Narrative Construction Research Articles

Postcolonial Identity and Discourse: Foucauldian Analysis of Shamsie’s A God in Every Stone

This research article delves into the intricate interplay between postcolonial identity and discourse in Kamila Shamsie's novel, "A God in Every Stone," employing a Foucauldian analytical framework This paper presents a Foucauldian analysis of Kamila Shamsie's novel, "A God in Every Stone." Drawing upon the works of Michel Foucault (2016), the paper examines the novel through the lens of power, knowledge, and the construction of historical narratives. Through a close reading of key characters and events, this analysis elucidates how colonial power structures and systems of knowledge production intersect in the novel to shape individual and collective identities. The present study has been conducted on Shamsie’s A God in Every Stone to highlight the process of colonization. The interpreter has examined the ways by which the colonized resisted colonial rule. Foucault’s model of Power has been used as the conceptual framework of the study to analyze the postcolonial aspects of Shamsie’s (2014) novel. The present study is qualitative in nature. The data has been collected through the close reading technique of the A God in Every Stone. For data analysis, those textual lines have been selected in which the elements of power and resistance are present covertly. The interpreter has explored different dimensions of Foucault’s power, i.e., Sovereign power and disciplinary power. British Empire justified its colonial rule over the colonized through the colonial discourse which was prejudiced against non-white people. The colonized people resist colonial rule through their dialogues in this novel. In A God in Every Stone, the major protagonist is Vivian Rose Spencer. She is an English woman who carried out digging in Turkey to unearth the ancient silver circlet. The interpreter has inferred that the colonizers used many disciplinary strategies to subjugate the colonized people. The Indian soldiers were trained by the British imperialists to fight in the battlefield on the Western Front. Many innocent Indian soldiers lost their lives in fighting the enemies of the British Empire. The major character of the novel Qayyum Gul, fought bravely in the battlefield. Unfortunately, he lost an eye during the battle. When he returned to Peshawar, he joined a freedom movement, which aimed to liberate India from the British colonizers. Ultimately, this Foucauldian analysis of "A God in Every Stone" underscores the intricate dynamics of power and knowledge in the colonial context and sheds light on the complexities of historical representation and identity formation in a postcolonial world.

Narratives and Power in Digital Media Coverage of the US Troop’s Withdrawal from Afghanistan

This study examined the digital media coverage of the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, focusing on how narratives within China Daily constructed and communicated power. This critical juncture in international relations provided a unique opportunity to analyze media narratives that shaped public perception and policy discourse, particularly through the lens of China Daily, a significant voice in Chinese and global media. The objective was to dissect how China Daily’s reporting reflected and influenced geopolitical narratives, utilizing Teun van Dijk’s framework for news discourse analysis. This involved a detailed examination of the discourse strategies and ideological constructs in the coverage of the troop withdrawal. By analyzing 192 articles from China Daily published between April and September 2021, the study explored the construction of narratives and their underlying ideologies. Findings indicated that China Daily strategically framed the U.S. withdrawal in terms of regional instability and terrorism risks, emphasizing the consequences of what it portrayed as a hasty and irresponsible U.S. action. This narrative strategy was aligned with broader Chinese political stances on non-interference and respect for national sovereignty. This research contributed to the field by highlighting the role of media in shaping international perceptions and added a non-Western perspective to discourse studies on global military engagements.

Narrative Study of Chinese Traditional Handicraft Brand

Shaping Chinese traditional handicraft brands through brand narratives is a systematic, comprehensive, and complex research and practical topic. This article innovatively adopts the perspective of brand stories and bases itself on brand narrative theory. It examines the current status of Chinese traditional handicraft brands in narrative practice, focusing on new narrative contexts such as the communication and consumption environments faced by the modern inheritance of traditional handicrafts. Furthermore, it proposes strategies for narrative construction of Chinese traditional handicraft brands, aiming to explore a path for shaping handicraft brands that is positive, modern, warm, and emotionally engaging.

