Collective Narratives Research Articles

The occupational wellbeing of people experiencing homelessness

ABSTRACTThis paper reports findings of a study that utilised an occupational perspective to explore how well-being was achieved and sustained by the occupations of people experiencing homelessness in Australia. Thirty three in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with homeless individuals in a regional city in Australia. Data from the interviews were thematically analysed to understand the relationship between well-being, as defined by the individual, and the occupations engaged in by people experiencing homelessness. The findings are reported here as three collective narratives that illustrate the experiences of diverse groups within the homelessness population explored in this study. The study demonstrates how occupations go beyond individual experience and choice to explore the social and cultural value of occupations as a means to well-being. The findings are discussed in relation to three key themes that emerged from the study: survival, self-identity and social connectedness. These interconnected concepts complement the existing occupational science literature, and offer a preliminary framework for understanding and improving well-being for disadvantaged and marginalised people where occupations are restricted by societal forces. The findings support the urgent need to redirect services to support occupational opportunities that are socially and culturally valued and enhance survival, self-identity and connectedness of homeless people.

Crossing a Line: A narrative of risk-taking by older women serving as caregivers

BackgroundCaregiving carried out by adults for other adults is increasing around the world as the demographics of many industrialized countries shift toward an older population with escalating care needs toward the end of life. Although much has been written about caregiving, few studies document the experiences of providing care as narrated by the caregivers. AimTo explore the everyday experiences of older adults serving as primary informal caregivers to significant others. MethodsA process of narrative inquiry was used via repeated interviews with three older women caregivers providing care to family members or friends. The data were analyzed using storyboarding techniques and identifying critical turning points, culminating in a poetic transcription of the resulting narrative. ResultsThese caregivers describe a tension that exists across their experiences and communication with authorities on whom they rely for guidance and collaboration. Situations in which this tension pushes the caregivers to act in ways that represent risk to themselves or their care recipients are central to the collective narrative. Conclusion and significanceThe everyday experiences of older adult caregivers include not only familiar care routines, but also advocacy on behalf of care recipients and negotiations with external authorities, resulting at times in unwelcome risk-taking. Their narrative warrants attention due to the lack of power described by caregivers when acting on behalf of their care recipients and the need for those in authority to recognize their dilemma.

Mediação de lendas urbanas na Biblioteca Pública Municipal Lupércio Luppi

Aborda a mediação da leitura e a contação de histórias como atividades essenciais para as crianças. Destaca que a leitura da palavra escrita está associada a outras leituras possíveis de serem realizadas. Salienta que os familiares, os professores e os bibliotecários são os principais mediadores de leitura na vida das crianças. Defende que as lendas urbanas são narrativas culturais e coletivas, produto do conhecimento popular, que podem ser utilizadas na mediação da leitura. Tem como objetivos investigar a mediação de lendas urbanas na Biblioteca Pública Municipal Lupércio Luppi e demonstrar o significado da apropriação das lendas urbanas pelas crianças nas atividades de contação de histórias. Como método de pesquisa foi utilizado a observação e análise de uma contação de lendas urbanas da cidade de Londrina. Conclui que a mediação da leitura contribui para o desenvolvimento da criança, assim como para a formação do gosto pela leitura, sendo necessário o envolvimento dos familiares, dos professores e dos bibliotecários.

Integrating Systems Thinking and Storytelling

This paper explores the role of design in conflict resolution when doing so means balancing burdened pasts with present uncertainties. To prove its relevance in today’s complex problem spaces, design cannot remain stagnant; it must evolve alongside the pace of development. Designing within complexity is unprecedented. Yet, design can define structures that guide an understanding of this complexity. The methodology and case study described in this paper explore how systems thinking, storytelling and grounded theory can contribute to this understanding. The methodology aims to combine subjective perspectives with systemic analyses to create a collective narrative that reveals the multitude of individual understandings of conflicts. Ultimately, this methodology does not attempt to resolve conflict; instead, it aims to provide an in-depth diagnosis of a wicked problem and question the role of design therein.

