Authoritative Narrative Research Articles

For the people: How we make online LAM collections more democratized

The article discusses how digitization in libraries, museums, and archives (LAM) can become more democratic. Digitization within LAM scholarship has been seen historically as a democratic act because it provides universal access to cultural heritage content, breaks down authoritative narratives, and enables participation from users. The article critiques the misconception that online collections democratize artifact information for public consumption and explores the ways in which LAM institutions fall short of living up to their democratic ideals when it comes to digital collections projects. Inspired by others with similar critiques, the authors discuss how LAM institutions can better fulfill the ideal of accessible and equitable access to their collections. The article emphasizes the importance of five areas of digital collections projects: system design, metadata practices, digitization selection and prioritization, labor, and user participation and engagement. The widespread misconception that digitization and digital collections are democratizing is a result of institutional biases that have masked undemocratic processes and systems which the authors strive to expose.

A true crime story: The role of space, time, and identity in narrating criminal authority

Abstract This article presents a theoretical and methodological argument for employing a narrative-based approach to explore criminal organisations’ (COs) claims to political authority, accompanied by an empirical example. International Relations scholarship is increasingly interested in the role narratives play in political meaning-making processes, with violent non-state actors (VNSAs) beginning to occupy a central space in such investigations. This work has contributed important insights into how VNSAs, such as terrorists and insurgents, mobilise narratives to challenge state authority. However, this literature still needs to take stock of groups that do not directly challenge the state but rather live within it. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary theory and using the Sicilian Mafia as a case study, I show that COs exercise and construct their narratives of political authority by reappropriating the state’s key constitutive narratives of space, time, and identity. By reflecting the same form of (statist) political imagination via alternative spatial, temporal, and identity configurations, these groups simultaneously reject and reproduce modern articulations of political authority in their spatio-temporal and identity dimensions.

Reconstructing Transnational History

Web-based interactive documentaries offer an innovative approach to reconstructing history, allowing users to explore historical content within a specific thematic context freely. This paper explores how transnational shared history, exemplified by World War I (WWI), is integrated into such documentaries, using the interactive documentary A Global Guide to the First World War (2014) as a case study. This documentary, a collaboration between the Guardian, historians, and the Imperial War Museum, employs interactive technologies and transnational historical narratives. It presents seven video chapters that allow audiences to explore WWI from a global perspective, going beyond the traditional single-narrative viewpoint. The interactive sections are based on a well-designed digital world map that provides users with diverse perspectives on the war, facilitating a broader emotional resonance. However, while ensuring authenticity, the documentary's use of authoritative narrative strategies tends to create a sense of alienation among viewers. It underscores the importance of incorporating personal narratives alongside official histories to foster deeper engagement and understanding. The paper argues for a more nuanced approach that balances the authoritative historical narratives with individual perspectives. This study demonstrates that the representation of transnational shared history and multiple perspectives is highly compatible with the interactive technology of web documentaries. The paper concludes that these digital platforms can effectively facilitate global understanding of shared historical events while encouraging critical and dialectical historical reflection.

The Critical Counterpoints of Dataveillance Artists: Contesting the Authoritative Narratives of the Intelligence Community

AbstractArtists provide critical counterpoints to the assumptions held by private contractors, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies about dataveillance, i.e. the use of datasets to monitor, predict, and control behavior. Whereas analysts tend to see data as “raw” facts and the analytical process as narrowly empirical, dataveillance artists regard data as constructed artifacts and remain open to a multiplicity of epistemological approaches. This article discusses the work of ten post-Snowden dataveillance artists who enable critical reflection on the capacity of automated dataveillance to represent complex and indeterminate social phenomena while refuting a singular, authoritative story about dataveillance.

Unearthing the Dark Side of the Law. Narratives of Law and Authority in the Tatarbunar Trials

This article examines a series of events that are generally known in historiography as the “Tatarbunar Uprising” – an armed rebellion that took place over ten days in September 1924 in south-eastern Bessarabia. I am also interested in the aftermath of those events as well as in their legal and memorial afterlife. My attempt is to reason through and to clarify the legal and historio­graphical construction of narratives of sovereign power as they emerge from the archives of the trial as well as that of the preceding and subsequent military and police operations. The reflection I will conduct here is indeed grounded in the historical context of 1923-1925, but the jurisprudential and comparative legal and political analysis I will deploy here has more general reach insofar as it aims to grasp some more general points about the status of legality under the conditions of emergency.

