Counter Stories Research Articles

Closing in on Story Openings and Closings: Evidence from Conversational Stories in Greek

AbstractMy aim in this paper is to show the benefits of incorporating a conversation-analytic perspective in the analysis of Greek storytelling data with regard to the endpoints of a telling, that is, the opening and the closing. I specifically explore the types of story openings and closings occurring in a data set that comprises the conversations of a group of female adolescents in a small town in Greece. I also discuss the salience of economic openings (Jefferson 1978) realized by certain conventionalized devices and the importance and local design of what I call counter stories in the stories' closing. I juxtapose counter stories to second stories (Sacks 1992), which have been found within CA to be frequent after a story's closing and I assess the frequency of second stories told by the same teller and not by a story recipient in my data. Overall, I argue that these systematic openings and closings in my data are interrelated with the types of stories told and the participants' roles and relations. Finally, I ponder the implications of this close connection for CA work on stories as talk-in-interaction.

Breaking containment – the power of narrative knowing: countering silences within traditional special education research

Special education has been critiqued for not adequately acknowledging and therefore addressing the overrepresentation of students of colour assigned disability labels. To counter the paucity of information about the largest group of disabled students in urban settings, eight young adults labelled learning disabled (LD) co‐created ‘portraits in progress’. These social, cultural, and historical based narratives act as counter stories to traditional special education research located within a medical‐model paradigm that casts students as deficit‐based. Excerpts from these highly personal narratives reveal nuanced understandings of power dynamics pertaining to disability, race, and social class as each one shapes the experience of the others. Participants perceive their lives as a series of interlocking containments; for some, special education is one example.

Work placements as narrative learning: stories for learning and for counterpoint

This paper reports on a study of work placement students in a British university, looking at the stories that they tell about what and how they learn on their placements. It argues that the stories told do not only relay the student's learning, but are also a part of how that learning takes place. Several of the stories seem to carry counter stories and the paper looks at several examples of students telling us both the story and its counter story, as if to express the need for both in their learning. This contrasts with the comparative univocality of some propositional learning. The paper suggests that narrative learning may be particularly appropriate when that which is being learned needs context, qualification and continuing development to make sense to the student.

Counter Stories of Race and Gender: Situating Experiences of Latinas in the Academy

Counter Stories of Race and Gender: Situating Experiences of Latinas in the Academy

Making a good Victoria Sponge cake: Schooling Empire, class, gender and sexuality

How do we communicate our work to our students and our friends who don't speak in the same academic tongues as we do? Using critical personal narrative, and a nice Homely metaphor, rather than poststructuralese, I explain what happens to a body in education, and how power works to produce it, say, as white, Imperial1, middle class and heterosexual. Alternating temporal frames, I tell the counter history of doing my (body's) counterhistory. I encourage you, my reader to settle in, get comfortable, make a cup of tea, and as we counter‐read/write, I hope we will come to understand my/our (counter) stories.

Learning by Telling

Organizational learning in this article is understood as a collective and relational process in which groups of persons are gaining knowledge and appreciation of issues through stories and an ongoing dialogue between stories. This notion forms the departure-point for the identification and implementation of an organizational learning intervention that aims to facilitate learning through storytelling workshops. The value and meaning of these storytelling workshops are illustrated with a case that deals with the development of palliative care for cancer patients among various health care organizations in an eastern part of the Netherlands. What kinds of stories were added to the existing set of stories, and how the storytelling process and the confrontation with counter stories contributed to the reflection on and reconstruction of canonized stories are described in detail. The article concludes with insights for organizational learning gained from storytelling in palliative care.

NÆRBILLEDER OG MODFORTÆLLINGER - INTERMEDIALITET, ERINDRING OG HISTORIEFREMSTILLING HOS KLUGE, SEBALD OG FOER

CLOSE-UPS AND COUNTER STORIES | Recently, several literary works have appeared which use formal experiments and intermedial strategies to thematize memory and history. Authors such as Alexander Kluge, W.G. Sebald, Daniel Mendelsohn, Monica Maron, Jonathan Safran Foer, Don DeLillo and Aleksandar Hemon include other, primarily visual, media such as film, photographs and drawings, in their works while dealing with historical events like the Holocaust or the 9/11 terror attack. My article discusses this tendency, analyzing works by Kluge, Sebald and Foer. They all work with photographs in their texts. I trace the differences between them, following how ’foto-fiction’ as a genre has developed during the last three decades while arguing that Kluge, Sebald and Foer can all be read as part of the same tendency: Inspired by Andreas Huyssen’s idea of a modern memory culture, I suggest that the modern intermedial works can be read as an expression of a current cultural situation brought about by changes in the mediascape. Of course, books with pictures have always existed, however, the modern works are different from the typical illustrated novel as well as traditional history books, since they do not use the visual material to illustrate or document the story. Rather, images and text are brought together to introduce some tensions; to navigate between fiction and documentary, between an intimate remembering gaze and the ’objective’ writing of history. Intermediality thus becomes a tool to reflect upon modern conditions of writing history.

AFEK OF TELEFOLMIN: A FABULOUS STORY FROM NEW GUINEA WHICH LEAD TO A STRANGE TRAGEDY

Friday, the 6th November, 1953, at three different places in the valley over the mountains from the remote outpost of Telefolmin in the Sepik District of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea, four men died as the result of planned attacks by stone-age men armed with iron axes. On Wednesday, the 7th July, 1954, at Wewak, the headquarters of the Sepik District, the Papua and New Guinea Administration brought 33 Telefolmin natives to stand their trial for the killings. These had made a harshly unusual but not completely unfeared episode in its history of peaceful penetration and uplift of the primitive people in the rugged area under its charge. As the slow investigations progressed an interesting and unusual story emerged from the mass of clever stories and counter stories told with the effect of confusing the already confounded hearers. It was a story of a cohesion and of a common enterprise carried out with secrecy on a grand scale which is most unusual in the annals of the Territory.