Collective Narratives Research Articles

Hashtag activism: social media and the #FreeYouth protests in Thailand

ABSTRACT The Thai 2020 anti-government protests were the first large-scale pro-democracy protests in Thailand mediated on Twitter. How has Twitter been used by anti-government supporters and to what effect? This article examines the use of hashtags by activists during the early stages of the Thai 2020 anti-government protests. Using an original dataset of 27,233 Twitter data points drawn from the #FreeYouth (FYM; #เยาวชนปลดแอก) campaign, the article argues that Twitter was used primarily to build collective narratives and disseminate movement information, rather than to mobilize offline protest activities. The key topic conversations within the Free Youth networks focus on discontent towards the government and demands for democracy, suggesting that Twitter was central to mobilizing pro-democracy collective action frames. The article further argues that the Free Youth networks on Twitter were loosely connected through community clusters of weak ties, not tight crowds. The challenge for FYM activists going forward is to support ties across its online networks that will strengthen over time, or risk becoming an ephemeral network of convenience that can only be mobilized on an ad hoc basis.

New music therapy faculty and the pursuit of fulfillment, success, and identity: A collective autoethnography

Little is known about best practices for effectively developing and mentoring new music therapy faculty as they transition to the complex ecology of higher education. To address this gap, three new music therapy faculty explored their lived experiences as participant-researchers in a collective autoethnography designed to synthesize their perspectives into a shared, comprehensive story. Over the 2017–2018 academic year, data were collected from personal journals and focus groups interweaving individual and collective narratives and qualitatively analyzed via restorying, domain and taxonomic analysis, and inductive semantic thematic analysis. Forty-two total domains, or cultural categories, were identified and then consolidated into six primary themes: student relations, evaluation, self-preservation, competence, challenges, and colleague relations. Primary themes were further distilled into three composite themes – fulfillment, success, and identity—that participant-researchers experienced as aspirational goals that were critical for professional development yet difficult to conceptualize and achieve. The narrative stage of rising action reflected participant-researchers’ aspirations to feel fulfilled, achieve success, and develop identity while contending with limited insight, guidance or direction. The findings provide foundational knowledge for future scholarship examining best practices for training and mentoring new faculty.

Finding ourselves as Black women in Eurocentric theory: collaborative biography on learning and reshaping qualitative inquiry

PurposeQualitative research consistently centers Eurocentrism through courses' integrations of ontological, epistemological and axiological perspectives. This literal whitewashing was a source of great frustration and confusion for the authors, four Black women, who found their identities omitted and disregarded in qualitative inquiry. Using Collins' outsider-within concept and collective narratives to center their experiences, the authors seek through their writing to actively repurpose and re-engage with qualitative scholarship that generally seeks to exclude Black women.Design/methodology/approachTheoretically informed by Collins' outsider-within concept, the authors use Deleuze and Parnet's collective biography to tell the stories of four Black doctoral students negotiating race, gender, class and intellectual identity, while critiquing Eurocentric theory, through coursework. The collaborative writing process provided shared space for the engagement of individual thoughts and experiences with(in) others' narratives.FindingsBlack women can interpret qualitative inquiry outside of the Eurocentric norm, and qualitative courses can provide spaces for them to do so by repositioning Black women philosophers as central to understanding qualitative inquiry.Originality/valueThrough collective biography (Deleuze and Parnet, 2007), this paper centers the voices of four Black women scholars who use a creative writing approach to think with/through theory as Black women (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012). The paper offers new discussions of and ways in which qualitative researchers might decolonize Eurocentric ways of knowing in qualitative inquiry and qualitative pedagogy from students' perspectives.

