Narrative Construction Of Identity Research Articles

The Northern Borderland and Eastern Kujawy – Parallels: The Construction of Narrative Identity in the Cycle of Stories “Konopnicka’s Desk” by Maria Danilewicz Zielińska

Maria Danilewicz Zielińska was a writer from the region of Kujawy, but she spent her entire adult life in exile. Her autobiographical stories collected in the volume entitled Biurko Konopnickiej [Konopnicka’s Desk] are an example of constructing a narrative identity based on people rooted in their homelands and related events. The first of the local homelands is Kujawy: the author was born in Aleksandrów Pograniczny (today: Aleksandrów Kujawski) and lived there for the first twenty-one years of her life; the second one is the northern Borderland (Kresy) of the former Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. Danilewicz had close family ties with the latter, as well as a living memory of its poets and writers. The family, historical and literary parallels connecting but also separating both geographical and cultural areas form pairs. The first one is Kujawy with its towns, nature, inhabitants and their customs, and, on the other hand, the Vilnius and Navahrudak regions, their poets, such as Adam Mickiewicz and Władysław Syrokomla, and ordinary people with their dramatic fate of being displaced. The second pair are rivers and stories related to them: the Vistula and the Nemunas. All these components are places of memory which constitute a hybrid identity of the émigré author from a historical and cultural borderland, an identity constructed by autobiographical memory. Weaving these parallels, she endows them with familiarity, avoiding pathos and mythologisation. Nevertheless, the overwhelming longing for the lost homeland is coupled with its idealisation, especially apparent in the descriptions of nature.

Narrative re/defining of the cultural identity of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the literature of the Bosnia and Herzegovina diaspora

Starting from the hypothesis that spatial-cultural displacement necessarily conditions the deconstruction of cultural identity, the work, based on the theoretical assumptions of imagology and intercultural hermeneutics, considers (inter)cultural aspects of the narrative de/construction of the cultural identity of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the literature of the Bosnian diaspora. Finding examples in the novels "The Book of My Lives" and "My Parents: An Introduction" by Aleksandar Hemon, the novel "Nowhere, out of nowhere" by Bekim Sejranović and the collection of stories "Well, to start over" by Cecilija Toskić, the work tries to point out the spatial-cultural displacement and intercultural processes not only as factors of crosscultural adaptation, acculturation and assimilation, but also as factors that enable objective perception and narrative representation of Bosnian cultural identity. The paper concludes that the experience of spatialcultural displacement, represented in the above-mentioned works, results in the narrative construction of hybrid identities squeezed between two (or more) cultures, and that precisely this position of (non)belonging will enable a narrative re/definition of the cultural identity of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Semantic Function of Spatial Experiences and Memories in The Southern Elephant by Archil Kikodze and Zinka Adamiani by Ana Kordzaia-Samadashvili

Urban space is a specific public space that society creates and lives in. Mental states and material conditions are spatially regrouped in different historical phases and rewritten each time. The topic of this research is to determine the semantic influence of spatial experiences and memories on the construction of narrative identity. Urban novels by two Georgian authors – The Southern Elephant by Archil Kikodze and Zinka Adamiani by Ana Samadashvili-Kordzaia – were selected as research objects. These primary sources were analysed within the following methodological framework: 1. the space semantics of Juri Lotman, 2. Pierre Nora’s sites of memory, and 3. Aleida Assmann’s forms of forgetting. Using these theoretical approaches, it was possible to determine the role of spatial concepts in the construction of narrative identity, and the impact of changes in historical, social, economic, cultural, and worldview conditions on narrative identities constructed in the text.

