Narrative Construction Of Self Research Articles

Performance, Credibility and #MeToo Testimony in Rush v Nationwide News Pty Ltd

ABSTRACT Rush v Nationwide News, a defamation case between Geoffrey Rush and the publishers of the Daily Telegraph, has been credited with exerting a ‘chilling effect’ on the #MeToo moment in Australia. The case presents an opportunity to explore both the influence of the #MeToo moment on testimony and how such testimony is received, interpreted and evaluated through legal institutions and the processes of justice. Through a close textual reading of court transcripts, media reporting and the judgment of Justice Michael Wigney, this article traces connections between the #MeToo moment, the testimony of the alleged victim-survivor, Eryn Jean Norvill and its circulation and reception within and beyond the courtroom. Taking a law and performance theoretical framework, I argue that both chief protagonists engaged in a performative approach to narrative self-construction in the adversarial courtroom – Rush as a theatrical genius, and Norvill as a #MeToo advocate – that profoundly influenced Justice Wigney's assessment of their credibility as witnesses, providing a platform for the judicial destruction of Norvill's credibility and denying her the truth of her own experience as a victim-witness of workplace sexual harassment. Indeed, the highly performative nature of this case and its connection to the assessment of witness credibility exposes the influence of a range of sexual harassment myths within Justice Wigney's judgment. In this way, Rush v Nationwide News starkly exposes the ongoing epistemic priority of masculine normativity within adversarial justice, veiled within the cloak of neutrality, objectivity and reason that frames the assessment of witness credibility.

Creative Writing Workshops and the Narrative Construction of Self: Using Oral History to Explore the Impact of Public Engagement in the Arts and Humanities

ABSTRACT The measurement and evaluation of the nonacademic impact of publicly funded university research have been important components of the funding model that has existed in the UK higher education sector since 2014, the year in which “research impact” was incorporated into the Research Excellence Framework (REF) as a key performance indicator. Chief among the methodological challenges created by the impact agenda is the need to develop mechanisms to capture and evaluate the longer-term impact of research findings beyond the academy. This paper responds to this need by offering a case study of the positive role a combined life-history and narrative analysis methodology can play in capturing the deeper subjective impacts of public engagement activity. Drawing upon the authors’ experience of public engagement and an analysis of semistructured interviews with nonacademic partners, the paper demonstrates how research impact reception functions as a plural and differential process that is personally and socially mediated. Based on this finding, it argues that research evaluation mechanisms need to be sensitively calibrated to facilitate a fuller appreciation of the emotional, situational, and historical dynamics that shape the impact of public engagement activity.

Antropologiczne podstawy odporności psychicznej: narracyjna autokonstrukcja jako czynnik ochronny w odporności psychicznej

Resilience as a construct is a relatively recent phenomenon that has now grown in importance, especially in new educational and pedagogical proposals that focus on prevention against possible risky behaviours. As a result, over the last few decades, approaches to resilience have undergone a transformation that goes far beyond this change in its conceptual conception.In this paper, we bring together two aspects that are considered fundamental to understanding resilience as a human capacity, leaving aside how it may be applied. There is a clear need to base resilience on clearly anthropological aspects that, suggested by philosophical anthropology, can help us to see that this capacity is the fruit of human nature itself. It is at this point that anthropology joins narrative self-construction in the development of the internal logos. Those anthropological traits are undoubtedly those that can help us to understand how a person can make themselves through their own internal dialogue in clear interrelation with their environment. Based on this personal growth, they will be able to develop aspects of their own personality that will help them to overcome adverse situations and even, in very extreme cases, traumatic situations.

Life Themes and Attachment System in the Narrative Self-Construction: Direct and Indirect Indicators.

The narration is the instrument that allows individual to organize his experience through a process of attribution and sharing of meaning within social interactions and to translate the extraordinary in normativity. As regards the narrative content there are “narrative genres” that impose thematic constraints on the way of narrating, but these also allow creative variations. According to the theoretical-clinical hypothesis of Life Themes (LTs), Love, Value, Power, Freedom, and Truth are shared attractors of meaning recurring in Life Stories. The influence of attachment system on the development of autobiographical narratives is shown in literature. This article presents a qualitative study of the specific dimensions and valences of the LTs in the adult attachment narratives. The study is part of a broader research project that aims to systematize the theoretical model of LTs in the narrative Self-construction, to study its connections and applications in the field of attachment theory, and to build a useful operative tool in the clinical assessment of patients’ stories. We also aimed to study the occurrence of the LTs in the Adult Attachment Interview transcripts, preliminarily exploring possible connections with Internal Working Models. 40 AAI transcripts of 20 men and 20 women (mean age was 33 years old), selected from a larger non-clinical sample employed in an adult attachment study, were analyzed using a phenomenological exploratory approach. For the research design we used a qualitative methodology that ensure a deep and intensive, rather than extensive, analysis, focusing on the complexity of meanings and discussing the results within the research group. Several indicators of LTs have been identified and the interpersonal dimensions were explored. An additional Theme emerged from the recurrence of some indicators: Ethic and Justice. In Dismissing subjects’ narrations the theme Value (in terms of being valued) emerges mostly, while in the Preoccupied ones the theme Power (in terms of impositions received), accompanied secondarily by Value and Freedom, occurs more frequently. The most frequent thematic indicators in the F group are related to Love and Truth. Clinical implications of an explicative model of critical Themes are discussed.

