Collective Narratives Research Articles

Remembering the Ruins of the Urakami Cathedral

When Urakami Cathedral was rebuilt in 1959, many citizens experienced the loss of the ruins as a silencing of Nagasaki’s experience. This paper explores Catholic survivors’ attitudes towards the Cathedral and loss of an important atomic relic, and shows that while they regret the ruins’ disappearance, they also recognise the rebuilt Cathedral as a symbol of survival. In addition, by examining individual and collective narrative and photographic images, it is demonstrated that Urakami Christian (kirishitan キリシタン) narratives on the Cathedral bond the trauma of the bomb to older memories of persecution, which in turn intensifies the justification for rebuilding the church. By placing such communal memory in the context of theologian Johann Baptist Metz’s conception of the ‘dangerous memory’ of suffering, the author evaluates narratives such as Nagai Takashi’s providence (go-setsuri ご摂理) and interpretation of the bombing as the Urakami ‘Fifth Persecution’ (go-ban kuzure 五番崩れ).

Democratic management and institutional support in primary care in the Federal District, Brazil

The study was performed within the framework of the Brazilian Unified National Health System (SUS) in the Federal District, Brazil, focusing on the role of institutional support in reframing work and management practices in primary care. The study aimed to map practices for supporting primary care in the Recanto das Emas Regional Administration, correlated with the Federal District's health priorities. The study design included qualitative intervention research with participant methods and production of collective narratives. Testing the support provided qualification and alignment of institutional measures with management priorities, qualification, humanization, and improvement of work and management processes, collegiate decision-making, and intervention in daily practices in primary care services. The study concludes that support practices can enhance democratic management processes and contribute to improving care.

The Grass Catcher: A Digression about Home

I read Ian Wedde’s memoir over Christmas 2014 on Waiheke Island, where I had been taken on holiday as a child sixty years earlier, delighting in his non-judgemental evocation of the 1950s—that culturally embarrassing decade that was a paradise to grow up in. In his account of a Blenheim childhood I encountered echoes of my mother’s recall of her childhood there in the 1920s. For the baby-boomers this is a defining literary registration of our era from within the lucid recall of a major writer of our generation. Sargeson’s or Frame’s New Zealand childhood worlds are distant now, and it is engaging to recognize a collective narrative not mired in puritanism or poverty. The Grass Catcher is a welcome generational story of place, community, and language.

Sense of community coherence and inter-religious relations

ABSTRACTThe current article attempts to broaden the individual-based concept of sense of coherence to the community level. We examine sense of community coherence and its connection with perceptions of collective narratives and acculturation tendencies in the social context of Palestinian Muslims and Christians living in Israel. Questionnaires that were developed and adapted for the unique population in this study were distributed to a representative sample of 1034 Muslims (455 males) and 720 Christians (354 males), all Israeli citizens aged 18 and up. As expected, sense of community coherence was negatively related to the level of acceptance of the out-group collective narratives and positively related to the level of acceptance of the in-group collective narratives. In the same vein, it was also positively related to the tendency for separation and negatively related to the tendency for integration and assimilation. The discussion focuses on the contribution of the research findings to the deepening of our understanding of the concepts of sense of coherence and sense of community coherence.

Social participation at the intersection of old age and lifelong disability: Illustrations from a Photo-Novel Project

•Participatory discourses on aging may conflict with experiences of aging and disability•The photo-novel represents innovative research and a community based practice of social change•Symbolic and environmental barriers can constrain the full participation of older people with disabilities•New stories locate older people with disabilities at the centre of participation•Collective narratives about participation can make policy and practices more relevant to diverse experiences

Coming out narratives of older gay men living in New Zealand.

Explore the coming out narratives in a group of older gay men. A narrative gerontological approach was employed to explore the coming out narratives of older gay men. Semi-structured digitally recorded individual interviews were undertaken with 12 gay men aged between 65 and 81 years who lived in the community. Data were analysed using a narrative data analytic process. Three collective narratives related to the coming out of older gay men were identified: 'early gay experiences', 'trying not to be gay' and 'acceptance'. Older gay men come from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds. However, they all grew up in an era where same-sex attraction was a criminal offence. The path to accepting being a gay man was individualised and stressful for these participants. Consequently health and social service providers need to support the ongoing development of resilience and provide a person-centred approach to care that promotes wellbeing.

