Hidden Narratives Research Articles

Providing peer support on a men’s mental health ward: a service user narrative

Purpose The purpose of this study is to describe peer support work in a men’s mental health unit from a lived experience and service user’s perspective. The intertwining of process (a lived experience perspective) and subject (the therapeutic value of peer support) leads to greater knowledge and insight into peer support for people with mental health problems. Design/methodology/approach This service user narrative draws on the extracts from a reflective journal of interactions and conversations with people with mental health problems as well as feedback from service users and staff about the value of peer support. These methods allow a first-person, service user’s, reflective and narrative account of peer support work. Findings Peer support work, particularly hearing voices sessions, are found to be highly therapeutic and worthwhile. They promote insight and create feelings of safety and hope in what can sometimes be a frightening and hostile ward environment. Peer support provides emotional and practical support. Sharing stories and experiences of mental illness with people leads to trust, feelings of being valued, heard and accepted as well as better experiences of care and being seen as a person first. Due to their shared experiences, peer support workers are able to befriend people with mental health problems on the ward. Peer support work bridges the gap and vacuum of care between people with mental health problems and staff. It compensates for understaffing to provide more holistic and person-centred care and support. Originality/value Lived experience/ service user perspectives and narratives on peer support are rare, particularly in a hospital setting. This article provides a rich, perhaps overlooked and hidden narrative on the nature of peer support work. People with mental health problems, like Ben, are often excluded from society, health and social care, education, employment and research. This narrative opens up a pathway to understanding peer support from a service user perspective.

Interview with Nesli Gül Durukan on her exhibition "Scattered - Hidden Narratives through Archives"

Interview with Nesli Gül Durukan on her exhibition "Scattered - Hidden Narratives through Archives"

Book Review: Outlanders: Hidden Narratives from Social Workers of Colour from Black and Other Global Majority Communities by Wayne Reid and Siobhan Maclean (eds)

Book Review: <i>Outlanders: Hidden Narratives from Social Workers of Colour from Black and Other Global Majority Communities</i> by Wayne Reid and Siobhan Maclean (eds)

Keepers of the Grave: Ritual Guides, Ghosts, and Hidden Narratives in Indonesian History

The 1965 killings in Indonesia brought about the incarceration, disappearances, and deaths of 500,000 to one million alleged members of the Indonesian Communist Party. This article concentrates on several suspected mass graves in Central Java reputed to have supernatural energy emanating from the violent deaths of the individuals buried there. These sites also have gatekeepers or juru kunci bridging the living and the spirits inhabiting these spaces. This research asks, How do these sites, through their juru kunci, elucidate a past which continues to be silenced? I posit that through contact with the souls of the executed, these gatekeepers utilize an ethereal connection to subvert the state’s enforced silence. These sites also provide a ritual space transforming these ghosts into ancestors worthy of remembrance. By reclaiming the identities of those murdered, the living and the dead can achieve a kind of localized spiritual reconciliation.

Narratives underlying research in African river basin management

River modifications through hydropower dams and other infrastructure have far-reaching economic, ecological and social effects that are viewed in highly contrasting ways depending on underlying narratives. As part of a Euro-African research consortium funded by the European Commission we studied pathways for sustainable river basin management in the Omo-Turkana basins in Ethiopia and Kenya. Based on a literature review, stakeholder workshops, targeted interviews and considering our own positionality, we identified underlying narratives related to (a) economic transformation and modernization, (b) indigenous rights and (c) nature conservation, which were all connected through water, energy, food and ecosystems within a (d) landscape nexus. Yet, we also identified a (e) living museum narrative suggesting that international advocacy for indigenous rights and nature conservation is a means through which Western societies want to preserve African societies in an “undeveloped” state. National governments use this narrative to silence external critique, while the tourism industry promotes it to advertise visits to pastoralist tribes. This narrative reveals powerful, yet largely ignored hindrances for collaborative projects resulting from cultural and historical biases in Euro-African collaborations. Based on our analysis, we argue that international research projects in sustainability sciences need to increase the transparency of open and hidden narratives that influence research directions and power relationships between scientific partners, also those using mostly technically-driven approaches. We emphasize that African landscapes are not to be viewed as living museums, and collaborative research should be based on fairness, respect, care, and honesty to allow for multiple narratives that underlie research.