Bruner’s Narrative Construction of Self and Its Curricular Implication

Bruner’s Narrative Construction of Self and Its Curricular Implication

An artist’s narrative self-construction: a conversation with Astrid Salles

In an interview with Ricardo Santhiago, visual artist Astrid Salles revisits aspects of her formation in the field of artistic creation since her youth in the late 1950s, in the state of São Paulo, in order to review important topics of her life history. She graduated in Music and is recognized as the first woman to play the French horn in Brazil. Astrid worked in illustration and landscape representation and now calls herself a painter. In the conversation, she recounts, among other points, her encounter with sertanist Orlando Villas-Bôas, which was crucial for her to dedicate her visual art production to reinterpreting indigenous graphic patterns.

Life Themes and Interpersonal Motivational Systems in the Narrative Self-construction.

What makes unique and unrepeatable individuals is their ability to write their own story attributing meaning, sharing it through narration, giving coherence to the information related to the interpersonal motivational systems, and creating alternative hierarchies to those biologically provided by the genetic code. Through clinical narratives and narrative literature, we can observe the recurrence of specific topics, across time and different cultures. Hence, we wondered whether there are some evolutionary suggestions that guide us in the construction of the narrative-autobiographical contents. In this article we proposed a theoretical-clinical hypothesis about the existence of a biological disposition to identify as fundamental six Life Themes (LTs) that contribute to defining the image of the self and the world: Love, Personal Value, Power, Justice, Truth, and Freedom. Besides the innumerable narratives dependent upon context, there may be many ways of telling stories that, instead, would be reported to these few essential themes. A narrative review of the literature about these concepts follows the systematic explanation of the perspective about the LTs as attractors of meaning. The manuscript considers also the process of co-construction of meanings within the interpersonal relationships and the influences of these on the narratives. In particular, we focused on the importance of episodic and autobiographical memory related to the attachment and significant figures, in the construction of the personal story and the LTs. We also explained the possible clinical implications of the theoretical hypothesis of LTs. Within clinical conversations, the LTs could be expressed rigidly or, otherwise, in a confused way. The lack of narrative integration may lead to the dominance of chaos or rigidity that generates suffering. A better comprehension of the LTs in patients’ narrations could be useful to identify a narrative profile about the areas of greatest suffering related to the idea of self and the world, as well as to construct an adequate care plan.

Disentangling the self. A naturalistic approach to narrative self-construction

In this article we explore the implications of a definition of self-consciousness as a process, by which we mean the self-representing of a multilevel system (the human organism). This sets the stage for a developmental story about how a narrative identity is progressively constructed from body awareness, which becomes bodily self-awareness between 18 and 24 months of age. The final outcome is an approach to narrative self-construction which, drawing on findings in developmental, dynamic, social and personality psychology, aims to distance itself from the hermeneutical and eliminativist forms of narrativism.

Hermeneutic Neurophenomenology in the Science-Religion Dialogue: Analysis of States of Consciousness in the Zohar

Many mystical texts convey insights into the nature of mind that have the potential to assist in the framing of scientific models in psychology and neuroscience. In many cases, however, the insights are concealed within complex, codified symbolic systems, meaning that the reader must engage with the hermeneutic employed by the texts’ authors in order to access the insights. Combining such a hermeneutic approach with that of neurophenomenology can enrich the input from mysticism to science. I exemplify this hermeneutic neurophenomenology through an analysis of states of mystical consciousness as portrayed in the classic of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar. Three distinct mystical states are identified, each of which is understood as being dominated by a specific dimension of consciousness. The normal state of consciousness is dominated by the narrative construction of self. The first mystical state arises as this narrative is attenuated, allowing the intentionality of perception and emotion to become the dominating dimension. The second mystical state comes to the fore as the mystic increasingly identifies with an associational propensity at the core of memory processing. The final mystical state conveys the essential feature of consciousness—phenomenality—with little, if any, intentional content. I explore how the Zohar’s insights into these states can combine with neurocognitive data and thereby enrich our understanding of consciousness.

Rehearsing Trauma: The Reader as Interrogator in Prison Narratives

Summary Accounts of detention survivors exert pressure on the theoretical framework that reserves a role for the reader in a post-Freudian hermeneutics of catharsis. In analysing the prison narratives of Ruth First and Emma Mashinini, I explore the position of the imagined reader in the complex dynamic at work when writing emerges from a position of woundedness. A reappraisal of the role of the imagined reader is warranted, in order to accommodate both the formative communality that operates in these texts and the complexity of a political context where “the public” is both ally and adversary, simultaneously enabling and complicating a survivor's self-construction.The task of asserting a new self in writing, to contest the criminalising “vocabulary” of the state security system, is both undermined and made all the more urgent by the overwhelming self-doubt which that system induces. Narrative self-construction can be thought of as an appeal as much as an assertion of self. The paradigm of trauma studies potentially enables attentiveness to the anxiety and vulnerability of detention survival. However, that attentiveness is undermined by theoretical abstractions that locate catharsis deep within individualised subjects and by attempts to imagine human connectedness across a generalised conceptualisation of trauma.

