Difficult Stories Research Articles

Effects of varied multimedia animations in digital storybooks: A randomised controlled trial with preschoolers

BackgroundRapid growth in early childhood device usage has raised critical questions about the potential impact of digital storybooks on children's reading outcomes. The current study examined how two types of multimedia animations in digital storybooks – animations of storyline elements or details in the illustrations – influenced the story comprehension and enjoyment of young children.MethodsPreschool children (n = 86) read a digital storybook in one of three conditions: storyline‐element animations, illustration‐detail animations or no additional animations. Two digital storybooks with varied difficulty and numbers of animations were examined. After an initial evaluation of vocabulary skills, children read their assigned version of each digital storybook and then completed assessments of story comprehension and enjoyment.ResultsOverall, animations focused on illustration details hindered comprehension. For a less difficult story (with limited animations), animations focused on storyline elements improved comprehension. In a more difficult story (with many animations), animations focused on storyline elements enhanced comprehension only for children with high‐vocabulary skills. There were no differences in story enjoyment across conditions.ConclusionsAlthough illustration details are related to story content, digital storybook animations focused on these visual details may be overwhelming for young children. While animations that depict or extend storyline elements can support comprehension for children, large numbers of these animations in difficult stories have a counterintuitive effect – improving comprehension only for children with high vocabulary. Even storyline‐element animations in difficult stories may overload processing and hinder comprehension. Given no observed effects of varied animations on story enjoyment, a strategic, restrained approach to embedded animations focused on storyline elements may be warranted.

Taking Power, Telling Stories: Using Collaborative Autoethnography to Explore Transitions to Adulthood with and without Disability Identities

This article explores collaborative autoethnography as a research method with emancipatory and unifying potential. We undertake this exploration via our shared stories of transitioning to adulthood through the lenses of identifying as living with and without disabilities. The article offers two important contributions: a deeper understanding of the ways in which disability identities relate to experiences of adulthood; and insights into the ways in which caring and collaborative autoethnographic methods can be applied in lived experience research. We found that adult identities were formed through acts of resistance and transitions to new relationships that exemplified a social relational model of disability. We found that collaborative autoethnography can be a valuable method for lived experience research that challenges power dynamics and subjectivities. A safe space in which researchers balance vulnerability and strengths can bring joy to research, even amidst the sharing of difficult stories.

Teaching Difficult Stories: Trauma-Informed Teaching in the Classics Classroom

AbstractEvery textbook has its strengths, and each its own quirks and idiosyncrasies. Apart from any pedagogical concerns about the old Cambridge Latin Course textbook series, for example, was the question of how it represented problematic aspects of the ancient world, such as the role of women and the institution of slavery (see Hunt, 2016). The de Romanis Latin course (Radice et al., 2020a and 2020b), which we use at my school at Key Stage 3, takes a much more detached approach to the teaching of Roman culture, presenting its reading exercises as individual stories grouped around each chapter's centralised theme rather than as a narrative told from the perspective of one group of fictionalised characters. But difficult subjects still arise and need to be handled sensitively by the teacher – particularly given the age group (11–14) the textbook is aimed at. This paper shows one way in which this might be achieved.

Bourdieu's habitus clivé in voicing, feeling, being Aboriginal

Bourdieu's concept of habitus clivé is discussed in relation to Aboriginal Australians’ experience within dominant White society. The argument is put forward that the concept can make an important contribution to illuminating Indigenous experience. At the same time there is an ever-present danger that habitus clivé becomes another tool for theorising about Aboriginal people, even if sympathetically, rather than a vehicle for Aboriginal expression of history, pain, suffering and contemporary aspirations. Growing recognition of the value of Aboriginal culture, art and ways of knowing is desirable and a positive part of present shifts in Australian cultural identities. Changing cultural tastes and an aesthetic sense beyond co-option of place involves telling and re-telling many difficult stories with Aboriginal experiences at the centre and learning to embrace what we hear.