Building with landscape

The multi-dimensionality of BwN calls for the incorporation of ‘designerly ways of knowing and doing’ from other fields involved in this new trans-disciplinary approach. The transition out of a focus on rational design paradigms towards reflective design paradigms such as those employed in the spatial design disciplines may be a first step in this process. By extension, the knowledge base and design methodologies of BwN may be critically expanded by drawing on ways of knowing and doing in spatial design disciplines such as landscape architecture, which elaborates the agency of the term ‘landscape’ as counterpart to the term ‘nature’. Operative perspectives and related methodologies in this discipline such as perception, anamnesis, multi-scalar thinking, and process design resonate with specific themes in the BwN approach such as design of/with natural processes, integration of functions or layers in the territory and the connection of engineering works to human-social contexts. A series of installations realised for the Oerol festival on the island of Terschelling between 2011 and 2018 serve as case studies to elaborate potential transfers and thematic elaborations towards BwN. In these projects inter-disciplinary teams of students, researchers and lecturers developed temporary landscape installations in a coastal landscape setting. Themes emerging from these project include ‘mapping coastal landscapes as complex natures’, ‘mapping as design-generative device’, ‘crowd-mapping’, ‘people-place relationships’, ‘co-creation’, ‘narrating coastal landscapes’, ‘public interaction’ and ‘aesthetic experience’. Specific aspects of these themes relevant to the knowledge base and methodologies of BwN, include integration of sites and their contexts through descriptive and projective mappings, understanding the various spatial and temporal scales of a territory as complex natures, and the integration of collective narratives and aesthetic experiences of coastal infrastructures in the design process, via reflective dialogues.

Social Networks Uses and Motivations: Proposition and Test of an Integrative Model

This study (1) identifies motivations for using social networks (SNs) and (2) tests an integrative model. A systematic literature review was conducted followed by mixed-method research. Technology, social, and individual domains of SNs motivators were identified. The qualitative stage of the research supported the selection of the variables to be tested, and the survey tested these motivations with a sample of 468 respondents. As a result, a new model highlighting the main motivations for using online social networks emerged. Competition and Collective Narrative are new constructs that explain social media use, together with Escapism, Information, Identity, and Socialization.

Understanding social constructions of becoming an academic through women’s collective career narratives

ABSTRACT The transition of early career researchers into academic posts is understood to be a crucial career step and marks a point at which representation of women declines significantly. The research adopts a participatory qualitative research methodology through career narrative interviews and group discussions with women engineers recently appointed into academic posts. It was found that academic careers are ‘hoped for’, but not described as a straightforward option in terms of either securing tenure or future career development. The collective career paths outlined were rarely linear and featured key moments of crisis and self-doubt, culminating in ‘tentative’ career identity formation in the face of gendered career structures. There is evidence of a pre-emptive and continuing uncertainty about the feasibility of an academic career that begins years before embarking on a PhD. The distinctive contribution of the study is the consideration of gendered early processes of forming an academic identity and ongoing collective experiences of becoming an academic.

Relative Privilege and the Seduction of Normativity

Traditional ways of understanding relational unconscious dynamics have not always accounted for power dynamics, particularly those connected with social identity. This article explores the role of identity and introduces the idea of relative privilege. The author argues privileged identities are amplified, whereas marginalized identities are minimized because of a desire for inclusion and belonging to the norm. The norm is positioned as a dominant collective narrative that is seductive. Links are made between the relevance of the collective with the subjectivity of individuals.

“How Does The Never To Be Differ From What Never Was?” The Importance of Dreams and Memory in The Road

Thehaunting presence of memories and dreams from an unregenerate past society thoroughly permeate the action of Cormac McCarthy’s vision of the post-apocalypse in The Road. Besides the intention of contrasting the barrenness of the world that the protagonists inhabit with the livelyimagery of the old world, the recollections that invade the father’s inner self provide a clash between personal and collective narratives which push him to struggle for survivaland protect his son in an effort to “carry the fire” of humanity. Parallelly, the symbolism of the dreams that we encounterthroughout the novel hold valuable clues that can be accessed to resolve the ambiguous closure to The Road. Inthefirst part of this paper, Iwillrevisitthe field of memory studies to reveal the importance that memory holds as a provider of meaning for life in the apocalypse. The second part of the article develops a theory that absolutely disregards any optimistic reading of the end of the novel, as itpresents us with the possibility that what we read in the last pagesof the bookconstitutes the wish-fulfilment produced by the boy’s dying dream. To investigatethis enticing theory that was furthered by Jacob M. Powning, I will assessthis hypothesis through the lenses of Psychoanalysis. McCarthy’s interest in the psychoanalytic studies, and his fascination with the dream world will help to develop a pertinent proposition that seeks to ultimately resolve the enigmatic Deus Ex-Machina that closes the novel

An existential view of biography and history: Synchronic and diachronic narratives

Narrative psychologists have increasingly sought to understand how cultural, collective narratives relate to individual life narratives. Two promising approaches are the study of how cultural master narratives influence personal narratives, and the study of generativity. These developments need to be extended through analysis of the ‘politics of storytelling’ – the ways in which life and collective narratives are implicated in the sociopolitical milieu. We draw on Sartre’s late work on the interrelationship between biography and history. Sartre suggests an individual life can incarnate history either diachronically – when a person narrates their life with a focus on individual temporal development – or synchronically – when a person narrates their life with a focus on power relations between groups in society. We discuss the political implications of each form of narrative; how they relate the individual to history, im/mortality, and generativity; and how they involve forms of false or liberated consciousness.

