Life Narratives Research Articles

‘Col Fumetto Posso Fare Di Tutto’. Life Narratives and the Italian Graphic Novel

ABSTRACT While comics studies are now a fully recognised field within academic debate in the humanities, it wasn’t until around ten years ago, when the medium really began to flourish, that they began to be accepted as an object of study in universities and research centres, including the field of Italian studies. This collective volume brings together an international group of scholars who were invited to reflect on one of the most fruitful genres in the Italian graphic novel: life narratives. This vitality is not surprising: at a time of socio-political crisis and instability, such as the one Italy is currently experiencing, the possibility to narrate and/or represent real-life experience, whether openly or metaphorically, stands out as a powerful tool for intellectuals and artists to analyse socially relevant questions of the day and, possibly, take a stance on these issues. Cutting across genres, editorial formats, targets, and markets, graphic novels closely mirror the historical complexity of their times, problematising issues and negotiating pressing questions of our social reality.

Agency and Communion in Brief Entire Life Narratives Across the Life Span.

The evolving life story is integral to personality, and motivational themes are central features of the life story. Personality implies individual differences that are relatively stable over time, but still allow for developmental processes. This study explored both long-term stability and developmental change in thematic content of the life story. Fulfilled and unfulfilled agency and communion were studied in brief entire life narratives across 4 measurements in 12 years in a cohort-sequential design including six cohorts (n = 172; age 8-77). Fulfilled agency and communion, as well as unfulfilled agency exhibited moderate rank order stability over 4 and 8 years, fulfilled communion showed even a modest 12-year stability, whereas unfulfilled communion displayed an unsystematic pattern. Developmentally, multilevel analyses revealed an inverted U-shaped association between age and both fulfilled and unfulfilled agency, peaking in mid-life. Fulfilled communion declined after emerging adulthood, but unexpectedly did not increase again in old age. Unfulfilled communion showed no systematic age trends. Girls and women told life narratives with more fulfilled and unfulfilled communion, whereas genders did not differ in either kind of agency. The content of the life story exhibits rank-order stability over time and systematic mean-level development across the life span.

Gratitude despite unease among Swedish male forensic psychiatric patients with substance use disorders: an interview study

ABSTRACT Purpose Forensic psychiatric inpatient care in Sweden is characterized by strict regulations and adherence to court-mandated rules, with a median care time of 7 years. Comorbity has significant clinical implications, impacting health and well-being, violent behaviour and criminal recidivism, and prolonging inpatient stays. This study investigated the individual experiences and perspectives of Swedish patients in forensic psychiatric care with substance use (SU) disorders, focusing on past, present and future orientations. Methods Ten male forensic psychiatric inpatients were individually interviewed following a semi-structured interview guide. A qualitative content analysis was conducted to inductively analyse the participants’ experiences. The study adhered to the Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research. Results Under the main theme of “embracing harmony in opposition”, three categories emerged: (1) unveiling the beginning of SU and its impact on navigating challenges in care, (2) exploring current confined care and gratitude despite unease and (3) yearning for a somewhat normal life. Conclusions Participants’ subjective perspectives underscored the importance of factors such as forensic nurses/healthcare providers in forensic psychiatry considering the patients’ life narratives, their aspirations for the future, their need for a secure environment and patient—staff relationships. These findings highlight the need for structural interventions that emphasize the importance of tailored and comprehensive health plans within rehabilitation.

Using Intersectionality to Understand How Structural Domains Are Embedded in Life Narratives.

This study draws on life narrative data and an intersectional framework to explore features of narratives around structural domains, aiming to better understand the possible impacts of these domains on identity. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 177 young adults from primarily minoritized groups (73% Asian American or Latine, 59% Women, Median Parent Income = $50,001 to $75,000), we gathered 885 life narratives. Young adults narrated a domain-general, ethnic/racial, gender, social class, and intersectional experience. Features capturing the content (Presence of Structural Domains, Connection to and Between Structural Domains) and process (Meaning Making, Affective Tone) of narratives were explored. Structural domains manifested uniquely within narratives such that ethnicity/race was discussed most frequently across narratives, whereas gender and social class were mentioned more in narratives about those domains. Additionally, Meaning Making was highest in self-defining narratives and positively correlated with the number of structural domains present within and across narratives. Affective Tone was most positive in self-defining narratives and most negative in social class narratives, which also contained the lowest Connection to Structural Domain. This study combines an intersectional framework and life narrative data to understand how structural domains manifest within young adults' experiences, revealing how those domains are interconnected and may impact identity.