“They want you to know who they really are inside of the old visage”—biographical storytelling as a methodological tool to explore emotional challenges in old age

BackgroundGrowing older is often associated with resilience, contentedness and inner growth. Older people however are also at risk of confronting unique emotional challenges as a result of varied ageing-related experiences. By employing a biographical lens, we aim to introduce storytelling as a methodological tool to more holistically explore older people’s emotional challenges and to improve their wellbeing.MethodsBuilding upon theoretical understandings about the narrative construction of identity across the life span, we draw upon a qualitative study about older people’s loneliness as an example to showcase the methodological value and feasibility of biographical storytelling. We aim to better understand the nuanced and sometimes painful emotional experiences that can be encountered alongside ageing.ResultsFindings from the qualitative study we showcase, highlight that unique emotional pains and the (in)ability to deal with such in old age could be deeply rooted in older people’s earlier lives. These findings contextualise people’s emotional challenges and needs within their identity, as a narrative thread that links their past, present and expected future. As such, our example study shows that emotional challenges in old age are not only ageing-related, but can be more fundamentally connected to disruptions to the ongoing flow of narrative identity construction.ConclusionThe highly retrospective and reflexive nature of these findings illustrates the methodological merit of biographical storytelling. We argue that the impact of biographical storytelling can go further than both conventional semi-structured narrative interviews and existing interventional tools. Instead, it is a particularly useful research methodology to explore human experiences and needs in the unique context of ageing. This methodological development thus provides an insightful analytical lens to explore how older people’s earlier life experiences may be carried forward and confronted to shape their emotional stability in the present and future stages of their ageing lives. Beyond the methodological significance, we further demonstrate the benefits of empowering older people to reconstruct their ageing lives in the context of their biography.

You Are Here: Narrative Construction of Identity and Community Resilience in Newfoundland during and after 9/11

ABSTRACT This study seeks to expand the use of quantum storytelling lens in qualitative research. Guided by this approach, we analyzed interviews with 32 individuals connected with the events of 9/11 in Newfoundland in three groups examining long-term narrative construction of resilience after a disrupting event and the idea that communication and construction of a resilience narrative can function as a larger community identity. This analysis revealed that participants not only use these narratives to shape their current lives but to narrate themselves and the community as resilient and generous. The findings also suggested theoretical implications that suggest we can broaden the definitions of both community and resilience and that these two are narratively constructed.

Factors Reducing the Risk of Social Maladjustment: A Narrative Approach to Adolescent Identity Formation

The research aimed to check if the construction of narrative identity by adolescents at risk of maladjustment contributes to their adaptive social functioning. It also aimed to identify factors related to identity on which the adjustment of adolescents at risk of social maladjustment depends. A natural experiment was conducted in Poland among youths from sociotherapy centres (n = 60, aged 18–20 years, 33 women and 27 men). A group of graduates at these centres (n = 31, aged 21–24 years, 17 women and 14 men) was included in the exploratory study and compared with the group of students in terms of maladjustment, ego-resiliency, and identity. The experiment shows that the construction of a narrative identity through a life story interview contributes to better social adaptation, which means a lower risk of maladjustment. The diffuse-avoidant identity style predisposes to maladjustment, whereas ego-resiliency is associated with a higher level of adjustment. Thus the narrative interview method can find application in the therapy of adolescents at risk of maladjustment.

Narrative construction of professional identities of teachers in Norway in the works of G. Søreide

Narrative construction of professional identities of teachers in Norway in the works of G. Søreide

Non- obviousness of biography as a research subject of a pedagogue

The aim I set for myself is to reveal what connects the main areas of biography research - literary and social - and to show what importance for upbringing, as well as for biographical research carried out in the field of pedagogy, are attempts to combine them. Problem and research methods: The main problem was formulated as the question: What makes a biography non-obvious? Another problems: What analytical categories relating to biography best capture this non-obviousness? What is the specificity of studying biography by educators and how do such analyzes differ from sociological or literary studies? The main method is to analyze the concepts that make up the research field and the relationships between them. In the first part of the article, I outline the relationship between biography and the construction of narrative identity, in order to show the way of understanding key concepts, such as narrative or story, as they constitute a specific basis for an attempt to grasp the meanings and dimensions of the title non-obviousness of a biography. Then I analyze the phenomena essential for the construction of identity: secrets, existential crises, trajectories or epiphanies. The next step is the analysis of categories such as the internal structure of life, as well as the image of life, ready biography, biography in interaction and autonomous biography. In the second part of the article, based on the concept of biography by Duccio Demetrio, I consider the specificity of pedagogical studies on the phenomenon of biography. The article concludes with conclusions on the specificity of pedagogical research on biographies and their relationship with therapeutic activities. As a result of the analysis, I come to the conclusion that the non-obviousness of the biography comes from the individual way of experiencing it. It is a set of features, a result of specific events, choices made, and at the same time a consequence of answering important existential questions. The aforementioned phenomena that are crucial for the construction of identity-occurrences are of particular use in its analysis. The pedagogical study of biography is different from sociological or literary analyzes, it turns out to be work with the collected biographical materials as well as with another human being and has, apart from cognitive values, a therapeutic dimension

Links Between Adolescents' Moral Mindsets and Narratives of their Inconsistent and Consistent Moral Value Experiences.