On (De)Constructing an Authoritative Narrative

The Letter of Isis to Horus is a brief (and precious) piece of Greco-Egyptian alchemy. Beyond the technical interest of the processes it describes, its prologue is noteworthy for its intricate and surprising mixture of Greek, Hebrew, and Egyptian elements. In it, alchemy is presented as a secret knowledge of divine origin, which the goddess Isis received from an angel who fell in love with her. This preface is, therefore, a key element in the study of the discursive mechanisms and arguments through which early alchemical tradition attempted to bestow authority on its writings and to justify the Holy Art label that is often conferred on this discipline. This article analyses these mechanisms and arguments according to the patterns around which this narrative was articulated.

Casting heroes and victims of disaster events: representations of race and gender in Hurricane Harvey front page news images

ABSTRACT Mainstream press coverage of public disaster events produce mythological narratives of heroism, sacrifice and authority. Press coverage of Hurricane Harvey in the late summer of 2017 proved to be an important historical moment in disaster coverage. A visual textual analysis of 106 front page photos of newspapers from August 28, 2017, to September 4, 2017 was conducted. The results show that news media represented people of color as displaced migrants and women as damsels in distress, while white men were represented as saviors and caretakers who brought order back to the chaos surrounding the storm’s social impact in the Houston community.

Agitation at the margins

The confusions, intimacies, and distress of war are common to the experience of journalists reporting from war zones, yet the professional conventions of war reportage erase these experiences from the commodity journalists produce. Journalists are left struggling with a twinned burden: the violence that saturates journalistic life, and the demands of an authoritative narrative genre. Based on two years of fieldwork in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, this article tracks what the news must expel, assessing a tension between journalist and journalism as the pressures of war and its commodification bear down. Contrary to scholarship emphasizing the separation of experience from output, I show how the production of war news is precipitated by what is occluded from that news, finding in journalists’ dreams, jokes, and traumas an archive that both transgresses and perpetuates the reality represented in journalism. Experience and output, I argue, form a relationship essential to the practice of war reportage, and to the production of a social fantasy of what war is. What disturbs this dominant fantasy is displaced by war reportage but never disappeared.

Diverse Perspective of the Shared History

This paper discusses how the interactive documentary A Global Guide to the First World War (Francesca Panetta, 2014) effectively integrates interactive technology with historical narratives of the war through a three-way collaboration between news organizations, historians and digital materials from the Imperial War Museum from the perspective of transnational shared history. The paper argues that the different images, videos, news reports and audio clips reflect diverse aspects of common historical themes in the documentary. First, in its seven video chapters, the museum's audiovisual archive covers many countries, and audiences can watch videos related to the WWI alongside historians' commentaries that explain how different nations fought in the war; second, the interactive part is based on an elaborate digital world map, and users can view audio clips, photocopied newspapers and other materials of the war under various web interaction options, and all of the above can be accessed in multiple languages. The natural and direct feeling brought to audiences is the understanding of the WWI experienced by different peoples and countries with a global perspective, instead of the traditional single narrative perspective. Thus, the documentary is a testimony to the shared history of the war. I suggest that the shared historical events and interactive technology make it easier for viewers from different cultural backgrounds to understand this work, and trigger a wide range of historical resonance. Visual media has always led people to leave events in their memories that they did not experience. Although most viewers did not personally experience WWI, historians' commentaries, museums' audiovisual histories and the Guardian's authentic old stories give us credible evidence of the past. The traumatic memories that the images bring to the audiences create an effect of sympathy for the pain of war and the responsibility to fight against it, which transcends racial and national identification. However, this transnational empathy is quite limited. The reason is that the documentary employs an official authoritative narrative strategy rather than the perspective of the individual. It somehow creates a sense of alienation for the viewers, who realize that these are collages of archival records rather than a kind of historical memory closely related to themselves.

Artefacts, Archives, and Documentation in the Relational Museum

Artefacts, Archives, and Documentation in the Relational Museum

Diasporic Archives and Hauntological Accretions

Centering on two recent participatory archive projects, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn’s The Making of An Archive (2014-present), and Regent Park Film Festival’s Home Made Visible (2017-2019), this essay examines how diasporic archives “densify” authoritative records, and allow us to think generatively about archival movements and accretions. Both projects gathered and digitised archives from members of diasporic and racialised communities. Through public calls and workshops soliciting amateur archivists’ personal and familial still and moving image troves, these projects prioritised excavating and inscribing quotidian and ephemeral records as a response to Canadian multiculturalism’s imposed silences. The essay approaches diaspora – and diasporic archives – not (just) through rubrics of loss and obsolescence, but through the concept of hauntological thickening, arguing that these two projects intervene on authoritative and singular archival narratives by densifying the latter with occluded histories, affects, and textural traces of transfer. It also examines how quotidian visual records offer hauntological refractions of official narratives, and become vehicles for imbrications of personal, familial, and national histories and discourses. Finally, the essay concludes with an exploration of how the archives engage audiences through affective and sensorial registers.

