious realities and material causalities, both of which may order stories outside

time ;, about non-verbal narrative sequences;, and about other, for instance,

particularly spatialised and sociohistorical, ways of understanding succession (Clark,

23
Introduction

2003; Harrison, 2004; Clark Harrison? Hollway and Jefferson, 2000; Frosh, 2002;

Mishler, 1999; Riessman, 2002; Tamboukou, 2003). Narrative social research has

some catching up to do here with literary and cultural studies and social theory,

particularly that developed by feminists, which has long adopted more nuanced

approaches towards narrative sequencing. This work recognizes, for instance, the

copresence of futurity and past in the present, the reconstruction of the past by new

‘presents’, and the projection of the present into future imaginings, in ways that do not

give an implicit priority to personally experienced time (Mulvey, 19917?; Steedman,

1987; Stanley, 1992)

A number of narrative social researchers are now putting into question the use of

‘time’ as a narrative-defining trope. Psychoanalytically-influenced narrative

researchers have been among those most ready to address alternative temporalities –

those of the unconscious as well as of lived realities – in their interpretations.

Moreover, in a kind of translation of Freud’s idea of nachträglichkeit (deferred action)

into social research, narrative researchers more generally are becoming increasingly

interested in the complex effects of temporal gaps and reinterpretations on our

approaches to narrative data (Andrews, this volume; Salmon and Riessman, this

volume; Riessman, 2002). At times, state, social, historical or spatial succession and

change are taken as alternative or additional narrative criteria. (see Patterson, this

volume, on Polanyi, 1985; Langellier and Peterson, 1992; Andrews, this volume;

also, Clark,20035; Tamboukou, this volume, and 2003).

24
Introduction

The broadening of the concept of narrative to include sequences whose ordering

occurs in dimensions other than those of chronologically, verbally and experientially-

ordered time, could again seem to some to give narrative research a generality that

trivialises it (Craib, 2004). However, narrative remains defined in all this work by

sequences with a specific order, temporal or otherwise, which takes it beyond

description; and by a particularity that distinguishes it from theoretical

representations.

This sense of ‘narrative’ as the ordering of particularities, fits well with some rather

underacknowledged aspects of the term’s meanings. Narrative’s Latin etymology lies

in knowing, not telling. Without overextending its remit, or treating personal

narratives as universal theories, research on narratives as ordered representations the

ordering of narratives can indeed claim to be mapping forms of local knowledge or

‘theory’. Narrative research thus converges across its differences, not so much in its

political interests, but in the possibility of having microsocial and micropolitical

effects through the local knowledges which it producesith which it works. These

knowledges may be particular, but they can enter into dialogue with each other and

The particular knowledges effected by narrative research may then engage in dialogue

and produce, as happens across the chapters in this volume, some larger and more

general, though still situated, narrative knowledges.

Narrative research is a multi-level,ed interdisciplinary field and any attempt to

simplify its complexity would not do justice to the richness of approaches, theoretical

25
Introduction

understandings and unexpected findings that it has offered. We have thus imagined

this book as a compass for navigating the rough seas of narrative research: a hands-on

resource document that can suggest open up paths to take, but that also allows for

diversions and excursionsthat can always be diverted and taken elsewhere.

Organisation of the book

The idea for this book came from a series of narrative symposia which we have run,

and continue to run, at our Centre for Narrative Research, based at the University of

East London. In the opening paragraph of this Iintroduction, we described the kinds of

questions that we have often heard from those who wish to use narrative in their

research, but are not exactly sure how to go about it. In response to questions like

these, through the years we have invited narrative researchers from a wide range of

fields (for instance, e.g. education, politics, health) to spend a day talking about the

nuts and bolts of their work. Those who came to talk about their work were asked to

address a problem or set of problems which they have encountered, to provide a

concrete demonstration of how they analyse their data, and finally, to provide an

annotated bibliography for participants. Invariably, the days were long, intense, and

very rewarding. In this book, we have tried as much as possible to replicate the

framework of the symposia, specifically the concrete demonstration of how to work

with narrative methods. The key challenge we faced in the collective creation of this

book was to capture the dynamism which had characterised the symposia. We asked

our contributors (all of whom had participated in one or another of the symposia) not

to present their research findings, but rather to give readers a sense of how they used

26
Introduction

narrative methods in their scholarly pursuits.

The book begins by setting out some of the key paradigms within narrative research,

moves to addressing issues of positionality, reflexivity, and power which lie at the

heart of narrative research, and closes with chapters which illustrate how narrative can

be used to investigate real social problems, and considers some of the ethical

dilemmas which researchers confront in their scholarly pursuits.

