Master Narrative Research Articles

Immigrant's death at the border: Do they influence White and Latinx Americans’ belief in the American dream?

AbstractIn this study, we test a clashing narrative approach to conflict, which argues that political conflict is based on opposing narratives that negate one another. We focus on the role of two master narratives central to political schism in the United States. The first is the American dream narrative, which posits that anyone who works hard can become successful in the United States. The opposing narrative, the systemic racism narrative, argues that the United States is a racist country where minorities are systemically held back. A survey study of 189 participants demonstrated that these two master narratives predict support for the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump or Joe Biden above and beyond more traditional ideological dispositions such as right‐wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. In a follow‐up experiment (n = 157), we examined how the Trump's administration policies of increased surveillance and policing of Latino immigrants crossing the border influenced White and Latinx participants’ agreement with the narrative of the American dream and the United States as a systemically racist country. Findings suggest that when confronted with news clips of immigrant death at the border, Latinx participants, compared to White participants, increased their endorsement of the American dream narrative. Conversely, White participants, increased their endorsement of the United States as a systemically racist country compared to Latinx participants. The results of this study help us understand support for the Republican party among Latinx voters.

Extending patient-centred communication to non-speaking intellectually disabled persons

Patient-centred communication is widely regarded as a best practice in contemporary medical care, both in terms of maximising health outcomes and respecting persons. However, not all patients communicate in ways...

Unmasking the Master Narrative: Exclusionary Practices and the Enslaved African Muslims Omar ibn Said, Bilali Muhammad, and Abdulrahman Ibrahima Sori

This study aims to investigate the exclusionary practices encountered by enslaved African Muslims in the antebellum United States, with an emphasis on how these practices shaped their lives. The significance of this study is that it sheds light on the challenges faced by individuals such as Omar ibn Said, Bilali Muhammad, and Abdulrahman Ibrahima Sori, offering insights into the workings of historical power structures. The guiding research question is: “In what ways did exclusionary practices impact the lives of the enslaved Muslims under study?” Utilizing a decolonial framework, inspired by the works of Walter Mignolo and Anibal Quijano, the study engages with concepts including the ‘master narrative’, ‘coloniality of power’, and ‘exclusionary practices’ to assess the legacy of oppression. The study contributes to the scholarship by providing a focused analysis of the experiences of enslaved Muslims, a topic that has received limited attention in historical and archival research. The conclusion will synthesize the discussion on exclusionary practices and the ‘master narrative’, reinforcing their importance in historical analysis.

What’s so Marxist about Marxist Educational Theory?

The antagonism between “class” and “race” have plagued educational theory for decades. As a communist organizer seeking to move Marxist educational theory out of the stagnant waters of theoretical debates, I turn to recent CRT scholarship, which I find much more in line with the communist project. Yet, this literature omits world-historic and ongoing transformations inaugurated particularly since the beginning of the 20th century by erasing, discounting or, denouncing them. I argue the primary factors inhibiting educational researchers: Anticommunism. The global revolutionary era led largely by revolutionary communists contains the most fruitful explanations of those conditions and connections (and the historical legacies accounting for mass movements in the U.S. today, like the historic 2020 uprising against the War on Black America). This rich and dynamic legacy is what can get educational scholarship beyond the cages of academia. After outlining the interconnection between anticommunism and anti-Black racism as the contours of master narratives, I demonstrate how anticommunism continues to hold education’s potential contributions to the struggle back while accounting for the material conditions responsible for the absence of revolutionary theory and practice and the overwhelming surplus of theories critical of revolution in the university today. I demonstrate how anti-Black racism in the U.S. is tethered to anticommunism and how Leninism provides the theoretical and practical link uniting the global struggle of the oppressed and creating the Black and indigenous-led communist movement, contending struggles against white supremacy, capitalism, and imperialism depend on a rejection of anticommunism by turning to Black communist Claudia Jones.

Internarrativity beyond acceptance: strategic narrative reproduction and Taiwan's ‘Taiwan Can Help’ campaign in the U.S.

ABSTRACT A political actor's strategic narratives will be accepted if they appeal to the target audience's master narratives, but acceptance is not a singular outcome. By building on the internarrativity framework by examining the audience as a narrator and identifying distortions in meaning between two narrative tellings, this paper analyzes the ‘Taiwan Can Help’ campaign as a strategic narrative that was overtly accepted by the U.S. while still being distorted and constrained by the same master narratives that enabled acceptance. The U.S. audience's reproductions of Taiwan's narrative only preserved elements that affirmed its exceptionalist self-identity and threat perceptions while overlooking the particulars of Taiwan's pandemic response model that the original narrative emphasised. This research contributes to the understanding that the discursive environment constrains Taiwan's capability to reach its full potential in projecting substantial influence in US-Taiwan relations, addressing Taiwan's unequal predicament, and garnering political support.

