Exploring neglected narratives: understanding vulnerability in narrative inquiry

Abstract

Framed by a question around vulnerability in narrative inquiries, we show the multiple ways that vulnerability is evident in narrative inquiry. We take up the concerns around vulnerability to show how, as narrative inquirers, we are searching to find ways to think with vulnerability and with what others have called neglected narratives. Drawing on one study with Aboriginal youth and their families, we make visible how questions of vulnerability need to be considered in framing of research puzzles, selecting participants, and moving from field to field texts to interim and final research texts. In composing final research texts, we struggled with the notions of vulnerability that are placed on Aboriginal youth by labels and single stories. These assigned vulnerabilities lead to interpretations that could create experiences of judgment. We returned again to the importance of making experiences visible, in order to shift understandings of who Aboriginal youth are, and are becoming, in a complex world that will not write over or ‘erase their Indianness’ nor their or our vulnerabilities. We showed the ways questions of vulnerability are inextricably interwoven into narrative inquiry.