In Chapter 1, ‘Narratives of events: Labovian narrative analysis and its limitations’,

Wendy Patterson introduces narrative analysis by describing the classic and highly

influential Labovian account of the structure or ‘syntax’ of the personal experience

narrative – the story of a single event that happened to the narrator in the past.

Patterson uses a short extract from her own work on personal narrative of the

experience of trauma as a model for analysis, and through it some limitations of the

Labovian approach are highlighted. This leads to a consideration of event-centric

versus experiential approaches to narrative analysis, and an exposition of the more

interpretive experiential perspective.

Chapter 2, ‘Experience-centred and culturally-oriented approaches to narrative’, by

Corinne Squire, examines two large and interrelated narrative research perspectives. It

starts by describing the assumptions underlying the experience-centred approach with

which Chapter 1 leaves us, an extremely powerful take on narrative as integral to

people’s lives and sense of themselves, which addresses the semantics rather than the

27
Introduction

syntax of narrative. The chapter moves on to sketch out that approach’s modes of

material collection and analysis. Examining the difficulties associated with this

approach’s potentially over-strong interpretive claims, over-psychological framework

and simplifying assumptions about subjects and time, it explores attempts that have

been made to develop such experience-centred models within more context-rich

frameworks which pay attention to social discourses and practices, and cultural

genres. The chapter enumerates the continuing contradictions and continuing

difficulties associated with these moves. The chapter returns to many of the narrative

examples used by Patterson, but adds a number from Squire’s own research, involving

stories that HIV positive South Africans tell about living with the virus.

In Chapter 3, ‘Analysing narrative contexts,’ Ann Phoenix analyses smaller-scale,

interpersonal aspects of ‘context’, in particular, the interpersonal relations between

interviewer and interviewee within which narratives are produced. The chapter

analyses the ways in which narratives are co-constructed within such interpersonal

contexts. The aim is to demonstrate the complexities of understanding that can be

achieved through different levels of analysis of narrative context. The chapter

examines how, in interviews, people both demonstrate awareness of what ‘society’

thinks of them, and also justify their individual positioning, moving in and out of

‘troubled subject positions.’ Such social and emotional contexts also change over

time. To demonstrate this approach, the chapter uses extracts from a study of social

identities, drawn from an interview with a white mother of a child of ‘mixed-race’

parentage. In contexts such as these, narrative analysis provides a means to consider

28
Introduction

the multi-layered ways in which research participants understand their situations.

Chapter 4 is an exchange between Phillida (‘Phil’) Salmon and Cathy Riessman, two

very senior narrative scholars, and reflects Bakthtin’s sentiment: “To live means to

participate in dialogue…”. Here, the reader must confront the ‘messiness’ which

characterises narrative practice, and some of the clarity offered by the previous

chapters begins to fall away. The authors were originally asked to co-write a chapter

on narrative analysis, but they responded by suggesting that instead, they contribute a

written exchange of ideas between them. We accepted this, regarding it as fitting that

their writing about dialogic narrative would take the form of a dialogue. Sadly,

however, Phil Salmon died before the dialogue could be completed, but we have

included it in this collection as we feel that it represents the dynamic and contested

nature of narrative inquiry. ‘Narratives are, in a fundamental sense, co-constructed’

Phil Salmon writes, and Cathy Riessman develops this point further: “The speaker’s

intent is always met with the analyst’s interpretation, which in turn, is situated in

discourses, history, politics and culture. It is never ending, always open to re-

interpretation.’ The meaning of words is never constant, neither for speakers nor

listeners. Narrative research which is based on conversations between people is

invariably a process of ongoing negotiation of meaning. People answer the questions

which they think we are asking them, and we respond to the answers with which we

think they have provided us.

Our understanding of their words is always contingent upon our ability to imagine the

29
Introduction

worlds they are trying to convey. This capacity to see other than what we know

changes in time, appearing both to diminish and to grow: sometimes we can no longer

find the feelings and dreams which were once ours, and at other times, having seen

more of our own life appears to give us greater access to understanding parts of the

lives of others which had once evaded us. And so the meaning we discern in the

narratives we collect and help to create is always in the process of transformation, is

always a becoming.

In Chapter 5, Molly Andrews explores some of the implications of this for narrative

research; in Rosaldo’s words ‘“all interpretations are provisional’” (1989:8). There is

no ‘view from nowhere’ (Nagel 1986), and neither is our positioning constant. Rather,

in the course of our lives passions shift, those things which we thought we knew well

become strange to us, the objects of our affection grow closer to us, or further away.

All of this affects us as people, and as researchers. And when we return to our data,

our new and altered selves often see things differently than we did before. There has

been an increasing tendency amongst narrative researchers to revisit former research

projects, and this chapter reports on some of those journeys. Central to this discussion

is a consideration of what constitutes an ‘adequate interpretation’. Does someone

have special analytic insights simply because they gathered the original data? What

right, if any, do we have to challenge the interpretations which researchers make about

their work? Is there ever an end-point to narrative analysis, or is it always, and only,

‘provisional’? The chapter considers the ongoing relationship between power, history

and biography, and how shifting circumstances both of the individual and of society,

30
Introduction

cause us to understand ourselves and the world which surrounds us in forever

changing ways.