‘Bottoms up’: A case study on integrating public engagement within a university culture

This study tracks the integration of public engagement within the systems, structures and culture of a university in Ireland. Public engagement, as an activity of research institutes, is gaining increased attention from policy and funding sources across Europe. However, little has been heard on the processes and practices which bring public engagement to the fore of conversations and activities in such institutions. In this practice case study, we track the evolution of a community of practice of public engagement in an Irish university over three years, through a bottom-up approach taken by a small group of faculty and staff, and organized through collective leadership to maintain momentum over the time period. With the support of key leadership figures, who provided top-down financial and structural support, we trace the narrative of defining public engagement within the university through stakeholder workshops, recording relevant activities with an institution-wide census, updating university public engagement reporting metrics, and establishing an active community of practice. Four key learnings are identified from this collective narrative: (1) the need for patience in attempting to instigate change within an institution; (2) the importance of establishing a shared understanding; (3) the importance of enacting collective leadership as a community; and (4) the necessity of leadership support with grass-roots activity. Reflection on these learnings suggests that the embedding of public engagement in institutions requires both personal and institutional investment.

Functions of Collective Narratives in a Territorial Conflict. The Israeli-Palestinian Case

ABSTRACT The various narratives of a conflict play a central role in its development. Not only are they a reflection of the collective memory of the various parties in conflict, but also a functional element in its dynamics. In the case of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, data show that each side’s main narratives are fairly stable over time, and they possess significant magnitudes – over two thirds of their publics, in both cases. This article analyses the use of narratives in the dynamics of the conflict, which affects both the cognitive and emotional dimensions of the public’s worldview on both sides. We draw ten main functions of collective narratives in the conflict. We discuss that, although a transformation of narratives in the conflict is required for its resolution, both groups will face resistance associated with the functionality of the narratives during this process.

Practicing Self Learning of ICT for Resilience Amidst the COVID-19 Outbreak: Experiences from Kathmandu Valley

The purpose of the study was to unravel how the school leaders, teachers, students and parents from Kathmandu Valley have experienced the self- learning of ICT use during the COVID- 19. It basically aimed at exploring how the sudden outbreak of COVID- 19 pandemic led the research participants to different vulnerabilities, and how the adoption of ICT use worked as resilience mechanism for them. Guided by the philosophical assumptions of interpretivism, the study considered the school leaders, teachers, students and parents to have subjective experiences regarding COVID- 19 and ICT use. And for making sense about how they have experienced ICT use amid the pandemic subjectively, narrative inquiry was adopted as research method. Using purposive sampling, a school leader, a teacher, a student and a parent having different socio-economic backgrounds were selected from Kathmandu Valley. Their experiences were assembled through in-depth interview, for which the researchers engaged with them for a prolonged period via phone calls and real time meetings. The assembled experiences were further analyzed with theoretical support, following the process of transcribing, coding, categorization and thematization. Through the collective narratives, it was explored that the COVID- 19 outbreak had come to the research participants, while the adversities they experienced were about the insecurities and stress resulted due to school closures, along with their less familiarity with ICT use. Nonetheless, the adversities were found to have minimized due to their motivation for self- learning of ICT use, and adopting the same, they were found to have grown resilient.