Outlanders: Hidden Narratives from Social Workers of Colour (from Black &amp; Other Global Majority Communities), Edited by Wayne Reid and Siobhan Maclean

Outlanders: Hidden Narratives from Social Workers of Colour (from Black &amp; Other Global Majority Communities), Edited by Wayne Reid and Siobhan Maclean

Performing Spaces: Staging Resistance, Gendered Cartographies and Self

The paper aims to explore the self in different performative spaces, which includes theatre, dance, music, and posters. In doing so it tends to analyze how the “spaces” are being refilled by defining the “hidden narratives” of the self through performances. The performances are not just for entertainment rather the aim is to expose the hidden spaces of the society where bodies with pride are produced. The spaces are liberating and empowering in nature through which multiple narratives are perceived, conceived and lived. Considering performative space as a space where gender binaries can be unsettled, the work reveals how certain performances bolster one to rethink about the social conventions of gender. The performative body becomes a medium through which the idea of self, sexuality, space, gender, and culture can be looked upon. The body experiencing the sense of ‘homelessness’ within its own being goes into the quest for the discovery of the self, which is underlined with an expression of anger against the pseudo codifications of systems, thus authenticating change. The paper provides discourse on how performative spaces have become a product of change. To this end, the paper unravels how performances “fill in the blanks” and explores the wider dynamics of space including public, private, and mental spaces and how the outer spaces influence inner spaces.

“Ask for a Miracle”: Memory, Manipulation, and Displacement in the Cooper-Young Neighborhood

Through a combination of walking, archival, and arts-based research methodologies, this paper expands the experiential process of creating a visual representation of the changes that have taken place in the Cooper-Young neighborhood of Memphis, Tennessee. Combined, these (visual) elements highlight the disparities between the dominant and hidden narratives of Cooper-Young’s history.

Ein Land – verschiedene Geschichte(n)

Summary One Country – Different Histories. About the “German Welcoming Culture” in Summer 2015 and its Psychodynamics When Germany didn’t close the open Schengen borders in August 2015, the reactions that followed were a big surprise inside as well as outside the country. The so called “Welcoming Culture” was initially based as much on official policy as on the generosity of large parts of the population. The following text traces the psychodynamics of this mass movement. The argument that this welcoming culture is a result of German guilt feelings resulting from WW II and the Holocaust is discussed in some depth. It will be connected to the identifications that results from the otherwise not much discussed German history of flight and displacement following WW II. Additionally, the impact of the later – from the 50s onwards – intake of some million workers and asylum seekers into (mainly) West Germany is traced. These influxes are considered as important background factors to understand public reaction to the situation of 2015 and later. These complexes are understood as hidden narratives that need an unfolding in the German public discourse.

History, Naming and Intellectualism in the #FeesMustFall Protests

This paper considers the black student as an emerging representative of the public intellectual's confrontation with history, institutional culture and language in the #FMF student protests. It pursues the manifestation of this confrontation through an analysis of specific episodes of articulation and events where the student as public intellectual encounters an academia that is incapable of comprehending or conceptualizing their demands. The protests animated the emerging black student public intellectual's projection into being and their confrontation with history, violence and academia. This paper examines the collaboration between the state and university as mechanisms of control to preserve the system and structure of neo-apartheid in a post-1994 South African society. I argue that the fixation with subjective violence, detracted from the greater, yet hidden narrative—that of the possibility of violence as ubiquitous in human social relations. Violence is also used to negate power. In confronting a powerful racist history and systems of racism, the #Fallists reference to the on-going complex levels of violence lived as a reality by black South Africans, could be understood as a form of social power to unchain the forced consensus that has been perpetuated around black violence and black ineptitude.

Hidden narratives; Personal albums from the KITLV collection and their captions

This article examines captions found in the various personal albums in the KITLV photo collection (Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde / Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Carribean Studies). The article shows that two types of captions can be distinguished: descriptive or identifying and commentary or reflective captions. These captions are an important part of the albums’ materiality and composition. Hence, captions turn the albums into autobiographical objects for both compiler and intended audiences. It is argued that photo albums and their image content should not be read separately from the captions either physically or digitally in image databases.