Past work on moral mindsets has largely overlooked the adolescent developmental period, a time when adolescents are navigating the complexities of moral life and experiencing tensions between important moral principles and their own actions. This study investigated how moral incrementalism and essentialism are linked to how adolescents construct meanings about their moral experiences. The sample included 96 Canadian adolescents (12-15-years of age; M = 13.5 years). Adolescents generated written narratives of times when they acted inconsistently and consistently with a moral value, and completed a vignette-based measure of moral mindsets. Moral incrementalism was associated with references to the psychological and emotional facets of experiences and engaging in meaning-making processes in narratives. Adolescents who endorsed incrementalism disengaged less only when narrating a self-discrepant experience, indicating some context-specificity across moral event types. Overall, results contribute to scholarship on moral mindset and narrative identity construction. Findings illuminate how individual differences in youth's views of moral traits and behavior may be associated with important aspects of moral identity development such as delving into the psychological and emotional aspects of their experiences and engaging in meaning-making processes.

Beyond Literal Idolatry: Imagining Faith through Creatively Changing Identities

This is Part I of a triptych. It addresses the latent potential of the imagination in constructing a sense of identity. Included is the role of faith in overcoming the obstacles presented by a social imaginary dominated by literal idolatry that leads to unnecessary suffering. The initial foundation examines the process of growth and the role that the imagination plays in the construction of narrative identity—an important part of human development. Literal idolatry interrupts this original process through the creation of a social imaginary that corrupts natural measures for self-correction. At the same time, a creative faith contains the capacity to dislodge the rigid boundaries of literal idolatry. A creative faith narrative identities in ways that open beyond simple coherence and completeness. It can also revitalize social institutions and public spaces. The argument concludes by arguing fictional narratives augment the work of theology in grounding and inspiring creative faith.

Constructing Narrative Identity and Capabilities of Finnish Reform School Adolescents

Most studies of adolescents placed in foster care due to severe conduct problems have focused on their problems, while adolescents with healthy adulthood condition remain understudied. In Finland, adolescents with severe conduct problems are placed in reform schools (RS). The purpose of this study was to examine how former RS adolescents’ narrative identity and capability construction interact in different phases of their life-stories. Semi-structured life-story interviews were conducted with 13 former RS adolescents with healthy adulthood condition. Data were analyzed using a narrative constructivist method. We found a story in which the theoretical elements found from the research material were especially rich and thick and decided to present it as a case example of our findings—Anna’s story. The analysis showed that capabilities were closely related to RS adolescents’ identity construction and well-being. Strengthened capabilities provided material for identity construction, such as identities of meaning making, agency, redemption, and communion. The findings of the study point out that out-of-home care adolescents’ stable and trusting relationships should be supported as they may strengthen capabilities and help develop feelings of meaningfulness, belonging, experienced parity of participation and senses of coherence.

Flexing and floundering in the on-demand economy: Narrative identity construction under algorithmic management

Based on an autoethnographic field study involving 130 h of work as a food delivery driver in the on-demand economy, semi-structured interviews (N = 40), and observations in company meetings and online forums, I developed a model specifying how the sociotechnical context of app-work (independent contracting, technologically-mediated task environment, no coworkers) simultaneously threatens workers’ ability to constitute and animate their narrative identities and creates conditions for workers to attenuate that threat. Specifically, the same characteristics that workers experienced as depersonalizing reduced interpersonal accountability concerns, allowing workers to self-servingly construe identity-implicating experiences through narrative flexing, a form of narrative identity work that workers enacted intrapersonally (through narrative structuring, fantasizing, rationalizing) and interpersonally (through storytelling in online communities). Overall, this work reveals how certain technological and social constraints and opportunities affect the identity dynamics of a vast, yet understudied class of workers who are neither fully tethered to nor fully untethered from traditional organizations.