Comparación del valor democrático de las discusiones de Facebook entre perfiles de candidatos políticos españoles a las elecciones generales de 2011

El artículo examina el valor democrático de los comentarios ciudadanos en los perfiles de Facebook de tres candidatos políticos españoles durante la campaña de las Elecciones Generales 2011 a través de una operacionalización de la democracia deliberativa. Los resultados reflejan que las conversaciones no cumplen los criterios deliberativos, pero que aun así revisten beneficios democráticos, como la autoexpresión ciudadana, la socialización democrática y el refuerzo de la cohesión social entre activistas y simpatizantes. Además, reflejan que el valor democrático varía ligeramente en función del tamaño del partido donde se produce. La conversación en los muros de candidatos que pertenecen a partidos mayoritarios está orientada hacia la autoexpresión, pero también confronta a los hablantes esporádicamente con la diversidad. Por su parte, la discusión en el muro de la candidata de un partido minoritario es ideológicamente homogénea, pero incluye más interacción discursiva, permitiendo desarrollar argumentario y cultivar la cohesión social en condiciones discursivas favorables.

Making post-Soviet counterpublics: the aesthetics ofLimonkaand the National-Bolshevik Party

This article focuses on the shaping of the aesthetics and ideology of Eduard Limonov's National-Bolshevik Party (NBP) through the pages of the radical newspaperLimonka.In order to study the making of the NBP as a political and intellectual community, the piece discussesLimonka's editorial line, its graphic style, and the alternative cultural canon that this radical publication promoted, as well as several interviews with National-Bolshevik activists involved in this process. During its first years of existence,Limonkaproposed a selection of controversial artistic, literary, and political role models, and the creation of an alternative fashion and lifestyle. The article argues that by provocatively combining totalitarian symbols, the aesthetics and posture of the historical avant-gardes, and Western counterculture,Limonkaproduced a collective narrative that contributed to the shaping of a new language of political protest in post-Soviet Russia. This resulted in a complex combination ofstiob, a form of parody that involves an over-identification with its own object, and a neo-romantic impulse. This new discursive mode, which the article defines as “post-Soviet militantstiob”should be seen as part of a series of tactics of radical resistance to what the National-Bolsheviks saw as the dominant neoliberal discourse of the mid-1990s.

What happened and why? Considering the role of truth and memory in peace education curricula

This paper is an exploration of challenges arising in the interplay between a standardised peace education curriculum and a localised post-conflict setting. Drawing on interview data from two Kenyan schools, the paper explores the reception of peace education initiatives implemented in Kenya following the post-election violence of 2007/2008 through the voices of teachers and pupils. The analysis identifies two patterns emerging from the pupils’ point of view; firstly an engagement with narratives of conflict addressing what happened during the outbreak of violence, and secondly an awareness of collective narratives of the past, centred on the question of why the conflict broke out. The data identifies a gap between the knowledge and perspectives of the pupils, and the level of engagement by the curricula and teachers in the same issues. Finally, the paper explores some implications of these diverging needs and perspectives in relation to the design and implementation of peace education curricula, particularly in relation to providing sufficient support for the teachers.

Post-earthquake community capacity and vulnerability reduction at the small-scale local level: collective narratives from Greece, Japan, and New Zealand

Communities are often overlooked in the course of disaster recovery planning, particularly in the area of social capital resources that can help increase the collective's resilience to risks and hazards. This research explores what collective narratives from the victims of localised earthquake events reveal about community capacity and vulnerability reduction at the small-scale local level. Study participants were recruited from populations living in three earthquake-affected areas in Japan, Greece, and New Zealand. The findings showed varied community and governmental capacity to reduce vulnerability and respond to earthquake events, differing levels of government and community capacity to provide for civil needs, and varied levels of community assistance to residents following the disasters. The implications are that planning and effort within a community can spur development of small-scale capacity to augment government efforts or mitigate government failures. Further research is required to determine applicability to other cultural paradigms and types of disasters.

Theoretical bases for analyzing the organic process of collective narrative and storytelling in advertising

Collective narrative or storytelling in advertising is a new form of narrative in which each fragment gives meaning to the whole story at the same time as conveying brand identity to the consumer. These modern collective stories build a narrative using bases which are similar to those used by our ancestors. This article presents a series of elements which constitute the beginnings of a standard methodology of study in the construction of a collective narrative as a sales communication tool. These distinctive components form a conclusive part of the similarities and differences observed in the processes of collective narrative throughout history and the possible applications of storytelling in advertising. In order to do this, we have revised the history of collective narrative from its most primitive form through to the present day. We have also analyzed the connection with current transmedia storytelling in order to look for similar features which allow us to identify basic patterns, as well as the interest in knowing about developments from the origins of group stories through to storytelling in advertising today. In the second part of the investigation, four examples of collective and transmedia narrative processes were examined: The Button Experiment, Twitch Plays, Pandemic and Decode Jay Z with Bing. As a result, we have defined three common stages in the building process of collective narrative, including storytelling in advertising, and we have generated application models which differentiate group stories for sales purposes from general collective narrative with the intention of building a useful guide for studying these systems from an academic perspective. The results may be presented in a simple form but their usefulness in confirmed and they provide a base on which to continue the investigation.