Curating the Past

Abstract We talk about curatorship as a process in which someone carefully and thoughtfully chooses and organizes a way to present particular artworks to the public. Some have theorized that curating an art exhibit and exercising the selection and organization of artworks is very similar to telling a story. This analogy invites us to expand it and reflect on how it can help illuminate what historians do as storytellers of the past. The central point of this paper is to think of historical work as a curatorial practice. This, in turn, allows us to understand the constructive enterprise that historians engage in and challenge a rooted and prevalent commitment in the historical discipline that the past is discovered rather than constructed. Historians as curators of the past select and organize undetermined materials that become determined when subsumed under a narrative that bestows the past with a particular meaning. The analogy also serves to clarify that no epistemic or metaphysical tension need exist between a notion of the real and an acknowledgment of narrative construction.

Compassionate Othering: the construction of refugee patients in medical students’ narratives – a qualitative study using story completion

BackgroundRefugees remain a marginalized population and are exposed to a variety of discriminatory processes, among them Othering which categorizes people as belonging or not-belonging according to certain ascribed characteristics. We explored how the narrative construction of refugee patients by medical students constitutes a form of Othering.MethodsUsing story completion, 124 5th year medical students at the Martin- Luther- University Halle-Wittenberg in October 2019 wrote a fictional story in response to a story stem situated in a medical practice. In a comparative approach, one patient presenting with abdominal pain lacks further characterization (version A) and the other is a refugee (version B). The stories were coded using qualitative content analysis by Mayring with a focus on content and narrative strategies (plot structure and perspective).ResultsWe identified four themes: characters, medical condition, access to care and provision of substandard care. The stories were predominantly framed with a medical or an interaction-based plot structure and written from a process-oriented perspective. The themes in version B, supported by their use of narrative strategies, were largely contextualized within the patients’ history of migration. An empathic depiction of patient B and the students’ compassion for the patients facing substandard care were key motifs as well.ConclusionThe perception of the version B patients predominantly as refugees establishes their construction as an Other. The students’ compassion acts as a representation of societal inequalities and remains an inept response without the tools to counter underlying discriminatory structures. Based on a discourse of deservingness, compassion alone therefore perpetuates Othering and highlights the need for structural competency training in medical school.

Indigenous rights, social media and protest movements in Sápmi

AbstractFollowing the rush to minerals that would enable the shift towards green economies, the Sámi homeland is quickly becoming a crucible for the rising tensions surrounding the potential for new mining projects and large-scale infrastructure projects. The roots of these conflicts date back to the colonization of the north and continue in the present with the ongoing fight to maintain the Sámi heritage, language and culture, and increasingly to gain ownership of their lands. What initially began as activism within the legal system has, on occasions, transformed into outright protests. Social media increasingly plays a key role in disseminating the message of Indigenous protest among the protesters themselves and feeding into the national and international mainstream media. This shift occurs simultaneously with the construction of a dual narrative, constituted of both land-use protest and intensified demands for Indigenous rights, including, first and foremost, the right to self-determination. Drawing from Social media theory literature and the concepts of political opportunity structures (POS) and legal opportunity structures (LOS), this study argues that social media is one of the most essential tools used by Sámi activists to raise awareness about issue-based protests as well as to communicate demands for the right to self-determination when legal and political opportunity structures are not enough to support the cause. The power of social media lies in its accessibility, immediacy and visuality, which is illustrated in the article via specific examples of mining and railway construction protests in Finland and Sweden. Social media does not replace older tools, such as international human rights litigation, but their use can complement existing strategies for defending and advancing Indigenous rights.

Qualities of Mercy: Capital Punishment and the Royal Prerogative in Familial Cases in the Chosŏn Records of Adjudications (Simnirok)

This article examines how royal mercy is articulated in homicide cases involving the family in the Records of Adjudications (Simnirok), a collection of over one thousand capital offenses reviewed by King Chŏngjo (r. 1776–1800) of Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910). Simni (“adjudications”) review comprised case memorials by provincial and metropolitan authorities and the royal judgments written in response to them. It was the king’s prerogative to endorse or commute any death sentence issued by officials below, and Chŏngjo’s judgments often find grounds for leniency. Previous studies of the Simnirok have examined the collection in light of late Chosŏn jurisprudence and social history, but have rarely subjected the narrative constructions and discursive strategies of the king with respect to highly contentious facts to close analysis. By examining select cases in the Simnirok involving domestic battery, adultery, and filial vengeance, this article examines how the “truth” behind each case and its legal implications are contextualized, constructed, or contested in view of orthodox values that are often patriarchal, and how Chŏngjo’s judgments project the persona of a benevolent and circumspect Confucian sage ruler who grants mercy largely within the bounds of the law.

