Small Stories Research and Narrative Criminology: ‘Plotting’ an Alliance

Abstract

Small stories research, a framework for narrative and identities-in-interaction analysis, was developed with the intention of providing a critical analytical way for interrogating the focus of narrative studies on interview-generated, coherent and teller-led stories and the marginalisation of fleeting counter-stories, emergent in everyday-life environments. Since then, it has experienced an unforeseen, albeit welcome and enriching, uptake by different fields (e.g. sports sociology, narrative psychology, organisational research, etc.) and stakeholders: from counselling on the go for homeless people, narrative inquiry into Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patients, to facilitating reflections of pre-service school teachers, designing educational material for programmes for minority children in Greece, etc. Picking up on this outreach and diversification, in this chapter, I will ‘recommend’ small stories research as a perspective within narrative criminology, that is well suited to uncovering and analysing the contextually sensitive co-construction of stories and any moments of agency, resistance, performance but also ambivalence, dilemmas and contradictions for their tellers. Employing tools and modes of analysis of small stories research facilitates the inquiry into this delicate identity work through stories as well as the scrutiny of the relationships between personal and collective stories, as those are nowadays inadvertently shaped by social media processes of distribution and amplification.