Narrative and Bodily Identity in Eating Disorders: Toward an Integrated Theoretical-Clinical Approach.

Eating disorders (EDs) can be viewed as “embodied acts” that help to cope with internal and external demands that are perceived as overwhelming. The maintenance of EDs affects the entire identity of the person; the lack of a defined; or valid sense of self is expressed in terms of both physical body and personal identity. According to attachment theory, primary relationships characterized by insecurity, traumatic experiences, poor mirroring, and emotional attunement lead to the development of dysfunctional regulatory strategies. Although the literature shows an association between attachment style or states of mind, trauma, behavioral strategies, and various EDs, the debate is still ongoing and the results are still conflicting. Therefore, we believe it is important to examine and treat EDs by understanding which narrative trajectory intercepts distress in relation to narrative and embodied self-concept. Drawing on clinical observation and a narrative review of the literature, we focus on the construction and organization of bodily and narrative identity. Because bodily representations are the primary tools for generating meaning, organizing experience, and shaping social identity from the earliest stages of life, we focus on the role that bodily interactions and sensorimotor and proprioceptive patterns have played in the development of EDs. We consider the role that lack of attunement, insecure attachment, and relational trauma play in mentalizing, affecting self-representation and emotion regulation strategies. The paper also considers a semantic mode of trauma in EDs that involves a top-down pathway through beliefs and narratives about oneself based on lack of amiability, on devaluation, and on humiliation memories. Finally, we would like to highlight the proposal of an integrated model with multiple access model to psychotherapy that takes into account the complexity of ED patients in whom aspects related to dysregulation, body image disintegration, and post-traumatic symptoms are associated with a suffering sense of self and a retraumatizing narrative.

Mihailo Lalić and Serbian Ethnology: Ethnography and Mimesis of Patriarchal Society in Montenegrin Highlands

My starting point is the yet unexplored supposition that Lalić’s realistic writing about the reality contains also a real ethnological and anthropological reference, first of all comments on the Serbian ethnology of the first half of the 20th century, its traditional paradigm, and strategy of ethnographic writing. My second supposition is that the deeper structure of Lalić’s historical novels is “inscribed” by the genre of ethnography which, together with other text types and stylistic means, contributes to the virtuoso construction of great narratives about the Montenegrin life world in historical perspective. Finally, an analysis of Lalić’s discourse reveals that despite the Marxist inspired criticism of ethnology as part of the Serbian national science, the discipline was an inevitable point of reference in the narrative construction of Montenegrin identity.

Second Acts and Second Chances: The Bumpy Road to Redemption

Throughout history, there are numerous examples of business and government leaders who have fallen from grace only to rise again, and have a “second act” and a “second chance” as a legitimate social actor or leader—that is, they achieved redemption. We explore “the road to redemption” of leaders—when and why it occurs, and what “bumps” prevent it. In our analysis, we conceptualize redemption as a process with three elements—remorse, rehabilitation, and restoration—and as an outcome (the restoration of legitimacy). We argue that achieving redemption is not a product of chance; rather, it is a social construction process of narrative creation and identity construction involving many parties. Also, the road to redemption is shaped by cultural-specific factors—and it is temporally dependent. From this framework, we identify new directions for the theory and practice of leadership.

Narrative Identity, Metacognition, and Well-Being in Patients With Schizophrenia or HIV.

It has been proposed that schizophrenia reflects disturbances in personal identity, which include sense of personal agency, sense of belonging within a social group, and metacognition. Less is known about how these different processes are related to one another and to well-being outcomes. To study this, we measured themes of agency and communion in narrative identity in 29 individuals with schizophrenia and 29 individuals with HIV. All participants had previously been assessed on metacognitive abilities using the Indiana Psychiatric Illness Interview (IPII) and completed scales measuring hopelessness and self-esteem. For the present study, themes of agency and communion were coded from the IPII transcripts. Results indicated that participants with schizophrenia had lower levels of agency and communion compared with participants with HIV. More presence of agency and communion themes were related to better metacognitive abilities as well as less hopelessness and higher self-esteem across groups. Agency predicted variance in hopelessness after controlling for metacognitive abilities. The results suggest that although the construction of narrative identity may depend on metacognitive abilities, agency themes predict outcomes beyond metacognition.