‘As I Lay Dying’: Facing the Past in the South African Novel after 1990

The essay considers four novels, written post-1990, that structure their fictional negotiation of the past by employing as protagonist/narrator the figure of a stricken and dying old white woman who recalls her personal story in the context of the national history: Karel Schoeman's This Life (1993), J M Coetzee's Age of Iron (1990), André Brink's Imaginings of Sand (1996), and Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (2006). The stories of these old women are told at the discursive intersections of memory, gender and race, and individually and together they revise the story of South Africa before, and for, the advent of democracy. Taking as its point of departure the pseudo-autobiographical form of these novels, the essay examines the role of memory in the narrative construction of self and identity, the self as discursive subject, and collective memories in relation to contesting nationalisms. The essay concludes with a more extensive discussion of Agaat, which exemplifies many of the issues discussed in the first three novels. Oliver Sacks's notion of a ‘neurology of identity’ provides a conceptual framework for reading the relationship between the main characters in Van Niekerk's novel as a South African instance of colonial mimicry, mockery and menace.

More than Representation: Storytelling and Self-Invention in Alistair MacLeod's Narratives

This article develops ways of reading resonance and connection between Alistair MacLeod's short stories and his novel No Great Mischief (1999) by focusing not only on what is said but on what is not said. It does so by developing MacLeod's concern with the continuously evolving subject in his short stories before touching on similar thematic concerns in the novel. As MacLeod demonstrates, the past is necessarily present in our conscious experiencing, just as our present understanding continuously reinvents our perceptions of what has been and our expectations of what is to come. By framing MacLeod's fiction within contemporary theories of memory and narrative self-construction, storytelling is revealed as more than a mere representation of the past. Rather, it becomes a means of articulating and interpreting temporal existence, as well as of constructing personal and social identity.

Caught between two opinions Africans, Europeans, and Indians in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative

Even before Paul Gilroy's theorizing of the Black Atlantic, Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, the African (1789) had been seen as a crucial illustration of the radical possibilities available for enterprising Africans in the 18th-century Atlantic world. Instead of reading the binary opposition of Africa and England or of colonizer and colonized, this article attempts to complicate binary understandings of Equiano by attending to the intersections of Africa, Europe, and the Mosquito Coast in Equiano's narrative. A more nuanced understanding of Equiano's narrative self-construction allows us to not only reappraise his place in the canon but to develop a more accurate model for understanding race and identity in the long 18th-century.

Interactional positioning and narrative self-construction in the first session of psychodynamic–interpersonal psychotherapy

The purpose of this study is to identify possible Session 1 indicators of end-of-treatment psychotherapy outcome using the framework of three types of interactional positioning; client's self-positioning, client's positioning between narrated self and different partners, and positioning between client and therapist. Three successful cases of eight-session psychodynamic–interpersonal (PI) therapy were selected on the basis of Beck Depression Inventory scores. One unsuccessful case was also selected against which identified patterns could be tested. The successful clients were more descriptive about their problems and demonstrated active rapport building, and the therapist used positionings expressed by the client to explore the positionings developed between them during therapy. The unsuccessful case was characterized by a lack of positive self-comment, minimization of agentic self-capacity, and empathy-disrupting narrative confusions. The authors conclude that the theory of interactional positioning is useful in identifying patterns worth exploring as early indicators of success in PI therapy.

Positioning as a Means of Understanding the Narrative Construction of Self: A Story of Lesbian Escorting

In this article we examine the use of narrative strategies in the construction of a self. We focus on the function one woman’s (alias Rachel) narrative serves in terms of constructing a coherent self through her account, via a magazine interview, of “How I became a lesbian escort”. We highlight the relational nature of narrative self construction, i.e., the ongoing dialogue between the use of cultural narratives in a story and the individual’s positioning in relation to such elements to create a unique and coherent self in that setting. (Narrative, Positioning, Construction of Self, Identity, Lesbian Escorting)

Interactional Positioning and Narrative Self-construction

Many have proposed that autobiographical stories do more than describe a pre-existing self. Sometimes narrators can change who they are, in part, by telling stories about themselves. But how does this narrative self-construction happen? Most explanations rely on the representational function of autobiographical discourse. These representational accounts of narrative self-construction are necessarily incomplete, because autobiographical narratives have interactional as well as representational functions. While telling their stories autobiographical narrators often enact a characteristic type of self, and through such performances they can become that type of self. A few others have proposed that interactional positioning is central to narrative self-construction, but none has given an adequate, systematic account of how narrative discourse functions to position narrator and audience in the interactional event of storytelling. This article describes an approach to analyzing the interactional positioning accomplished through autobiographical narrative, and it illustrates this approach by analyzing data from one oral autobiographical narrative.