The Many in Action and Thought: Towards a Poetics of the Collective in Narrative

Starting out with the observation that collective storytelling has only recently received sufficient narratological attention, this article outlines the pervasiveness of plural subjects in factual narratives and their comparative lack of salience in fictional texts. Discussing the collective on the levels of agency, mind, and narration, the article examines the alternation between plural and singular referents, using crowd scenes as illustrative example. It then turns to we-texts and the ambiguities of the first-person plural pronoun both on the plot and the narrational levels. The final section of the article compares factual and fictional collective narration, emphasizing how fictional we-narratives exceed familiar grammatical constraints in order to achieve particular semantic and narrative effects. The essay is a preliminary step in the development of a poetics of collective narrative, both factual and fictional.

A Collective Narrative: Documentary Architectural Photography of the Great Hall of the People

A Collective Narrative: Documentary Architectural Photography of the Great Hall of the People

Post-earthquake community capacity and vulnerability reduction at the small-scale local level: collective narratives from Greece, Japan, and New Zealand

Post-earthquake community capacity and vulnerability reduction at the small-scale local level: collective narratives from Greece, Japan, and New Zealand

Stocking up on Fish Mox: a Systematic Analysis of Cultural Narratives about Self-medicating in Online Forums.

This study is a systematic review of cultural narratives that drive American belief in the value and efficacy of stocking up on fish antibiotics for human consumption. Popularized by “doomsday prepper” forums and survivalist medical professionals' online videos, this narrative suggests that in some scenarios humans may benefit from such treatments—even as they note its contraindication to mainstream public health advice. Discussions in crowd-sourcing forums however, reveal that in practice Americans are using them as a form of home remedy to treat routine infections without missing work or to make up for gaps in insurance coverage. This article argues for greater attention to what makes it plausible and reasonable to treat human conditions with animal medications. It suggests that public health initiatives should address such decisions as emerging from a rational analysis of social and economic conditions rather than dismissing such practices as dangerous to population and individual health outcomes. As social scientists of medicine have long argued, collective narratives about health and medicine illustrate deeply the broader contexts in which communities understand and experience bodily state and shape how communities interact with public health institutions and respond to medical expertise. This study surveys online discussions about “fish mox” to show how participants contest medical expertise and promote a more distributed form of populist expertise. As such, consuming fish mox is both panacea for health inequality and a critique of health institutions for perpetrating such stratification.

Transitioning together: Narratives of sexuality and intimacy by partners of trans people

Research into trans people’s sexuality is growing, yet research into the sexuality of cisgender partners, in the context of their partners’ transition, is sparse. This project presents an in-depth narrative analysis of six cisgender women partnered with trans and non-binary identified individuals. The participants ranged between 35 and 71 years old, were all UK residents and held a range of sexual identities. The findings are presented through the collective narratives the participants told. The main story plot that emerged was ‘the quest to stay together’ which is told through sub plots of identity, the body and invisibility. The analysis includes the ways in which narrators drew on, and/or challenged, social discourses of gender and sexuality and also performative aspects of identity. Clinical implications include the importance of therapists enquiring about what a sexual identity means for the individual and the value of addressing the topics of loss and invisibility in therapeutic work with this client group.

We-Narratives: The Distinctiveness of Collective Narration

This article establishes a definition of we-narrative based on a plural type of narrator, and in doing so challenges many of the presuppositions in the recent work on we-narratives. Despite an increased interest in this mode of narration, a definition of specifically first-person plural narrative as an independent narrative form has not yet been suggested and we-narrators have been mostly measured by the I-narrator’s yardstick. I propose instead to consider we-narrators as an independent type of a collective character narrator that distinguishes we-narratives as such from we-discourses in otherwise first-person narratives. To demonstrate that we-narrative exists as an independent narrative form, I will combine an analysis of three case studies—short stories by William Faulkner and Joyce Carol Oates as well as a novel by Joshua Ferris—with a discussion of existing contributions to the topic. I will rely on earlier work by Susan Lanser, Uri Margolin, and Franz Karl Stanzel and draw on contributions by Monika Fludernik, Brian Richardson, and Amit Marcus. A formal definition of we-narrative is required, I argue, to productively analyze the features and rhetorical effects specific to we-narrative in terms of its own conventions of narration and without linking these to the classical form of first-person narrative.