Seeking Balance in How the International Criminal Court Communicates Prosecution and Defence Narratives to the Public

Abstract In the aftermath of atrocities, international criminal trials become forums for telling stories about the alleged crimes. These stories are presented by the prosecution and defence, before being distilled into a judicial narrative by the judges. The International Criminal Court (ICC) faces the challenge of communicating this plurality of narratives to the public, who want to know in certain terms what crimes happened, why they happened and who was responsible. The decisive answers to these questions are in the judicial narrative, but this is unavailable until many years into the proceedings. For most of the time, the ICC has to find a coherent way of presenting the conflicting narratives of the prosecution and defence to the outside world. This article argues that neither party can claim to have more accurate narratives than the other, so their accounts should be heard by the public equally. The value of communicating their narratives is not to hold them up as the truth, but to demonstrate how the legal process can accommodate competing versions of events and arrive at the authoritative narrative after hearing both sides and testing their evidence. The public may currently have a distorted impression of this process at the ICC given that the prosecution, as an organ, can amplify its narratives in public using institutional resources not available to the defence. The article recommends providing the defence an equal platform for communication as is offered to the prosecution. While this comes with some risks, such as potentially platforming denialist narratives, these can be mitigated through, for instance, contextualizing the narratives that come from the Court. In any event, the risks are outweighed by the potential benefits, including improving the perception of the Court’s impartiality and legitimacy in communities where the ICC might be lacking it most.

John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman: Critiquing Victorian Values through Metafiction

This article explores John Fowles’ employment of Metafiction in the French Lieutenant’s Woman. It makes the case that Fowles’ metafiction is motivated by the author’s postmodernist desire to comment upon, undermine and critique the dominant and authoritative narratives in history, the understanding of history and in literary history. Fowles’ novel’s metafiction critiques the Victorian ideology through interweaving metafictional elements into a novel set in the Victorian era and, at least initially, following a conventional kind of plot premise. The Victorian ideology is critiqued through a metafictional reimagining of tropes of Victorian fiction. The novel breaks through the constraints of Victorian fiction in such a way as to fragment itself into multiple conflicting endings. Each of these endings violate the conventions of Victorian fiction in form and content, whilst remaining historically rooted and plausible. The multiple endings expose the fictitiousness of the novel and express John Fowles’ beliefs about the absurdity of human social life.

Techno-aesthetic ceramic traditions and the effective communication of power on the North Coast of Peru

ABSTRACT In this paper, I examine the relationship between technological and aesthetic shifts in Andean North Coast prestige ceramics and sociopolitical change by focusing on pottery as a form of information technology in a world without formal writing. To do so, I begin by defining two techno-aesthetic macro-traditions to emphasize the interconnections among technique and visual appearance, semantics and aesthetics. I then demonstrate how these two traditions waxed and waned in complementary fashion for millennia, and I set the shifts in their popularity within their broader sociopolitical contexts. In investigating technological choices and their concomitant visual qualities, I explore the interplay between technological, aesthetic, and sociopolitical transformations, with a focus on the changing role of ceramics as media for communicating ideological narratives of power and authority.

Review of “Iraqi Refugees in the United States: The Enduring Effects of the War on Terror”

Scholars working in refugee studies have long been concerned to address what is called refugeeness. Conditions of existence in which persons deemed legally eligible for refugee status are subject to social, political, economic and cultural processes, and practices of reception which divest them of a historical and agentive identity. In the contemporary narrative of Western moral authority, refugees are diminished persons; objects to be rescued and re-invested with integrative interventions appropriate to the receiving state. Refugeeness is compounded by globally instituted distinctions, which authorize refugees only as involuntary movers, in contrast to voluntary migrants. The refugee/migrant distinction bolsters the notion that refuge confers legitimate victim status—objects of conflict or persecution—that is open to abuse by “voluntary migrant pariahs in disguise.” Refugees are therefore compelled to negotiate this victim-pariah duality in which their status as legitimate victims is implicitly called into question and must be continuously proved. Refugeeness presents a challenging research terrain for scholars in that the specificities of refugee experiences as historical actors should be validated without bolstering the victim-pariah construct, particularly in Western reception contexts.