Dynamics of leadership styles within the Ogoni and Ijaw movements in the Niger Delta

Much of the literature on the Niger Delta deals with the Ogoni and Ijaw groups together, as having common lived experiences within a shared geographical location. However, the nature of the leaderships led the two movements to adopt distinct strategies in their struggles against the Nigerian state and multinational oil companies. Successful collective action is often ascribed to effective leadership and to the employment of social identity to drive collective group behaviour. Building on the Comparative Case Studies approach, this article compares the nature of leadership within the two movements, and particularly the choices that led Ogoni leaders to preach nonviolence and Ijaw leaders to advocate violence. The article analyses the role of the leaders in determining the strategies adopted by the movements, and examines the importance of the psychological drivers of the collective narratives developed by the two groups of leaders in accounting for the different trajectories. These issues are investigated within the social and political psychological context utilising three axes of comparison — vertical, horizontal and transversal. Findings suggest that strategic choices are frequently based on charismatic leadership, particularly when group leaders are able to utilise a heightened awareness of identity, and on conscious and unconscious fears linking past and current threats.

Explicating Cultural Concepts

Ethnolinguistics deals with collective identities and reality-interpreting narratives. Collective identity (beliefs, values, and their symbolisations shared by a community) is defined as a mental construct, access to which can be obtained through complementary and linguistically “externalised” images. Inquiry into identity is the most effective when it is concerned with language, both in the narrower sense of linguistic structure and textual narratives, and in the broader semiotic sense. Whichever option is selected, the important issues to be addressed include the linguistic phenomena that make up identity, the methodology of identity research, as well as the data on the basis of which collective identity can be reconstructed.In this study, attention is paid to narrative linguistic phenomena: language is viewed as a most human phenomenon and a significant social fact that contributes to the construction of collective identity. The notion of “reality-interpreting narratives” pertains to subjectivised stories of the world, more or less stable judgements, stories that interpret reality and assume the shape of cognitive definitions.In the course of thirty years of work on and with the cognitive definition, two types of ethnolinguistic description have emerged: holistic (integrated) and separated (isolated). The former is preferred in the Dictionary of Folk Stereotypes and Symbols, the latter in the Axiological Lexicon of Slavs and Their Neighbours. Both types of description reveal the functioning of images (sterotypes/concepts) in a network of relationships that allows one to capture the system of values that underlies the languages and cultures being studied. These relationships are here illustrated with the Polish images of róża ‘rose’ and wolność ‘freedom’.

Creation and renunciation in Ricoeur’s political ethics of compromise

Ricoeur interpreted the work of compromise as a creative process to imagine a new world by projecting ourselves into other people. The challenge of compromise is to learn to tell our own story differently within the contours of a broader collective narrative, in compliance with the paradigm of translation. As such, Ricoeur’s political ethics of compromise is at risk of highlighting the element of creation, which refers to the social imagination of a shared vision of a better society, at the cost of recognition of the element of renunciation, which refers to the reciprocal shelving of ideas and desires that the other side considers to be truly intolerable. However, I argue that we can read a delicate connection between forgetting, forgoing and forgiving in Ricoeur’s thought. It is, then, the model of forgiveness, as part of the paradigm of translation, that gives due respect to the importance of renunciation through the emphasis on the unjustifiable, for which renunciation even cannot suffice. The ‘poetics of pardon’ brings creation and renunciation together and, by doing so, it highlights that compromise always remains an object of hope.

Globalization and counterdevelopment: The importance of new narratives

AbstractThe article is a personal recount of living under the called neoliberal regime installed in the post‐Cold War in the region. Written from the perspective of a Latin American woman in the betweenness of the North and the South. Focusing on capitalism history shows how counterdevelopment has been the other face of globalization. The social protests in the whole continent request the respect of human dignity recovering an inclusive collective narrative and social justice caring of our common home, to build a more profound democracy and a more just world.

Mad to the bone: learning outcomes of critical grief pedagogy

ABSTRACT We outline critical grief pedagogy as a Mad feminist response to the silencing of loss that often occurs in academic spaces. This pedagogical framework creates openings for students to “break open the bone” of their own and others’ losses, particularly through community-engaged learning and research. Using collaborative autoethnography, in this essay we (a professor and her mentees) explore our experiences working with the Scraps of the Heart Project—a community-based research collective focused on empowering families following the loss of a baby—to understand student learning outcomes that were born from our engagement with critical grief pedagogy. Our collective narratives revealed that these learnings included: gaining compassionate communication skills, embracing and unpacking failure as a method of mourning, becoming empowered and empowering others to share their stories of loss, and building a community of Mad grievers. We put these learning outcomes into conversation with cultural discourses surrounding pedagogical and academic norms. Additionally, we offer insight into how loss and mourning can be invited into the classroom so that students learn to engage grief critically, meaningfully, and Madly—and to learn important communicative skills along the way.