In search of a new identity: An institutional consultation at a sub-acute inpatient unit in a general hospital.

Hospitals are constantly morphing under the pressure of ever-evolving health care technologies, procedures, and reimbursement practices. In turn, healthy institutional identities and personnel allegiance contribute to counterbalance the potentially destabilizing effects of those changes. An institutional consultation was requested at a general hospital recently created sub-acute unit (SAU) due to malaise and dissatisfaction in the nursing staff. The consultation included a total of 3 group meetings with the SAU nursing staff as well as observation of procedures and milieu in this and adjacent units. In the course of this process, a structure of demeaning narratives about the unit and the nursing personnel's own role in the context of changes within the hospital was detected, destabilized, and transformed, and the kernel of a new identity for the unit was developed, using a shift in a routine evaluation procedure for patient's progress as a fulcrum for generating change. Follow-up evaluation indicated a qualitative improvement in the unit milieu and nurses' job satisfaction, resonating with an enhancement in the staff's identification with the unit's reformulated mission as part of a constructive continuum of care. This improvement was also acknowledged and rewarded by hospital administration. While maintaining a stance of positive connotation, assumptions of good intent, and a systemic view of the organization, demeaning collective narratives can be transformed through timely interventions that restitute pride and meaningfulness to the personnel and improve the unit's quality of care. (PsycINFO Database Record

Redefining ‘early career’ in academia: a collective narrative approach

ABSTRACT‘Early career’ in academia is typically defined in terms of research capability in the five years following PhD completion, with career progression from post-doctoral appointment to tenure, promotion and beyond. This ideal path assumes steady employment and continuous research development. With academic work increasingly casualised, experiences of ‘early career’ are changing and definitions in use by institutions and research bodies do not reflect the lived experiences of early career academics (ECAs). This paper presents five collective narratives and a thematic analysis of survey data from 522 ECAs in three Australian universities. The results offer insights into the diverse experiences of the early stages of academic careers and provide an opportunity to reconsider current definitions. We argue that the employment context in higher education makes it crucial to consider scholars’ self-definitions alongside existing objective indicators to redefine early career in academia.

Negotiating “New” Narratives

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is currently in the midst of an extraordinary period of mega-event hosting. While a large number of articles have been keen to illustrate the transformative potential and dilemmas of utilizing mega-events to advance an urban agenda, less understood is the role that media play in the construction of the “media geography” of mega-events. This research examines the collective narratives crafted by five Western international news outlets that emerged in the lead up to Brazil’s 2014 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup. Incorporating interviews with international and new media journalists from a number of organizations, we illustrate the difficulty that foreign journalists faced in their attempts to represent the circumstances of “two Brazils”—one that was hosting a global event and another that is mired in structural injustice. We also highlight the role new media played in shifting the representative frame as Rio de Janeiro prepared for the tournament.

How do interpreters become heroes? Narratives on Soviet/Russian military interpreters

This article identifies narratives, or storylines, which represent Soviet/Russian wartime/military interpreters. The data include the autobiographical writings of interpreters, documentaries, media articles, scholarly articles, and websites. The examination of the data proceeds to some extent in accordance with the narrative typology provided by Mona Baker (2006), that is, from general to personal narratives, with the assumption that personal narratives are embedded in collective narratives. The positioning of wartime interpreters participating in the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) is compared to that of military interpreters participating in the military operations of the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. A narrative reading of the data uncovers the storylines that portray wartime/military interpreters as quiet war heroes.

How do interpreters become heroes? Narratives on Soviet/Russian military interpreters

This article identifies narratives, or storylines, which represent Soviet/Russian wartime/military interpreters. The data include the autobiographical writings of interpreters, documentaries, media articles, scholarly articles, and websites. The examination of the data proceeds to some extent in accordance with the narrative typology provided by Mona Baker (2006), that is, from general to personal narratives, with the assumption that personal narratives are embedded in collective narratives. The positioning of wartime interpreters participating in the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) is compared to that of military interpreters participating in the military operations of the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. A narrative reading of the data uncovers the storylines that portray wartime/military interpreters as quiet war heroes.