Archaeology, Emotional Storytelling, and Performance

Archaeologists tell stories about the past through the interpretation of material remains, frequently an emotional pursuit. Even so, the profession is often represented simplistically, dispassionately, or problematically, according to perspectives on practice that have little to do with the actuality. The South Korean stage musical Return: The Promise of the Day is an example of how the representation of archaeology and archaeological fieldwork specifically have been incorporated into staging and storytelling to tell difficult stories about the past to both domestic and international audiences. The practice of conflict archaeology is represented as a means of facilitating the understanding of violent conflict across generations. This paper accounts for how Return makes use of archaeology, further showcasing the potential for representations of archaeology and archaeological practice to tell emotional stories and expand heritage audiences.

Panelists Outline How to Address Patients’ Social Determinants of Health, Why It’s Important

Panelists Outline How to Address Patients’ Social Determinants of Health, Why It’s Important

Using fiction to tell mad stories: a journey into historical imagination and empathy

ABSTRACT In this article, the author explores larger themes of empathy, imagination, and the historian’s craft through her process of writing a novella entitled The Red Chair. This historical fiction is about the psychiatric patients at the Brockville Asylum (Brockville, Ontario, Canada), and explores the daily lives of many inmates. It emerges from her Master’s Research Project, where the author sought to center emotions as a means of knowing. Reflecting on the process, she argues for a larger presence of historical fiction in academic scholarship to engage both with the past and the historian’s craft. The author argues that the expansion of disciplinary boundaries should include fictional conventions, which might assist in telling more difficult stories, and in her case, challenge the biomedical dominance of asylum histories.

L’identité narrative dans la prise en charge psychologique des jeunes issus de la conception médicalisée

The story of becoming a parent is often couched in the language of desire built on fantasies. And although such idyllic accounts tend to conceal much more difficult stories about becoming parents, nevertheless assisted reproductive technology has given new hope to many couples experiencing infertility. In the course of our work as professional psychologists, we recorded the reflections of young women between the ages of 15 and 25 who were conceived using assisted reproductive technology. To understand how the circumstances of their conception impacted their narrative identity, we adopted a clinical approach that involved having these young women share their life narratives, starting with their conception stories. Based on our clinical observations, the article explores a five-stage method for facilitating narrativity, consisting of the interview process, projective mechanisms, the creation of an autobiographical timeline, and, finally, the act of writing a life story. This multifaceted approach makes it possible to address the impact of conception stories on narrative identity from both a diachronic and synchronic perspective. Finally, we conduct a theoretical and clinical assessment of this promising methodology, which primarily aims to give young people the tools and support they need to share their life narratives in the context of therapy sessions—a process likely to promote better mental health through more harmonious identity development.

Considerations of Truth and Fact in Narrative Analysis

A central understanding of narrative scholarship is that stories are ever in process, taking shape in each recounting according to the needs, purposes, and understandings of the teller. Sometimes participants share accounts that are incomplete or inaccurate, shrink from voicing their feelings, or silence their accounting altogether. In this study, I draw on difficult stories, shared by military bandswomen who endured a traumatic government investigation into their personal lives during the McCarthy era, to examine the distinctions between empirical facts and interpretive truth, trouble the linkage between objective and subjective ways of knowing, and consider the researcher’s ethical responsibility when a participant hides the facts or refuses to voice their truths.

Feminist humour’s disruptive potential: Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood and Rupi Kaur’s ‘I’m taking back my body’

Using Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood and Rupi Kaur’s TEDxKC performance, ‘I’m taking back my body’, as case studies, this article examines how feminist humour is used by celebrities and public intellectuals to tell personal stories of oppression, trauma and inequality. Building on humour theory, feminist humour theory and affect theory, this article examines the potential of feminist humour as a rhetorical device to help storytellers tell difficult stories, to engage in acts of community-building and world-making, to challenge social inequalities and to enable social change. Ultimately, this article asks what we can learn from these examples, and how we can employ feminist humour in our own storytelling practices not only to disrupt power relations and establish solidarity, but also to imagine new, more equitable, worlds.