Exploring the Construction of Identities in Written Humorous Narratives by L2 Learners of Greek

The aim of this paper is to explore how adult learners of Greek as a second language construct their identities through humorous written narratives. Analyzing 135 written humorous narratives with Bamberg’s (1997) narrative positioning model and the knowledge resources of script opposition and target from the General Theory of Verbal Humor (Attardo 1994, 2001), we detect two main categories: (a) narratives of legitimizing identities and (b) narratives of resistance identities. Here we discuss one narrative of each category in which narrators position themselves towards aspects of the Greek sociolinguistic context. Humor emerges as a basic tool for identity construction and stance expression, as narrators either align themselves with dominant values of the L2 context or disassociate themselves from it.

Narrative Founder Identity: Weaving the Past Life Stories Together to Make Sense of Self

It is argued that founders’ identities provide valuable insights in understanding differences across those founders’ behaviors and their enterprises. Until recently, however, entrepreneurship literature has been drawn only on two prominent identity theories – social identity theory (SIDT), role identity theory (IDT), and the combination of both. This study suggests that there is an additional stream of identity research that will be helpful in reconciling the discrepancies between the two prominent identity theories and in providing a more coherent sense of oneself. Narrative identity literature, based on social constructionist perspective, suggests that people construct their current identity by reflecting on their past life stories and narratively weaving them together so it can give answers to the question of ‘how I came to be.’ In other words, narrative identity construction provides people with coherent sense of self that runs through temporal horizon of one’s life. SIDT and IDT, respectively, has its advantage in understanding entrepreneurs’ identity based on their belongingness to certain social categories and their assumed roles. However, these two theories do not explain well about the changes over one’s life course. Narrative founder identity will make the field overcome this shortcoming by looking at entrepreneurs’ identity in terms of its temporal integration of discrete social and role identities in certain points in time of their life histories.

Narratives that Matter: #MeToo and Performative Narrative Identity Construction

The study of narrative identity has provided a strong empirical basis for management and organization studies, but we still lack understanding of how narratives might matter and make a real difference in people’s lives. We argue that the crux of the issue is performativity, which remains a poorly understood aspect of narratives and storytelling. In this paper we present and analyze a unique case inspired by the #MeToo movement and a collective mobilizing of people’s narrative accounts. Drawing on both Paul Ricoeur and performativity theory we show how narratives matter, and how multiple others, when they form a shared narrative, affect our decision to act or to remain passive in a situation – to speak or to be silent. Performative narratives are powerful in their emancipatory effect on individual and collective identities. Our findings show that the narratives have strong performative power, and the narrative identity is constructed and reconstructed in the process.

Construction of deaf narrative identity in Creative South African Sign Language (SASL)

In this paper we observe how deaf narrative identity (identities) emerge in creative SASL texts. We first identify how difficulties in establishing deaf cultural identities in the hearing-dominant world are represented in the ‘Man Against Monster’ plot (Booker 2004) commonly employed in sign language narrative. Then we use de Certeau (1984)’s notion of ‘place versus space’ and Heap (2003)’s notion of Sign-deaf space (plus our own term of mediated Sign-speak space) to explore how deaf artists transform the Monster (i.e. oppressing hearing place) into Deafhood and deaf space, which leads to the celebration of sign language and deaf culture. We also demonstrate how the recent notion of sensescape , coined by Rosen (2018), can be used to reinterpret our own approach to deaf narrative identity. The Monster in deaf stories can be understood not only in terms of the audist ideology but also in terms of different sensory orientations between deaf and hearing characters. Creative texts provide a wealth of opportunities to explore how narrative identities are constructed. In fictional stories, deaf narrators step back from being themselves and extract the essence of their shared experience and sublimate it into a search for Deafhood which appeals to the deaf community. Various notions developed within the field of deaf studies, such as Deafhood, deaf space and deaf geographies, are useful in (re-)interpreting existing texts and shedding a new light on them.