BED

In BED David Slater describes the genesis of a street theatre work jointly created by a group of older women living in South East London, all members of the participatory arts company Entelechy Arts. It traces how a company of seventy and eighty-year olds, made a performance work in response to feelings of invisibility experienced when going about their day to day lives in south east London, describing how they had felt that their stories and those of their peers, often living in loneliness and isolation, were not heard, valued or recognised. The resulting work, BED, initially designed for performance in a local street market, subsequently found itself touring to festivals and events across the UK and was later commissioned by Southbank Centre in London and the Saitama Arts Theatre in Japan.The article describes and celebrates a complex cultural ecology balancing on an edge between art, social care and everyday life, that has been created in one south London Borough to propagate new artistic practices; processes that have enabled engagement with radical arts practice to become both an ordinary and extraordinary part of the day to day lives of older (often isolated), residents. It outlines the co-productive processes and methodology that underpinned the joint creation of BED collectively by artists engaging with theatre and performance work for the first time in their lives in their seventies and eighties. It describes the ambition of the older creators to capture the truth and authenticity of their generation’s lived experience in the creation of a work intent on taking people by surprise, challenging perceptions and uncovering hidden narratives.

Moses died and the people moved on: A hidden narrative in Deuteronomy

The Torah states that Moses died at the age of 120, a ripe old age at which to die. Nevertheless, his death is usually considered tragically premature, as it came before completing his life mission...

What You See Is What You Get

French history textbooks occupy a pivotal position in the colonial fracture. They impart difficult knowledge about the Algerian War of Independence, knowledge that impacts the relationships between the communities of memory in France today. Textbook analysis has focused on their verbal content and, recently, in the work of Jo McCormack, on corresponding teaching practices. This article highlights graphic design as one layer of visual knowledge production and primarily contributes to the methodology of textbook analysis with an exemplary multimodal analysis. It reveals a hidden narrative about the postcolonial relationship that is not expressed in words.

Book Review: The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race

Book Review: The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race

Enlivening the senses: engaging sight and sound to (re)consider the hidden narratives of academics in the histories of university education

This article interrogates the construction of a visual and sound installation that juxtaposes contemporary material with historical artefacts regarding academic work to offer an aesthetic mode of interruption in explorations of academic voice in university histories and in the contemporary university. Drawing upon Foucauldian histories of the present (particularly genealogy), this installation combines text, images and sound to take audiences on an emotive journey of the university. As historical research increasingly takes on an aesthetic and sensual turn, moving beyond content and context to consider other forms of representation, the article draws on theories concerning the functions of art and the semiotics involved when we engage with art to explore the emotional dimensions of academic work. Art in story and story in art methodologies are used to situate attempts at engaging in aural and visual ways of knowing time and place to (re)consider academics’ silenced historical and contemporary narratives.

Review of The Undersea Network

In The Undersea Network, Nicole Starosielski traces transoceanic cable systems in order to illuminate their hidden narratives. Used to transmit the majority of Internet activity across the globe, these cables are seldom seen or thought of, notwithstanding their immense impact on global connectivity and the digital world.

Chủ thể trần thuật trong hồi ký cách mạng Việt Nam 1945- 1975

The article is aimed to find out the role, characteristics and expression of the narrator in Vietnamese revolutionary memoirs 1945 – 1975 from perspective narratology. Since then, it is to survey in details the characteristics and confirms the important role of witness narrator, the main narrator in memoirs. In addition, the types of objective narrator such as the hidden narrator and the third narrator make up the diversity of narration methods.

An Analysis of Humorous Dance Movements of Choripdong Dance

The purpose of this study is to investigate characteristics of humorous dance movements in Choripdong Dance, and to reveal a hidden narrative of the...

Hidden Narratives: Dancers' Conceptualisations of Noncharacter Roles in Leotard Ballets by George Balanchine and William Forsythe

The study of dancers' relationships with their noncharacter solo roles in leotard ballets by George Balanchine and William Forsythe reveals a dynamic cluster of flexible and multifaceted conceptualisations. Performers' process includes a range of abstract images, nonfictional and docufictional ideas, metaphoric allusions and storyboarding constructions. Drawing upon Michael Kirby's concept of non-matrixed performing (1987), as well as on ideas from dance aesthetics, narratology, theatre and film theories, noncharacter roles are understood as partly flexible, diverse performing frameworks that contain ambiguity but do not promote characterisation. The findings suggest that the dissolution of character traits in plotless choreography often serves as a catalyst for the performers' polyvalent expressions of their artistic identities, value systems and agency. Observation of performances, in conjunction with direct interviews with expert dancers from several international ballet companies, brings to light the links between the performer's ideas and the effects observable in the dance. Attention to the performers' approaches and aspects of the work which they wish to emphasise reveals less observed aspects of dance texts and illuminates the nature of the ballet dancer's qualitative contribution in non-narrative choreography.