Meaning, purpose, and narrative

AbstractAccording to many philosophers, “the meaning of life” refers to our cosmic purpose, the activity that we were created by God or a purposive universe to perform. If there is no God or teleology, there is no such thing as the meaning of life. But this need not be the last word on the matter. In this paper, I ask what the benefits provided by a cosmic purpose are, and go on to argue that thinking of our lives in a particular way—in terms of a unified life narrative—can supply us with many of those benefits. We might lose little if there is no such thing as the meaning of life, since there is still something that can provide much of what is valuable about it.

From Census to Commission to Life Narratives: Tracing the Nat Community's Socio-Economic Status

This paper delves into a comprehensive exploration of the macro-level socio-economic landscape characterizing the Nat community, a de-notified tribe categorized as a scheduled caste in the state of Rajasthan, India. The primary aim is to furnish a nuanced understanding of the life and livelihood dynamics and the contemporary circumstances of the Nat community both at a national level and, more specifically, within the confines of Rajasthan. Historically, the Nat community is a nomadic group of entertainers who performed for Rajput kings and their subjects through dance and acrobatic skills. Drawing upon an amalgamation of existing scholarly works, the most recent datasets, and pertinent information from sources such as the 2011 census and reports issued by the National Commission on Nomadic, Semi-nomadic, and De-Notified Tribes, the paper unfolds across various thematic sections. These segments include an examination of the historical trajectory of the Nat community, an assessment of their social standing across different states, an exploration of the diversities, divisions, and deprivations experienced by the Nat community in Rajasthan, and a macro-level reflection on their demographic, educational, and economic profiles. Through this multi-faceted approach, the paper aspires to contribute valuable insights into the intricate socio-economic fabric that encapsulates the Nat community in the Indian context.

Amy Carlson, Reading Mediated Life Narratives: Auto/Biographical Agency in the Book, Museum, Social Media, and Archives

In Reading Mediated Life Narratives: Auto/Biographical Agency in the Book, Museum, Social Media, and Archives, Amy Carlson, leveraging her background as a librarian, delves into the nuanced mediations influencing life narratives, with keen awareness of (im)materiality, (re)formatting, text versions, and the reading experience. Expanding upon Anna Poletti’s insights, Carlson highlights the critical importance of both materiality and mediation in the analysis of (self-)life inscriptions. She emphasizes embodiment as a pivotal concern in life writing scholarship, stressing the significance of understanding auto/biographical texts as objects. By delving into Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska’s concept of ‘original technicity’ (2012), which asserts that humans have always relied on external technologies to navigate life, Carlson articulates how human experiences are inherently mediated.

Reclaiming Agency Through Conversation: Life Narrative Interviews of German-speaking Jews in Israel

abstract: During the 1990s and 2000s, various authors published collections of oral interviews with Israeli Jews who had been born in German-speaking countries, known as Yekkes . The use of oral testimonies for systematic historical research presents several methodological challenges. However, the Yekke interviews provide a captivating glimpse into a world that no longer exists. This paper explores whether and how historians can use such collections in their work. These oral history interviews, I argue, offer a rare perspective on how Yekkes negotiate their belonging and loyalty between Germany and Israel, between Germanness and Israeliness.

Experiences of living with severe mental disorder: narratives about the personal recovery process.

The article approaches the subject of recovery, a sociopolitical movement, field of studies and practices that aims, from the experience of people living with mental disorders, to promote a more optimistic outlook of the prognosis. Aiming to understand the recovery process of people who experience severe mental disorders, qualitative research was developed, based on Gadamerian hermeneutics. We conducted in-depth interviews, in the form of life narratives, with five people who recognize themselves in the process of recovery, and are part of a mental health patient group. Based on narrative analysis, three axes were organized: recovery process facilitators and coping strategies; barriers of recovery process; and relationship with diagnosis. The discussion is based on Canguilhem's theory; in the logic of psychosocial care, and in theories about the notion of recovery. We identified important intersubjective and sociocultural resources for recovery, however, we concluded that these same elements may constitute barriers to a creative existence, as the social norm remains crossed by the stigma that accompanies mental disorders, and by hierarchical power relations.

The influence of event similarity on the detailed recall of autobiographical memories

ABSTRACT Memories for life events are thought to be organised based on their relationships with one another, affecting the order in which events are recalled such that similar events tend to be recalled together. However, less is known about how detailed recall for a given event is affected by its associations to other events. Here, we used a cued autobiographical memory recall task where participants verbally recalled events corresponding to personal photographs. Importantly, we characterised the temporal, spatial, and semantic associations between each event to assess how similarity between adjacently cued events affected detailed recall. We found that participants provided more non-episodic details for cued events when the preceding event was both semantically similar and either temporally or spatially dissimilar. However, similarity along time, space, or semantics between adjacent events did not affect the episodic details recalled. We interpret this by considering organisation at the level of a life narrative, rather than individual events. When recalling a stream of personal events, we may feel obligated to justify seeming discrepancies between adjacent events that are semantically similar, yet simultaneously temporally or spatially dissimilar – to do so, we provide additional supplementary detail to help maintain global coherence across the events in our lives.