In Chapter 6, Maria Tamboukou picks up the treads of the relationship between

power, discourse and history, and offers a Foucauldian approach for using narratives

to re-imagine history, investigating the interrelationships between narrative,

subjectivity and power. The chapter is divided in three sub-sections, namely, a)

genealogical problematics, a section discussing the particular problems that Foucault’s

theories raise in narrative research; b) questions of method, a section where the ‘how’

of a Foucauldian approach to narrative analysis is under scrutiny; c) emerging themes,

a section where the author draws on her own research to demonstrate some of the

research effects of a Foucauldian approach to narrative analysis. Tamboukou argues

that rather than being considered as representing realitiy/ies, narratives should be seen

as productive: narratives do things, they constitute realities, shaping the social rather

than being determined by it. Indeed narrative research informed by Foucauldian

insights is particularly concerned with the processes, procedures and apparatuses,

whereby truth, power knowledge and desire are interrelated in the production of

narratives and in their effects. But are narrative researchers or practitioners and

professionals who draw on narrative methods always aware of the effects of what they

do? ‘… [Narrative researchers] … know what they do. They frequently know why

they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does’

(paraphrasing Foucault, cited in Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, p.187). The importance

of this question is dramatically illustrated in the chapter which follows.

31
Introduction

In Chapter 7, Margaretta Hydén takes up the theme of narrating sensitive topics by

problematizing the very concept of the sensitive topic itself and showing how it is

relationally and culturally defined, as well as embedded in power/knowledge relations.

Making a useful distinction between sensitive events and sensitive topics, Hydén

focuses on methodological strategies in the process of researching sensitive issues in

contested areas. She argues that narrative analysis is particularly well-suited for this

task, since it gives informants the possibility to develop their points of view

uninterrupted and the researcher the opportunity to analyze their stories as emerging in

the interviews, in its entirety. The context of the interview thus becomes a central site

for the analysis of the chapter, which draws on Hydén’s experiences as a social worker

and as an academic, particularly focusing on her work with battered women. In this

light Hydén addresses the problem of power relations between the interviewer and the

interviewee showing that imbalances and hierarchies are not always well defined

and/or established, Foucault’s model of power becoming the theoretical underpinning

of such an approach. She further discusses the issue of victimization of the

interviewee’s experience and finally points to the risks of the circulation of narratives

on sensitive points beyond the control of the narrator and indeed the researcher, a

problem that is further developed in the final chapter which follows.

In Chapter 8, Paul Gready reflects on the public life of narratives, considering the

effects of narrative research once its results reach the public realm, and how the

possibility of such effects must be factored into the research. Gready particularly

32
Introduction

deals with the methodological problem of whether researchers need to anticipate the

public life of narratives, and if so in what contexts, why and how. In particular, the

chapter focuses on oral testimony narratives, which are an increasingly common focus

of interest and research. Evidence from a range of sources—advocacy networks, truth

and reconciliation processes, Holocaust testimonial video archives—suggests both the

arbitrariness of testimonial uptake and circulation in the public sphere, and challenges

to testifiers’ sense of control and ownership when their testimony takes on an

unanticipated public life. The main argument made here is that research on public

narratives, without an understanding of the public sphere, of the unsafe spaces

surrounding the (sometimes) safe spaces of delivery, can become a violation of trust.

With voice comes power; the lack of control over representation in human rights

reports, the courtroom, the media or elsewhere, marks a return to powerlessness. In

this context, to speak is not a one-off event, but a process, spanning various narrations

and interpretations. Using case studies, the chapter outlines the methodological

challenges posed by the increasingly public life of personal narratives, suggests ways

of addressing these problems methodologically, and details how individuals and

organisations are reclaiming control and ownership over their own life stories- thus

outlining a methodological ethics and politics for contemporary testimonial research.

We have ordered the chapters in this way because for us this sequencing was most

compelling, developing as it does from basic models of narrative practice to the less

concrete and ethically pregnant questions of what happens to our work after it is

released it into the public world. We are of course aware that readers may choose to

33
Introduction

dip in and out of the collection in a different sequence, depending upon their interests

and preoccupations, and thus we would also like to suggest a few alternative ways of

clustering the chapters.