THIRD FRONT RAILROADS AND INDUSTRIAL MODERNITY IN LATE MAOIST CHINA

AbstractIn the late 1960s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) became concerned that the United States or the Soviet Union might invade. To protect national sovereignty, the Party carried out a massive campaign to industrialize China's West called the Third Front. This article focuses on Third Front railway building. It shows that, although Third Front railroads initially had problems, they eventually integrated large parts of western China into nationwide industrial networks, which accelerated and standardized regional transportation. To build railroads, the CCP compensated for the country's shortage of industrial capital with massive inputs of labor. This industrialization strategy placed a heavy burden on rural men. To boost morale, the CCP organized thought campaigns that praised hard work as a revolutionary contribution to China's industrialization and defense. This collective narrative of national security and industrial progress never entirely silenced discontent, but it did provide workers with a wa...

Narrating Death, Surviving Life: Memory and Palestinian Mothers Who Lost Their Children in the Second Intifada

The cause of Palestinian children’s deaths in the second intifada (2000-2006) is a matter of dispute in the memory of some Palestinians and Israelis today. Mainstream Israeli media and political narratives often say that the Palestinian parents sacrificed their children in the name of religion. Some of this misunderstanding comes in response to the Palestinian mothers who memorialize their sons’ death as beautiful and an act of strength. However, a reading of the mothers’ narratives that is grounded in memory studies and contemporary Palestinian history disrupts the notion the Palestinians embrace ‘an industry of death.’ The mothers recall the death as an honorable sacrifice for Palestine to not only find individual solace from a traumatic past, but also to share in a collective narrative with national meanings. This paper uses oral histories to explore the politics of individual and collective memory in Palestine today.

The Rise of the “We” Narrator in Modern American Fiction

Historically, the first-person plural narrator has been rare in US fiction, and it is both enigmatic and technically demanding. Yet an increasing number of American novelists and short story writers have turned to this formal device over the past 20 years and particularly since 9/11. How might one account for this rise in “we” narration, a trend that surprisingly few commentators have identified, questioned or examined at any length? What are the implications of telling a story in this difficult, even risky way? And in light of the formal challenges it poses to reader as well as writer, why have contemporary works of fiction that are told collectively often been critically and commercially successful? In this essay, I will attempt to answer such questions, examining how US writers from William Faulkner to Jeffrey Eugenides, and Kate Walbert to Julie Otsuka have used the collective narrator in short stories and longer fiction and finally reflecting upon the use of “we” in recent American political discourse.

Stateless Revolutionaries and the Aftermath of the Ottoman Great War

Stateless Revolutionaries and the Aftermath of the Ottoman Great War Commonplace European and American impressions of the Middle East focus on disorder and violence. But the Ottoman nineteenth century was less violent than in much of Europe or America. People everywhere experienced the emergence of the modern state and its claims on their resources, bodies, and consciousness. The story was similar in most of the eventual Great War belligerents: mass conscription, citizenship, education and indoctrination into the state, and its collective narratives characterised the long nineteenth century. After 1918 Britain and France partitioned the Ottoman State into more than a dozen new colonial and quasicolonial states. This event is the origin point of Middle Eastern disorder of the past century. Former citizens of the defeated Ottoman Empire did not accept partition and colonialism. The post-war Middle Eastern settlement was everywhere greeted with revolts and revolutions. But lost in the details of both colonial and postcolonial nationalist historiography of these movements, is the legacy of nineteenthcentury Ottoman modernity that both bound them together and facilitated their emergence.

Re-imagining a Nation: The Australian Dictionary of Biography Online

This essay investigates how the digital medium has recently enabled radicalchanges in the ways that national biography can be generated and engagedwith. It takes the position that national biography, whether or not it sets out todo so, reflects how a nation views itself. The Australian Dictionary of Biography(ADB) has been produced continuously for more than 50 years, and has cumulatively generated a story of a nation. The nature of that collective narrative, however, is not easy to discover. Now, as a result of the ADB’s recent adoption of digital formats, the potential for analysis of the biographies it contains has expanded exponentially, offering unprecedented research opportunities for investigating in new ways how the idea of nation itself has evolved in Australia.This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing in May 2014 and publidhed on 25 June 2015,

Spirituality and entrepreneurial failure

The paper examines how spirituality, an inner awareness especially of a greater force or power beyond the individual self, affected entrepreneurs’ experience of an important but under-researched part of the entrepreneurial process – venture failure. We implement a qualitative, narrative research design and present a collective narrative of nine entrepreneurs whose spirituality played a role in experiencing venture failure. Unexpectedly, findings revealed entrepreneurs engaging deeply with failure instead of indulging in the self-deception and denial suggested by research that applies psychological theories to venture failure. Furthermore, findings provided a rare, positive outcome from failure – entrepreneurs’ spirituality deepened through experiencing this negative life event. Finally, results indicate how spirituality influenced entrepreneurs’ decisions about founding future ventures after failure.