“Awe, Masekinders!”: Kullid Identities from Eden Park, Johannesburg in the Work of Bougaard

ABSTRACT Bougaard, an emerging South African creative practitioner, examines games from her “Coloured” childhood community in Eden Park, Johannesburg, and how these games may offer a window into a reframed Kullid identity. She considers the rhymes used in these games and the role of language—specifically Afrikaaps—in identity formation, and explores through papermaking and art installations the social contexts and meanings embedded in these games. In this article, the authors analyse Bougaard’s use of sculpture, papermaking and printmaking techniques both to mediate and to subvert conventionalised tropes and stereotypes of “Coloured” communities as well as to empower a sense of her familial and community-based identity through an emergent Kullidness. The authors focus on selected paper works and on three mixed media installations (2021–2022). The authors complicate any reading of these works as uncritically affirmative of a declamatory and essentialist identity position by proposing Bougaard’s visual strategies as premised upon mediation, ambivalence, indexicality, and refuting iconicity. The authors identify Bougaard as deploying elements of strategic essentialism in her desire for community visibility and visual sovereignty, and the authors therefore critique the benefits and the limitations of this approach, concluding that Bougaard’s choice of mediating strategies avoids a simplistic narrative of community life.

Shaping and Reshaping Primo Levi: The Affiliative Postgeneration Biographic Novel

ABSTRACT Since 2005, Italy has witnessed a boom in the production of graphic life narratives dedicated to both well-known, internationally established public figures and victims of Italy’s post-war history, whose memory has only recently started to be negotiated. Some of these figures have even inspired several artists, who have approached the life narrative genre from different angles. A particularly striking case is that of Primo Levi, whose life and works are the subject of three graphic narratives. In this article, we explore the extent to which these narratives address the complex figure of Primo Levi and how the multimodal medium of the graphic narrative can extend the transgenerational reach of postmemory by negotiating the memory of first-generation Holocaust survivors.

Narrating lives across 16 years: Developmental trajectories of coherence and relations to well-being in a lifespan sample.

The ability to narrate a life coherently develops first in adolescence, but little is known about its course across adulthood and into old age. Also, the potential association of life narrative coherence with well-being has never been studied. Our aim was to investigate lifespan development of coherence and associations with well-being using data from the longitudinal MainLife study. A total of 172 urban Germans (8-80 years; 87 females) narrated their lives up to six times across 16 years (N = 803 brief entire life narratives). Most were highly educated, and the proportion of a migration background was typical for the local population. Life narratives were rated for three types of global coherence (temporal, causal-motivational, and thematic) and coded for two types of autobiographical arguments (stability maintaining and change engendering). Multilevel models were used to investigate their lifespan development and relations to well-being. While most life narrative measures increased up to emerging adulthood and then remained stable, thematic coherence continued to increase into middle adulthood. Only change-engendering autobiographical arguments slowly decreased from midlife onward. Unexpectedly, neither autobiographical arguments nor global coherence correlated significantly with well-being. Data exploration suggested an association between thematic coherence and self-continuity. We conclude that life narrative coherence may only be related to well-being if samples include cases with more extreme noncoherence (e,g., clinical disorders). Our findings add to understanding the development of the life story across the lifespan, especially in older age, and suggest studying relations of coherence, self-continuity, and well-being specifically in life crises and in clinical samples. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The Black (W)hole of Dysphoria

This essay returns to Evelynn Hammonds’s field-changing essay “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” with a focus on the labor of knowledge production under fraught institutional conditions, characterized in this essay as languaging. The simultaneous desire for and impossibility of accurate language to describe racialized, gendered, and sexual subjectivity drive Hammonds’s essay as well as a number of other key texts in Black feminist sexuality studies. This essay (re)introduces the diagnostic category of dysphoria to speak to this paradox: here, dysphoria describes the affective and psychic condition of institutional illegibility and fungibility for racialized and gendered people. Using the analytic of dysphoria to characterize and connect the political economy of Black feminist knowledge production and the life narrative of A. Dionne Stallworth, a Black trans woman activist, this essay directs urgent attention to the simultaneously material, spiritual, psychic, and affective dimensions of self-, knowledge-, and world-making.