Life and Art: A Research and Practice Journey

ABSTRACT Playwrights crafting work from real-life sources have heightened links with both the affective subject material of such work, and the sources themselves, particularly when the life stories derived from such sources are traumatic in nature. Being drawn to and dealing with difficult individual, social, historical and political stories implies a complex writing process of reflexive iterations of responsibility to sources and subject. Such a process requires ethical sensitivity to the concept of ‘truth’ as an amalgam of subjectivities and attention to ‘authenticity’ as a complex and accurate encapsulation of that truth. Creativity demands ongoing highly conscious self-knowledge to develop and strengthen both practice and product. This essay explores the point of view and experience of an artist-practitioner working with traumatic subject matter. Drawing on theory from theatre studies and trauma studies and discussing the process and centrality of ethics in relation to creative methodology, the essay reflects on the personal impact of the making of fraught work, and the uncovering, sharing and responsible transformation of fraught stories for a wider audience. It offers an outline of this experience that is relevant for other, similar artist-practitioners and researchers.

About the Artist: Jasmine Togo-Brisby

About the Artist:Jasmine Togo-Brisby Katerina Teaiwa Jasmine Togo-Brisby is a fourth-generation Australian South Sea Islander with roots in Ambae and Santo, Vanuatu, and now based in Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Her practice is multidisciplinary, including painting, early photographic techniques, and sculpture, and her research examines the historical practice of blackbirding, a euphemism for the Pacific slave trade, in which over sixty thousand Islanders were taken to work on Australian sugarcane plantations between 1847 and 1903. This labor trade has a contemporary legacy, continuing to impact those who trace their roots to Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia through the South Sea Islander and other slave diasporas. Togo-Brisby, whose great-great-grandparents were taken from a beach in Vanuatu in 1899 and put to work as house slaves for the Sydney-based Wunderlich family, is one of the few Pacific artists exploring cultural memory and shared histories of plantation colonization and displacement across the Pacific. Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Nadai Wilson Ships, displacements, arrivals, and belonging are regular themes in Togo-Brisby's powerful works. She is deeply inspired by her ancestors' difficult stories and experiences, as well as by what she needs to share with her daughter, who features in her artworks. In a 2020 interview for the New Zealand Maritime Museum, titled "Unfurling Tākiri with Jasmine Togo-Brisby," she spoke on the importance of identity within a community still marginalized in mainstream Australia: "What does it mean to be South Sea for me? Like, it's everything, you know. It's my culture. It's my people. It's why I exist." Jasmine Togo-Brisby is the first artist of Australian South Sea Islander heritage to be featured in The Contemporary Pacific, and we hope that awareness and inclusion of Australian South Sea Islanders as an integral part of Australian and Pacific histories and families will continue to gain attention and establish the recognition and justice these communities deserve. [End Page vii] Click for larger view View full resolution Bitter Sweet, by Jasmine Togo-Brisby, 2015. Unrefined sugar and resin, dimensions variable; installation 2,000 x 2,000 x 1,200 mm. Photo by Shaun Waugh. Racial segregation was heavily enforced in Australia throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. Respectful burial of non-white people within cemeteries was often difficult to facilitate, and many plantation owners opted to dig large burial pits on the outskirts of their plantations. Today, mass unmarked graves of South Sea Islanders remain scattered across plantations throughout Queensland and northern New South Wales. Often dug up by accident, each discovery reopens wounds from a past that most Australians would rather forget. This work exists as a memorial to those who did not survive the journey on slave ships, to those who passed away through lack of immunity to Western diseases, and to those who endured the toil and burden of hard labor only to be left out of Australian history books. [End Page viii] Click for larger view View full resolution Into Something Else, by Jasmine Togo-Brisby, 2021. Crow feathers and mixed media, diameter 2,500 mm. Photo by Bo Wong. South Sea Islander erasure was initially pathed through mass deportations (the largest in Australian history), and those remaining were forced by governmental structures to identify their South Sea bodies as Indigenous Australian, a terrain of "Blak" political struggle that continues to reinforce South Sea placelessness today. Into Something Else interrogates this spatial dilemma and acts as a physical manifestation of the Pacific slave diaspora—exploring the complexities of contemporary South Sea Islander identity. The black crow is often claimed by our South Sea community and used in unity as a symbol of the blackbirding trade and of our collective memory and cultural identity. My practice takes shape using reoccurring motifs, and in this piece, I claim crow products as my own South Sea material culture. The installation moves both backward and forward in time, refusing to sit in either the past or the future, while offering itself as a site of South Sea possibility. [End Page ix] Click for larger view View full resolution Post-Plantation, by...