Representing Social Minds: “We” and “They” Narratives, Natural and Unnatural

Representing Social Minds:“We” and “They” Narratives, Natural and Unnatural Brian Richardson (bio) The representation of social minds can be done in many ways, including the familiar group perspective in nineteenth century fiction that Alan Palmer has documented so thoroughly. In many cases, however, authors feel a need to present collective experience in an unusual or innovative form. This has led to the rise of first-person plural or “we” narratives, prominent examples of which can be found throughout the twentieth century, as I have discussed at some length in Unnatural Voices (37–60). “We” narration easily slides into distortions of ordinary usage and readily becomes nonrealistic or what I have called “unnatural,” as we will see in the accounts below. “They” narration, by contrast, is much more rare; it is found in only a few works, such as the first three-quarters of D. H. Lawrence’s “Things” (1928); two chapters of Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963, see Fludernik 224–25); Georges Perec’s Les Choses (1965), and two chapters of Maxine Swann’s Flower Children (2007). “They” narration rarely loses its basis in realism, though as such a narration continues it seems odder and odder that the narrator doesn’t refer to the characters individually; in the case of D. H. Lawrence, the shift from an insistent “they” reference to the more conventional [End Page 200] “Erasmus” and “Valerie” signals a growing fissure in the relationship of the couple. Most radical is the close juxtaposition of “we” and “they” kinds of narration; such a fusion, which necessarily unites internal and external narrative stances, is generally considered impossible.1 The first sustained example of both first- and third-person plural narration seems to be Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1899), a novel which represents what Conrad called “the collective psychology” of the crew of a merchant marine ship (ix). The work opens in the conventional manner of standard, omniscient third person narrative: “Mr. Baker, chief mate of the ship Narcissus, stepped in one stride out of his lighted cabin into the darkness of the quarter-deck” (3). The work’s collective subject is soon identified, as individual characteristics are subsumed within the roles and functions the men perform: The men had shaken into their places, and the half-hourly voice of the bells ruled their life of unceasing care. Night and day the head and shoulders of a seaman could be seen aft by the wheel, outlined high against sunshine or starlight, very steady above the stir of revolving spokes. The faces changed, passing in rotation. Youthful faces, bearded faces, dark faces: faces serene, or faces moody, but all akin with the brotherhood of the sea; all with the same attentive expression of eyes, carefully watching the compass or the sails. (30) Extended “they” narration starts early in chapter 2, once the ship is at sea: “They were forgetting their toil, they were forgetting themselves” (32). “We” narration does not appear until a common bond develops among the seamen; then “we” becomes the primary perspective: “We hesitated between pity and mistrust” (36). Conrad uses these two types of collective narration in counterpoint to the sensibility of the men he is depicting: the greater their cohesion, the more insistent the use of “we”; when the connection is lessened, “they” narration dominates. This general pattern is further varied in the text, as will be discussed subsequently. “We” in this text is not universal but circumscribed; it refers to most of the crewmen, but not the officers; the resentful troublemaker, Donkin; the West Indian sailor, James Wait; or old Singleton, the boatswain, a seaman of an earlier period, “a lonely relic of a devoured and forgotten generation” (24). The men’s perceptions of Donkin are represented in terms that express difference: “Our sea-boots, our oilskin coats, our well-filled sea-chests, were to him so many causes for bitter meditation: he had none of these things, and he felt instinctively that no man, when the need arose, would offer to share them with him” (40). Intriguingly, in this passage the “we” narration is focalized unnaturally through the mind of Donkin, something of course a first person narrator...

Past and Future in the Construction of Communal Identity: Collective Memory and Mythical Narratives

This article relates to the question of whether or to what extent identity is wholly constructed through language by engaging in a discussion of how the use of the past enters into the construction of communal identity. It argues that in order to understand why collective memory and the mythical narrativisation of the past which it frames are such powerful elements in the construction of collective identities, it must be distinguished from the science of historiography. But neither can collective memory be thought of as a communal analogue to the individual mental process of remembering. Rather it is a specific kind of discourse whose subject-position is endowed with a number of distinct privileges (different from those in the discourse of modern historiography) and through which a community can approach and articulate its past in mythical narratives whose ‘validity’ in fact has little to do with the extent to which they mirror ‘historical reality’.

Narratives, Identity, and Transformation

In attempt to honor the legacy of Dudley Allen Sargent and address our current concerns in kinesiology in a transformative manner, this article examines both our collective and individual narratives with respect to kinesiology and examines how this relates to our identity. In the language of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, we need to examine the kind of stories we tell about ourselves and the kind of stories others tell about us. I contend that we need to not only share our own individual and collective narratives but also make space to listen to the narratives of others.