Network Practice of Rare Disease Bloggers and Life Narrative: Take ALS as an Example

As a healing method, narrative is widely concerned by the medical community. The characteristics of "Hyper-temporal", "sharing" and "personalized" of new media provide convenient conditions for the self-performance of rare disease groups and also encourage them to re-choose narrative content and strategies. This paper adopts in-depth interview and text analysis to analyze the network practice and narrative behavior of Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) web celebrities. The study found that the online narrative of ALS is not only the life practice of bloggers' self-healing, self-persuasion and self-empowerment, but also their positive response to real family and social responsibilities. At the same time, the online celebrity career of rare disease bloggers reflects their life courses in a certain sense. The social media accounts of rare disease bloggers are an important carrier for them to enrich themselves and place their feelings and expectations, and the continuation of their digital life has brought new philosophical and ethical thinking.

Ways of being Palestinian: autobiography as critical emplotment in the work of Fawaz Turki

ABSTRACT Autobiography has become an increasingly prominent form of Palestinian literature since the 1980s, giving rise to scholarly discussions about how best to read, interpret, and analyze Palestinian life narratives. Using the memoirs of Palestinian poet Fawaz Turki as an illustrative example, this article challenges a prevailing scholarly view that Palestinian narratives should be read and understood, before all else, as “counterdiscourse” to Zionism. However much this framework illuminates the colonial backdrop and testimonial potential of Palestinian life-writing, it risks flattening Palestinian autobiographies into a single national mold and framing Zionism as the central locus of Palestinian self-expression. Mindful of these dangers, this article draws on the work of David Scott to argue that Palestinian autobiographies can be more fruitfully interpreted as exercises in “critical emplotment” and analyzed as narrative undertakings by which Palestinians creatively (re)interpret their pasts and identities in light of the always-shifting circumstances in which they find themselves.

Unveiling Trauma in the Life Narrative of Transgender: A Study of Manobi Bandhopadhyay’s A Gift of Goddess Lakshmi

Unveiling Trauma in the Life Narrative of Transgender: A Study of Manobi Bandhopadhyay’s A Gift of Goddess Lakshmi

Pioneering approaches: Navigating mind wandering and self-silencing in dissociated adolescent female sexual trauma survivors - An interpretative phenomenological analysis

BackgroundMinimal exploration exists on mind wandering and self-silencing in adolescent girls with sexual trauma and dissociation. ObjectiveTo investigate the lived experiences of female adolescent sexual trauma survivors with dissociation, focusing on overcoming mind-wandering and self-silencing through Pranayama, mindfulness meditation, music, and art therapy. Participants and settingsThis study, conducted in Sikkim, India, addresses a research gap in a culturally distinct context. Three adolescent girls diagnosed with PTSD and dissociation by a psychiatrist were selected through purposive sampling. MethodThis study uses Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to explore participants' individual stories and perspectives. It provides a comprehensive understanding of the lived experiences and narratives of three participants. ResultsThe IPA analysis revealed three super-ordinate themes: coping mechanisms, support and relationships, and, therapeutic approaches and the healing journey. In coping mechanisms participants reported (1) mind-wandering, self-blame, and daydreaming, (2) self-silencing, and (3) sublimation through academic achievement. The support and relationships theme included (1) lack of support from family, (2) attachment issues with mothers, (3) gender-based double standards, (4) Lack of infrastructure and health care human resources, with some participants turning to (5) faith-healing for mental health issues. The therapeutic approaches and healing journey theme demonstrated the effectiveness of Pranayama, mindfulness meditation, music, and art therapy in alleviating mind-wandering and self-silencing. ConclusionsThis study underscores the resilience of survivors of post-sexual trauma, advocating for culturally sensitive healing and evidence-based practices. Addressing mind-wandering and self-silencing through Pranayama, mindfulness meditation, music, and art therapy strengthens support systems, pioneering ways to mitigate the impact of sexual abuse.

#OFW: Filipino migrant workers brokering counter narratives of overseas life on TikTok

#OFW: Filipino migrant workers brokering counter narratives of overseas life on TikTok

Incorporating lived experience narratives into interdisciplinary environmental communication projects: A technique for better environmental communication

This paper describes how lived experience research, a qualitative research method based on phenomenology, can be modified and incorporated into interdisciplinary environmental risk communication projects. Lived experience methods can give insight into stakeholders’ needs and concerns, enabling development of better communication products and potentially helping overcome disciplinary barriers on project teams. We describe the purposes and methods of lived experience research, draw upon two cases from our own experiences to outline how methods can be adapted for the contexts of interdisciplinary research projects, and describe potential barriers to and opportunities for using this research method in team communication projects, including co-production of knowledge, internal research team acceptance, and making project products more responsive to user needs.