Non-binary reproduction: Stories of conception, pregnancy, and birth

Background: Many non-binary individuals AFAB (assigned female at birth) seek gestational parenthood. However, the limited available literature is often focused on trans men and overlooks the conception, pregnancy, and birth experiences of non-binary parents. Aims: The study aimed to capture the unique reproduction narratives of non-binary people AFAB. Methods: Five non-binary individuals volunteered to participate in this study. Data were collected using largely unstructured, in-depth, tape-recorded interviews. Thematic analysis of the verbatim transcripts and tape recordings yielded a chronological, cohesive narrative for each participant. Four participants reviewed their narrative and confirmed that their story was accurately represented. The individual narratives were then woven into one collective narrative, and common themes across the participants’ stories were identified. Results: Before conception, most participants considered how to balance their medical and social transitions with their reproductive goals. Conception was relatively easy and straightforward for the four participants who used their partner’s sperm. The gendered nature of, and language surrounding, pregnancy greatly impacted participant’s reproductive experiences, leading to feelings of isolation and loneliness, difficulties finding maternity clothes and gender dysphoria. Participants desired gender-affirming care and reported mostly positive experiences with their healthcare providers. Their gender identity influenced their experiences of parenthood, as well as the decisions they made regarding the disclosure of their gender identity to others, their gender presentation, chestfeeding, and parental designations. Discussion: The cisnormative and heteronormative scripts that surround pregnancy shaped the reproductive narratives of those who participated in this research. The findings reinforce the importance of inclusive, gender-affirming healthcare and social support services.

How Trauma, Depression, and Gender Roles Lead to Intimate Partner Violence Perpetration Among a Sample of Predominately Low-Income Black, Indigenous, Men of Color: A Mixed Methods Study.

Despite decades of research and significant efforts by practitioners and advocates, intimate partner violence (IPV) in the United States remains a public health issue that disproportionately affects racial/ethnic minorities. The lack of mixed methods and qualitative studies, particularly with Black, Indigenous, Men of Color (BIMOC), limits the field's ability to tease apart the complex, multifaceted aspects of IPV perpetration and minimizes diverse perspectives of how childhood trauma and key proximal factors culminate in IPV perpetration. An explanatory design, follow-up explanations model, was used with a sample of predominately low-income BIMOC in a batterer intervention program (BIP). Associations between IPV and theoretically supported factors (e.g., trauma symptoms, depression, gender roles) were examined using a cross-sectional survey (N = 67) with ordinary least squares regression. Following up, processes explaining how these factors might lead to IPV perpetration were explored using semistructured interviews (N = 11) with narrative analysis. Results indicate that depressive and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms together predict men's IPV perpetration. Participants' collective narrative explains how key factors-such as adverse childhood experiences, PTSD, depression, social isolation, anger, and restricted emotionality-work together to culminate in IPV perpetration. Findings shed light on potential trajectories and antecedents that manifest in IPV perpetration, providing implications for practice techniques and program development with low-income BIMOC in BIPs.

Shared responsibility and community engagement: Community narratives of bushfire risk information in Victoria, Australia

Bushfires (wildfires) present an increasing threat to rural Australia. Effective messaging about planning and preparing for bushfires is essential, as is the provision of accurate and timely information to residents when they come under bushfire threat. We argue that an understanding of the ways in which collective narratives about disaster events are developed at a locality level is required, and that these narratives are influenced by features of locality, community and rural life which act as filters that enable residents to shape their perceptions of bushfire risk and views on what constitutes 'good information'. This process eventually drives their choice of bushfire information sources and communication pathways. The outcome is a preference for local sources of information and a level of mistrust of information provided by centrally orchestrated bushfire information sources. This conclusion raises challenging questions about the idea of shared responsibility in relation to disaster events between agencies and communities. We propose that bushfire safety initiatives must be tailored to take into consideration locality and community features. Of note, these processes are likely to be ineffective unless they are also tailored in relation to the narratives and understandings of these communities within the localities that define specific populations confronted by the prospect of bushfire events. We present three case studies of contrasting rural towns in Australia to identify how locality and community features inform resident perceptions of bushfire risk and preferences for bushfire information.