A number of chapters deal with what is referred to as ‘sensitive issues.’ Although

Gready, and Hyden and Overlien deal with this topic most explicitly, there are a

number of other chapters which also explore some of the difficulties which come with

this territory. Sometimes sensitive topics reveal themselves not in what is said, but in

what cannot be said, or cannot be expressed coherently. Phil Salmon’s piece opens

with an attempted suicide, and immediately conveys the cost of telling stories which

are missing their connective tissue. Percy’s suicide attempt makes no sense to us

because it does not appear to be endowed with meaning by Percy. His story doesn’t

‘work’ because he does not offer his listener an account of his actions which can

render them ‘socially and culturally comprehensible’. It is perhaps this very aspect of

narrative deficiency which has contributed to his attempt to end his life. Ann

Phoenix, in her chapter on ‘mixed-race’ children, discusses how individuals establish

‘an entitlement to talk about racism.’ Clare, who is white, describes herself as one

who has experienced racism, and indeed feels that in some situations she has

experienced more ‘prejudice’ than her black husband. Key to this discussion are

issues relating to what is considered is considered ‘sensitive’, who can claim to have

insight into this, and how issues of power and positionality enter into the interview

situation. In Squire’s chapter on South African HIV stories we see how individuals

meet the challenge to narrate experiences which are both everyday and life-

34
Introduction

threatening.

Issues of power and narratability run throughout many of the chapters. Maria

Tamboukou adopts a Foucauldian analysis to her work with autobiographical

narratives of women artists, highlighting the potential of genealogical work to uncover

“new questions to interrogating truths of our world.” One of the benefits of adopting

such a lens is that it recognises the forever changing circumstances of our lives, and of

our world. This theme is demonstrated in the exchange between Phil Salmon and

Cathy Riessman, both in terms of the issues which they raise, and also in Phil

Salmon’s unforeseen death, which renders the communication with a different layer of

meaning than it would have otherwise contained. Molly Andrews also explores the

theme of the changing questions which guide our research, and the dynamic nature not

only of our interpretations, but of our data themselves.

Wendy Patterson’s opening chapter of the book helps us to think carefully about what

constitutes a narrative, and she demonstrates what can be lost if one focuses

exclusively on a linear model of narrative structure. The story of Percy, refereed to

above, demonstrates the importance we attach to apparent coherence and meaning of

narratives. His tale doesn’t work because it is not offered in a cultural framework

which is recognisable, and hence he is abandoned by others, and even by us, his

potential audience. Context cannot be stripped away, nor can be separated from

questions of meaning. Squire’s chapter draws our attention to need for sensitivity

towards cultural genres, and Gready’s chapter points to the importance of context, not

35
Introduction

only in terms of understanding the narrative, but also in terms of the interpretive

community. When we are conducting our research, what is the context in which it

will be read, and how should this feed into decisions about what to write, and what to

leave out?

The question of how we hear, and often fail to hear, aspects of the narratives we

encounter, and how we decipher their meaning, is an issue which is addressed from a

number of different angles throughout the book. We as narrative researchers are

crucially a part of the data we collect; our presence is imprinted upon all that we do. It

is left to us then to determine how we account for ourselves in the work that we do, to

consider the impact of our own positioning and that of others – e.g. those whose lives

lie at the centre of our research; our intended audience – on our scholarship. All of the

contributors to this volume stand somewhere in relation to the topics which we are

exploring, and reflexivity upon this positioning is a part of each of the chapters.

There are yet many other pathways through these chapters; we have attempted to

outline but a few. It is our hope that the chapters in this book will provide the readers

with much food for thought, and that in the tradition of good narrative research, that

they will raise at least as many questions as they answer.

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1
For a take on the interactions of these traditions through some specific texts, see

Hyvarinen (2006forthcoming)
2
I am not considering here the much larger field of journals and books within the

humanities and philosophy that were ‘cross-read’ by social researchers – journals such

as Radical Philosophy, Screen and Signs and books by Coward, Heath, Jameson,

Eagleton, Rose.
3
This form of argument is apparent in for instance Hollway’s earlier work in

Changing The Subject (Henriques et al., 1984).

4
Ricoeur’s (1984) work has had perhaps the greatest effect in promoting this

understanding of narrative
5
the more agentic versions and interpretations of
6
Spivak (1993) has famously objected to this overuse of strategic essentialism in

situations of theoretical and political difficulty

7
Some ‘small story’ researchers associate themselves with this postmodern

perspective. However, the association is not generally accompanied by any

theorisation of linguistic or subject indeterminacy, or of the larger place of discourses,

to support it. The ‘small stories’ position does not, then, seem to be necessarily a

poststructural or postmodern one.

8
To a limited extent, psychoanalytic understandings of such emotionality allows that

signs of it appear within narratives, as do other contemporary but determinedly non-

psychoanalytic frameworks for understanding desire (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980)

9
The chronological and semantic spaces which such unconscious proximities span,

depends on the psychoanalytic framework with which you work

46