Human Rights Education, Postcolonial Scholarship, and Action for Social Justice

In our global age, educational researchers and practitioners need tools that can be applied in a range of contexts and scales: local, national, and international. This article argues that human rights education (HRE) is a site of struggle in which human rights and democracy need to be constantly renewed. It contextualizes HRE within a critical, reflective postcolonial framework that nonetheless recognizes modernist principles of universal rights. It focuses on 2 concepts—universality and recognition—to develop a theory of HRE that meets the needs of multicultural, multi-faith, yet secular societies that are characterized by asymmetrical power relations and anti-democratic political movements. An evolving theory of HRE needs to embrace the ethics of recognition by extending this concept beyond that expounded in human rights instruments and building on learners’ experiences. Individual narratives are starting points for new collective narratives to enable the strengthening of human rights and social justice.

Exploring Variation in theMoroccan‐Dutch Collective Narrative: An Intersectional Approach

Collective identities are constructed and negotiated in interaction. The dynamics of collective identity construction in the interactions of group members, however, remain understudied. Taking into consideration public discourses of ethnicity and religion in theNetherlands, in this article we explore the uses of narrative in intragroup identity construction amongMoroccan‐Dutch young adults. In line with theories of intersectionality, we expected intragroup identity construction to be influenced by the specific location of participants in a matrix of intersecting identity categories. Narratives were elicited in focus groups that varied by gender and by the educational level of the participants. We compared the content and import of stories in each group. We found that participants across groups told similar stories in which they referred to the treatment of their group at a societal level. However, we also found that the intersection of ethnicity, gender, and level of educational attainment influenced the way our participants narrated their everyday experiences, and, in particular, their relations with native Dutch neighbors, fellow students, and coworkers. An intersectional analysis shows how, faced with negative stereotypes regarding their ethnic and religious background,Moroccan‐Dutch young adults variously accept, reject, and act in relation to those stereotypes.

Challenges of Postconflict Coexistence: Narrating Truth and Justice in a Bosnian Town

This article sets out to deepen our understanding of how people make everyday strategies for living together after mass atrocities and what role transitional justice may play for these strategies. Based on a study in the small town of Foča in Bosnia‐Herzegovina, the analysis unpacks the encounter between three clusters of narratives that make competing moral claims and offer different ways of ordering the past, present, and future: the “institutional” narrative formed globally at various institutions of transitional justice and here represented in the local by the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY); the collective narratives of ethnonationalism constructed by entrepreneurs in politics and media and fed into daily discourses; and individual narratives “in the margins” that refuse collective categorizations. The article argues that the ICTY narrative, based on individual justice and factual truth, was, contrary to its aims, used to enforce exclusionist and collective claims. At the same time, less dominant narratives embraced the ICTY narrative, which suggests that the tribunal may potentially play a constructive role as an “archive for the future.”

Plane Views

“Plane Views” are taken from airplane windows by gazing tourists and migrants alike. These photographs give self-reflexive witness to the “in-between-ness” of air travel as an experience of modernity. However, such images of celestial skies and earthbound topography are also reworked through folklore, and classical and popular culture, into the metaphorical dreamscapes of diaspora imagination. This article looks at a collection of my father's photographs taken from planes during various family migrations of the 1960s and 1970s, between the globally scattered territories of Indian Fijian communities, across the Pacific region and beyond. By linking these images to the personal and collective narratives attached to their production and consumption, “Plane Views” can be understood as reinterpretations of the historical tropes of both landscape photography and the omnipotent gaze of surveillance.

Positive weighing of the other's collective narrative among Jewish and Bedouin-Palestinian teachers in Israel and its correlates.

Teachers play a pivotal role in the educational discourse around collective narratives, and especially the other's narrative. The study assumed that members of groups entangled in a conflict approach the different modules of the other's narrative distinctively. Jewish and Palestinian teachers, Israeli citizens, answered questionnaires dealing with the narrative of the other, readiness for interethnic contact, negative between-group emotions and preferences for resolutions of the Israeli-Palestinian (I-P) conflict. Positive weighing of the other's narrative among Jewish teachers correlated with high levels of readiness for interethnic contact and low levels of negative between-group emotions, across the various modules of the Palestinian narrative. Preferences for a peaceful resolution of the I-P conflict and rejection of a violent one were noted in two of the modules. Among Palestinian teachers, positive weighing of the other's collective narrative was exclusively noted for the Israeli narrative of the Holocaust, and this stance negatively related to negative between-group emotions and preference for a violent solution of the I-P conflict, and positively related to readiness for interethnic contact and preference of a peaceful resolution of the conflict. Practical implications of these findings for peace education are discussed.