Honoring the Difficult Histories and Diverse Stories of Little Tokyo

An interview with actor and activist George Takei uncovers how his early experience in a Japanese American relocation camp shaped his views on why we choose to preserve historic places, how telling difficult stories can lead us to reconciliation, and how preservation can contribute to the social justice goals of equity and inclusion.

Historying Tragedy through an Object of Empathy: Hon Xuan’s Violin

AbstractObjects with difficult histories present profound opportunities for learning and teaching alike because of their authenticity, relatability and quite often their ability to inspire empathy. The following article constructs a multivalenced account of a student’s vandalised violin by utilising a narrative framework to layer various perspectives into an educational history. Recent theory in historiography, oral history and material culture will help to navigate the ethics of telling sensitive and difficult stories from the past. The version of history I present positions the student’s violin as the central character in the lives of its caretakers. As a result, we see the instrument not a as static object, but as a piece of material culture in a constant state of becoming. This article offers its readers an opportunity to reflect on the meaning we give to classroom objects, the agency these objects possess, and the necessity to pursue new ways to teach empathy.

Boondock Kollage: Stories from the Hip Hop South by Regina N. Bradley

CLA JOURNAL 125 Book Reviews Bradley, Regina N. Boondock Kollage: Stories from the Hip Hop South. Peter Lang, 2017. 140 pp. ISBN: 1433133032. $46.95 Paperback. In an eerily similar way to Boondock Kollage author Regina N. Bradley, I was also transplanted to Albany, Georgia during my eighth-grade year. I was a military brat and had lived a privileged, international life. I found myself transfixed by a world where the color line held strong and firm, even in the mid- nineties. I hadn’t known that a live oak tree could be haunting and beautiful simultaneously. I was uncultured in the melodious dialect of black folk in South West Georgia who pronounced “back” like the word “bike” and sang the praises of Jimmy’s hotdogs. In 1992 when I landed in Dougherty County, I was schooled in the ways and wisdom of my new environment. I learned to embrace my newly discovered southern identity and haven’t looked back since. Bradley’s collection of stories, Boondock Kollage brings the idiosyncrasies of her hometown to life with all the finesse and detail of local color writing. She indoctrinates her readers in the unique cultural milieu of SOWEGA (South West Georgia, for the outsiders), offering imagery and language that speaks with a truth that any southerner will recognize, regardless of regional affiliation. The first story,“AVisitation from Grace”for instance,honors the tumultuous space of Lake Blackshear and the elder folk who shaped the community and made the Hip Hop South even possible. Bradley’s reverence for place and the people who came before her is evident in her writing. The collection is offered in three parts, each focusing on a specific theme and engaging in intertextual dialogues about the South. Part One, “Reaching Back Around” addresses coherently the importance of remembering and the safety one finds in the healing hands of black women like Auntie Nan. Bradley calls to mind the difficult stories of southern black folk as told by the likes of J. California Cooper in a single line:“His hands were rough like the ones before him, but they didn’t wander” (44). Her knack for storytelling captures the everyday folk, in the vain of Zora Neale Hurston, while also summoning the spirituality embedded in a region that has been both a place of home and a site of horror for generations. Part Two, entitled “Long Division” nods toward Bradley’s writerly kin, Kiese Laymon, and his phenomenal collection by the same title. In “The Beautiful Ones” she grapples with the realities of being young and black in a self-segregating South where black boys go missing. Bradley masterfully demonstrates those original and innovative “Characteristics of Negro Expression” in phrases like “biscuit and fatback thick” (47) and characters nicknamed Picklebean and Scoot. Part Three, “Stitches in Time” takes the reader through the ritualized rigor of black high school band camp and closes with a wonderfully illustrated tale of post-Hurricane Katrina paranoia and trap games. The publisher includes a question bank, rightly anticipating that the stories are ripe for teaching and learning about the South for a new generation. The stories in Boodock Kollage offer a new vision of the South with a language and lifestyle that are as old as time yet vibrantly contemporary. It is no wonder that the 126 CLA JOURNAL Book Reviews anthology has received the endorsement of Jesmyn Ward and Kiese Laymon, two of the most recognizable contemporary southern writers. In the words of Andre Benjamin, “the South got something to say” and has found a worthy mouthpiece in the work of Regina Bradley. Kameelah L.Martin is the author of Conjuring Moments in African American Literature and Envisioning Black Feminist Voodoo Aesthetics, which received the CLA Creative Scholarship Award in 2017. She is the Director of African American Studies at the College of Charleston where she also holds a joint appointment as Professor of African American Studies and English. ...