Apostolicity – The question of Continuity and Authority

This article was presented as a research paper for the Ecumenical Theology Course at the Ecumenical Institute Bossey in Switzerland. Apostolicity and the relation to the apostles and the early Christians is a big discussed topic in several ecumenical dialogues. First the article analysis the method and context of five different ecumenical dialogue documents. It goes from multilateral Faith and Order documents like “Baptism, Eucharist, Ministry” and “The Church Towards a Common Vision” over the “Porvoo Common Statement” to two Lutheran/Roman-Catholic documents. Then it identifies some characteristic dimensions of apostolicity and brings the results from the dialogues together. A reading of apostolicity as narrative of continuity and authority in relation to god and Jesus Christ occurs through the chapters. Especially in the question of ministry apostolicity plays an important and differentiated role. The article focusses in the end on the episcopal ministry and develops the differentiation of horizontal and vertical apostolic continuity. Apostolicity is described as a gift of god and becomes obviously through gods action in the ordination act. Finally, the article summarises all results, ideas and new approaches.

From Bricks to Clicks: How Digital Heritage Initiatives Create a New Ecosystem for Cultural Heritage and Collective Remembering

Cultural heritage institutions, such as museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies, are increasingly using digital heritage initiatives and social media platforms to connect and interact with their heritage communities. This creates a new memory ecosystem whereby heritage communities are invited to contribute, participate with, and share more of what they are interested in collectively remembering, rather than simply accepting the authoritative narratives of heritage institutions, which raises questions about what this means for cultural heritage writ large and whose versions of the past these heritage communities will hold onto as their digital inheritance. The primary contributions of this article are to provide both an extended view of the issue by building on several qualitative studies involving in-depth interviews and digital observations with eight cultural heritage communities over a five-year period and to better understand how their digital heritage initiatives are creating a new ecosystem for cultural heritage and collective remembering.

The use of public houses as a collective representation of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ireland

Pubs have served as a collective representation through which the collective identity of ‘Irish society’ has been articulated during the crisis of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. As such they offer a case study of how meaning making occurs in contemporary periods of social crisis. While the neoliberal era is widely interpreted as period involving a process of desymbolisation in which meaning giving traditions are undermined, in this period of social crisis long-established and authoritative narratives drawn from collective memory circulated to articulate the meaning of the pandemic for the collective identity in the sense of its nature, character, boundaries, ‘others’, and moral duties and sacrifices that membership implied. Highly stereotyped images of the sacred moral core of the collective as represented by publicans who embodied qualities of age and maturity, rural, cultural-nationalist identity and a post Land War ideal of community-oriented owner-proprieters appeared. Similarly conventional representations of the immoral enemies within, who threaten to morally and literally infect the community, can be seen in representations of venues and drinkers who embody youth, the urban crowd and mixing. The ‘other’ through which identity is articulated against was represented through Britishness, which was shown as the source of the undesirable aspects of modernity.

Mapping Senufo: Reframing Questions, Reevaluating Sources, and Reimagining a Digital Monograph

AbstractMapping Senufo: Art, Evidence, and the Production of Knowledge– an in-progress, collaborative, born-digital publication – will offer a model for joining theories about the construction of identities and the politics of knowledge production with research and publication practice. In this article, we examine how computational methods have led us to reframe research questions, reevaluate sources, and reimagine the form of a digital monograph. We also demonstrate how our use of digital technologies, attention to iteration, and collaborative mode of working have generated fresh insights into a corpus of arts identified as Senufo, the nature of evidence for art-historical research, and digital publication. We posit that the form of a digital publication itself can bring processes of knowledge construction to the fore and unsettle expectations of a tidy, authoritative narrative.

UN Guiding Principles at 10: Permeating Narratives or Yet Another Silo?

AbstractThe endorsement of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) triggered a remarkable process accelerating the recognition of human rights responsibilities for corporations in law and governance. Perhaps even more important is the emergence of an authoritative narrative on business and human rights (BHR), which arguably has the potential to overcome the often-fragmented approach to global issues. This article discusses the degree to which the BHR narrative has been able to penetrate competing powerful narratives that shape societal and regulatory responses. To what extent is the need to address the responsibility and accountability of corporations for human rights violations acknowledged? This is an especially pertinent question where it concerns imminent major global challenges such as climate change, which poses one of the greatest threats to human rights. Two major milestones of the last decade in the area of (environmental) sustainability are analysed: the Paris Climate Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals. What role does the BHR narrative play in this context?