Alternative policy narratives of the future of climate change: Analyzing Finland's energy and climate strategy and news reports

AbstractIn this article, we examine the ways in which the futures of climate change and the climate change policy process are constructed as narratives—both explicitly and implicitly—in two different yet interconnected contexts that shape public climate discourse and debate: foresight‐based political decision‐making and journalism. The featured case is the National Energy and Climate Strategy of Finland for 2030. We employ and expand the Narrative Policy Framework to better understand the co‐existent, implicit narratives of the future in the contexts of policy and media. We construct two co‐existing yet contradictory underlying narratives of the future of climate change and climate policy. Our approach reveals that the prevailing master narrative of a desirable future is challenged by a co‐existing counter narrative where policies in the energy and climate strategy prioritize shorter‐term policy interests over climate change. Building on these findings, we argue that, in climate policy communication, communicators convey futures through narratives—both explicitly, as descriptions of what is perceived, hoped, and anticipated to happen, and implicitly, as the sum of the parts included and excluded.

Home as survival: Seeing Queer archival lives

As a teenager in the eighties, French filmmaker Sébastien Lifshitz scoured flea markets for amateur photographs. In 2013, he assembled a book titled The Invisibles comprised of snapshots depicting queer lives. He included a pair of Kodachrome images, which replicate a near-identical domestic scene in the 1960s: two aging women in their bourgeois home sit at a table, embracing as they look at the camera. Taking as a point of departure these personal photographs, this article focuses on two documentaries that queer postwar domesticity: Lifshitz’s The Invisibles (2011) and Magnus Gertten’s Nelly and Nadine (2022). In his film, Lifshitz not only includes postwar snapshots and home movies, but also reinvents the amateur dispositif. He interviews queer aging men and women inside their homes, challenging social exclusion and stigma based on gender nonconformity and aging. In Nelly and Nadine, a sexagenarian named Sylvie retrieves home movies from her attic that uncover a lesbian love story between her grandmother Nelly and a fellow survivor of Ravensbrück named Nadine. Decades later, the centrality of the domestic space and the amateur archive in these two documentaries offers a lesson in seeing the home as survival and unlearning the master narratives of the postwar era.

‘School is the Foundation of Everything’: Master- and Counter-narratives in Lower Secondary School Pupils’ Stories About the Importance of Schooling and Education

Cultural images of the knowledge society and the achievement generation are prevalent in current public and policy narratives about young people’s education. This article investigates how young people themselves give meaning to education, by reconstructing their narratives about the importance of schooling and education in today’s society. We present results from a qualitative in-depth study, consisting of focus group interviews with lower-secondary school pupils in suburban middle-class areas of Norway. From the perspective of narrative methodology, the article identifies how pupils construct, thematize and emplot the role and importance of education in their lives. The article finds that young people navigate a complexity of meaning dimensions in their lives. Although a master narrative of the knowledge society and its inherent achievement imperative certainly dominates the pupils’ accounts, they also present refinements and counter-narratives to these cultural imaginaries.

Plantations Beyond Monocrops: Cannabis Ecologies From Colonial Angola to São Tomé

São Tomé, a small island in the Gulf of Guinea and a former Portuguese colony, is an exemplary place to analyze the development of plantation “cropscapes.” These cropscapes emerged around sugar in the sixteenth century, evolved with coffee in the 1850s and consolidated with cocoa from the 1880s onwards. While is impossible to ignore the monocultural nature of São Tomé plantations and the centrality of specific plants for these plantation ecologies, there were other human/plant assemblages, that sustained, subverted or ran parallel to plantation goals of production, profit and power. This article zooms into cannabis to explore different relations between plantation working peoples and plantation environments, between suffering, healing, and violence, between labor, pleasure, and power. It will examine how cannabis was part and parcel of the lives of peoples from Angola recruited to São Tomé and, consequently, of the island's plantation worlds in the late nineteenth century. It will also discuss how colonial discourses on cannabis obscured and silenced the presence of this plant in contemporary plantation histories, regardless of its traces in the archive. Cannabis histories are in fact important ones: they counter imperial master narratives by showing how, even under conditions of exploitation, laboring communities and plants co-produced spaces of autonomy, care and leisure.