Refugee Narratives; Oral History and Ethnography; Stories and Silence

This paper addresses the challenges of working ethically and reflexively with refugees, migrants, and others whose life circumstances place them in positions of great precarity. The crises that have led to large-scale migration and asylum-seeking throughout the world bring us face-to-face with situations and experiences about which we urgently need and want to know. As ethnographers and oral historians, we work with narratives and look for understanding at least in part through personal histories. But in the process of engaging with people and their difficult stories, we come to appreciate the larger contexts of struggles that include we ourselves, and must confront our own relationship to these circumstances in ways that challenge the very idea of a coherent, single “story.” The practices of oral history and ethnography, because they require a personal engagement on the part of the researcher, are particularly useful in enabling us to see beyond individual narratives to the historical, political, economic, and social contexts in which, in a deeply interconnected world, we are all implicated, and out of which stories (sometimes) emerge.

Only a game? Player misery across game boundaries

ABSTRACTVideogames often confront players with frustratingly difficult challenges, fearsome enemies, and tragic stories. As such, they can evoke feelings of failure, sadness, anger, and fear. Although these feelings are usually regarded as undesirable, many players seem to enjoy videogames which cause them. In this paper, I argue that player misery often originates from a fictional or lusory attitude which brackets game events from real-life, making the player’s emotions solely relevant within the game context. As they are part of the game themselves, these negative emotions can be enjoyed and easily relativized, since players can acknowledge that their cause is ‘only a game’. However, there are feelings of misery associated with the playing of videogames which are not caused by either the game’s fiction or challenge. In the last part of this paper, I describe a qualitatively different kind of player misery: one that is caused by elements that are not perceived as part of the game by the player, and is not bracketed from real life by a lusory or fictional attitude.

Who will do the difficult stories now? British local newspaper editors fear a future where powerful fi gures are not held to account, plus a poll of public opinion on journalism

Who will do the difficult stories now? British local newspaper editors fear a future where powerful fi gures are not held to account, plus a poll of public opinion on journalism

Listening to difficult stories: Listening as a research methodology

This paper reflects on the emotional geographies of listening to difficult stories from Sri Lankan refugees and asylum seekers. I have framed this discussion within a methodological rubric of listening: the way I listened to difficult stories during interviews, and how I reflected on the process of listening afterwards. Conducted in their homes, the interviews involved participants (re)telling stories of fleeing war-torn Sri Lanka, often replete with harrowing experiences. These stories were emotional and oftentimes traumatic for participants to (re)tell. The interviews were also emotional and sometimes distressing for the interpreter employed and myself as the researcher in this sensitive setting. In this paper, I unpack how participants’ stories were told, how I listened to them, and I foreground how the presence or absence of emotions formed part of these stories. Then, I discuss my own fieldwork experiences that provided an analytic lens as I repetitively listened to, transcribed and analysed the content of the interviews. I reflect on strategies developed from my experiences and outline lessons learned from this fieldwork to facilitate pathways for researchers conducting sensitive research.

The Value of Speaking up.

The authors of the contributions to this symposium #MeToo in Surgery: Narratives by Women Surgeons have courageously told often difficult stories that are important for all surgeons to reflect upon. The stories of discrimination and harassment are terrible to read but in no way surprising for anyone involved in surgical training over the last 30 years. Unfortunately, these experiences are not of historical interest only. They continue to occur and point to the need to change the culture of surgery.