Historical maps as a neglected issue in history education. Students and textbooks representations of territorial changes of Spain and Argentina

In the last years, history education has become a highly developed field, which is receiving considerable attention not only from educators but also from historians, philosophers of history, and social scientists in general. In this vein, seminal empirical and theoretical papers have focused on how history is taught to students and what are the different abilities that should be developed with the end to critically understand historical processes. These abilities are related to key concepts in the field such as historical thinking, historical consciousness, and historical culture. The aim of this paper is to focus on a matter not much considered in any of these approaches. This is to say, “where” the historical processes occurred. Usually the “where” implies a specific territory that is under dispute. In this vein, territories and their transformation through different time periods are represented by historical maps reproduced in atlas and textbooks. But these representations could have several bias and also tend to provide a number of incomplete ideas among the students and citizens in general. In relation to this, it is necessary study not only the features of historical maps but, also, how students appropriate them. This appropriation could be influenced by an essentialist view of the nation through historical master narratives. This is what we have found in our initial empirical studies in Spain and Argentina. Additional empirical studies are needed to improve history education studies from the point of view of the development of historical thinking and historical consciousness taking into account how historical maps and territorial changes are represented by both students and textbooks.

Social Imaginary of the Just World: Narrative Ethics and Truth-Telling in Non-Fiction Stories of (In)Justice

The paper focuses on the issue of truth-telling in non-fictional narratives of (in)justice. Based on examples of rape narratives, domestic abuse narratives, human trafficking narratives and asylum seeker narratives, I examine the various difficulties in telling the truth in such stories, particularly those related to various culturally conditioned ideas of how the world works, which at the same time form the basis of, among other things, legal discourse and officials’ decision-making processes. I will also demonstrate that such culturally conditioned ideas, which are the basis of official discourse, can be considered within the category of both the social imaginary of the just world in the Taylorian sense of the term, and the social master narrative, which in the case of stories of (in)justice is often based on the just world hypothesis.

The Birth of the Myth About the Byzantine-Bulgarian War of 863

The Byzantine-Bulgarian relationship from the mid-9th to the early 10th century has attracted the attention of historians for years. However, this topic is fraught with multiple myths and misconceptions. The Byzantine invasion of Bulgarian territories in 863 is one of these myths. This hypothesis became part of the master narrative of Bulgarian national historiography and significantly impacted the clarification of the actual motivation of all parties in the complex political process. However, an analysis of sources shows that the military raid under Basileus Michael III and Caesar Bardas into Bulgarian territory is nothing more than fiction. According to a new Byzantine propaganda policy, this narrative was created after the mid-10th century. This research observes how a simple interpolation becomes a historiographical hypothesis and the dominant historiographical narrative. Additionally, a new interpretation of the beginning of Bulgarian Christianization is proposed.

The House of European History: Pöttering’s Elite-Level Impact in shaping European Identity

The House of European History in Brussels, Belgium, is a pan-European identity-making institution, created by the European Union. It has sparked an array of scholarship that speaks to the power of the museum, its ability to create a master narrative for the European people, and the varying omissions and choices made in telling Europe’s history. While European Parliament President Hans-Gert Pöttering receives credit for originating the museum, little scholarship speaks to his ideas regarding European Union integration, community, and its identity – even though, elite leader ideas are recognized in nationalism studies as instrumental in the making of an identity. This article fills this gap and shows how Pöttering’s ideas influenced the broad and generalized narrative the House of European History espouses today.

Crafting professional identities at the bottom of the knowledge economy a critical analysis of managerial discourses

ABSTRACT In the context of labour arbitrage, Romania became home to an expanding nearshoring business service sector. Many graduates work in ‘call centres’: a generic term for various types of customer-oriented services associated with different employment regimes and company structures. This research examines the discursive construction of compliance to precarious work, largely centred on managerial perspectives. Based on in-depth interviews with managers, HR staff, call-centre operators and through the thematic analysis of managerial outlets and career events, the paper unpacks several mechanisms, metaphors, and symbols that maintain young people’s adherence to the demands of work. It is argued that the repertoire of neo-liberal tropes (authenticity, personal development, growth) creates legitimacy for an (arguably) precarious sector in an emerging economy, and ultimately crafts individual­ized working narratives. The paper suggests that young employees appropriate the related structures and the master narratives, whilst lacking a solid repertoire to critically engage with them.

The Parenting Gold Standard: Maternal Master Narratives of Parenting Black Emerging Adult Children

Little is known about the prevailing narratives of how to be a “good” parent in American society, and even less is known about parenting emerging adults in Black families. To address these gaps, this qualitative study employed a master narrative approach to investigate the maternal master narratives of parenting and the mechanisms by which Black mothers ( N = 20) of emerging adults navigate such constraints through cultural alternative narratives. Themes that emerged for a master narrative of parenting emerging adult children focused on education, over-parenting, hands-off parenting, permissive parenting, guidance and support role, and contribution to society. Results also described how mothers utilized alternative narratives to make sense of their culture in light of American society through themes that emphasized stern parenting, family values, cultural generational awareness, parenting independent of norms, restrictions on parenting, guidance and support role, and contribution to society. Findings indicated instances of microlevel culture. Ultimately, the major implication from this study was the importance of taking into account culturally related experiences when defining what is “appropriate” parenting.

How ASEAN and Western media covers China’s Belt and Road Initiative: a case study of representation of the Laos-China railway under international news flows framework

The research uses the coverage of the Laos-China railway as a case to compare how media in ASEAN versus Western countries represents China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Under the framework of international news flows, through investigating the agenda-setting, news source distribution and frames of 137 stories by 42 news outlets in seven ASEAN and seven Western countries, the study finds that the long-existing imbalances in volume, direction and content of information in international news flows have seen continuities and changes. On the one hand, the international news flows remain unidirectional from the center toward semi-peripheral and peripheral zones in the world system, rather than the other way around. On the other hand, the dominance of Western media in the flows as major news suppliers providing the master narratives of most international events has been disrupted due to the emergence of counter-narratives offered by alternative news providers such as China’s Xinhua and Asian News Network. Such continuities and changes in international communication flows exemplified by the media coverage of a China’s BRI project serve as both empirical evidence of a broader global power shift and a thermometer measuring the Global North’s and Global South’s reactions to such a shift.

Youth identity and postsecondary decision making in a rural state: evidence of a College for All master narrative

This study examined the normative messages that inform youth postsecondary decision making in a predominantly rural state in the northeastern U.S., focusing on the institutionalization and circulation of identity master narratives. Using a multi-level, ecological approach to sampling, the study interviewed 33 key informants in positions of influence in educational, workforce, and quality of life domains. Narrative analysis yielded evidence of a predominant master narrative – College for All – that participants described as a prescriptive expectation that youth and families orient their postsecondary planning toward four-year, residential baccalaureate degree programs. Both general and domain-specific aspects of this master narrative are elaborated, as well as findings indicating that the College for All ideology appears to both obscure and stigmatize the development and institutionalization of alternative postsecondary pathways. Implications for rural communities, rural mobility, and future research on narratives informing postsecondary options for youth are discussed.

Not by Words Alone: Early Holocaust Graphic Narratives as a “Minor Art”

Abstract Immediately after the Holocaust, scores of Jewish survivors created graphic narratives, in word and image, about their individual and collective wartime experiences under Nazi oppression. This essay will make a case for these early postwar works as a “minor art.” “Minor” captures the material characteristics of this low-capital, low-circulation printed matter: slight in weight, small in size, modest in price, and ephemeral in quality. It also describes their “poor” images that pull, in form and structure, from popular culture (comics, cartoons, illustrated books) on the margins of modernist concerns (composite image-texts relying on narrative storytelling). Borrowing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of “minor literature” as a deterritorialized, political, collective utterance, I argue that disciplinary notions of “art” and “testimony” have prevented us from seeing this “minor art” and recognizing how its vernacular, amateur art practices allowed survivors to reconstruct the past, remember communities and identities erased, and reclaim their own narratives of persecution. Created by a minority (a decimated Jewish community) working on the peripheries of the art world, they tell a Jewish story using Jewish frames of reference to create a community outside of majoritarian culture. What is at stake in them is not only a poetics of recollection but a politics of representation: of seeing with Jews as a critical act by dominated persons against the dominant, antifascist master narrative of WWII and the primary media of its dissemination, photography and film. Ultimately, this “minor art” can have major implications for both how we understand the crucial first decade of survivor initiatives and how we write our histories of Jewish art.

Beyond Master Narratives: A Reassessment of the Apprentice Riot of 1592

ABSTRACT: The relationship between London apprentices and playhouses in the Tudor period has tended to be viewed through the filter of guiding master narratives of class solidarity, local rivalry, subversive playhouses, unruly youths, or hegemonic control. In the case of William Webbe’s report of a riot by apprentice feltmakers on June 11, 1592, scholars have offered many interpretations in service of one or another of these narratives. This essay offers a reassessment of the events of that day based on the history of feltmakers’ apprentices and the geography of the Blackfriars in London, Bermondsey Street, the Bankside, and Newington Butts. By rewriting the events of that day based on such details, we find that the apprentices were a politically savvy group cannily using the theaters and geography of early modern London to assert their own self-advocacy.

Beyond the master narrative of ‘green’ modernity: A critical reading of the energy transition

This article critically reflects on the dominant narrative on the climate crisis and its energy transition programs. The energy transition has been reproducing the structures of the contemporary capitalist system, namely its extractivist, technological and financial apparatuses. Inspired by critical perspectives that hallenge the dichotomous divisions perpetuated by the hegemonic ontological framework, I argue that in order to face the ecological crisis, we must adopt practices based on non-dualistic ontologies that recognize the deep and close relationships of (inter)dependence that sustain life on Earth.