Crafting post-feminist women in contemporary western/horror

The scarcity of creative work that engages the problematic issue of female marginalization in the western/horror hybrid space demonstrates the need to expand her limited framework and develop a new screenwriting approach that privileges the female perspective. Prevailing contemporary western and horror hybrid texts, such as and Bone Tomahawk (2015) adhere to traditional male-centred American myths that re-inform genre codes and conventions supporting patriarchal power. Female-centered western/horror hybrid narratives, such as The Witch (2015), Brimstone (2016), Mohawk (2017), and Prey (2022) move issues of female representation into lesser-explored territory, but, when read through a post-feminist lens, do not fully realize the fruitful craft potential that, as I will argue, genre hybridity and post-feminist screenwriting generates. That said, using Mohawk, as a detailed case study, I will analyze how post-feminism successfully informs the narrative and character construction, to advance female representation in mixed-genre form. In addition, this article proposes and explores a new approach to ‘writing’ strong female characters: one that expands the limits of power beyond the boundaries of the existing western/horror storytelling.

The Japanese Film AI Amok (2020) and the Collapse of Realist AI Vision

AI Amok (2020), directed by Yu Irie, offers an incisive exploration of artificial intelligence’s role in a near-future Japanese society and is set in the year 2030. Employing the analytical framework provided by Bordwell and Thompson’s Film Art: An Introduction, this research explores the film’s narrative construction, visual storytelling techniques, and its thematic depth, particularly focusing on the portrayal and implications of artificial intelligence. Distinct from the often distant futures depicted in science fiction cinema, AI Amok presents a vision of the future that mirrors current technological trajectories, especially in healthcare and urban development. This stands in contrast to films like Blade Runner 2049 (2017) and Her (2013), which envision more abstract futures. AI Amok thus distinguishes itself through a narrative that integrates AI into societal fabrics, confronting the ethical quandaries this integration elicits. The analysis reveals a scenario that feels immediate and tangible, offering a credible sight into the technological advancements and challenges of the near future. Moreover, the study highlights AI Amok’s nuanced depiction of AI’s roles within healthcare and government, suggesting a reflection on and projection of these technologies’ evolving paths. Unlike the overt technologization seen in The Matrix (1999) or Ex Machina (2014), AI Amok opts for more subtle visual effects to convey AI’s ubiquity, providing a unique perspective on AI’s potential to shape societal dynamics. This approach enriches the discourse on science fiction cinema, contributing a distinctive viewpoint to the ongoing debates concerning the ethical development and integration of artificial intelligence in real-world contexts.

Exploring Themes, Narrative Progression And Character Development In Hoover’s It Ends With Us: A Pragmatic Analysis

This study examines the impact of speech acts on character development, plot development, and thematic exploration in Hoover's novel It Ends with Us. The research examines how these speech acts shape the narrative and deepen readers' understanding of the characters' internal and external conflicts by utilizing John Searle's taxonomy of illocutionary acts—assertives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations. Commissives highlight promises and commitments central to character motivations, expressives reveal emotional depth, and declarations mark pivotal moments that alter the story's reality. Assertive speech acts reveal characters' beliefs; directives propel the plot through influencing actions. The study emphasizes the significance of expressive speech acts in reinforcing themes of love, resilience, and personal development and revealing the emotions of characters. This study contributes to literary linguistics by [1]demonstrating how speech acts function as essential tools for storytelling and meaning-making in contemporary literature by analyzing the nuanced interactions between language use and narrative construction. The results shed more light on how Hoover's thematic exploration, narrative progression, and character dynamics are influenced by language.

Howdy Comrade

Abstract American and Western audiences have long come to understand Soviet and Russian womanhood, and thus US womanhood, from representations in popular televisual texts. While there is a long history of popular culture presenting the “othered” women of Eastern Europe, for example as temptress “Bond girls” during the Cold War, these narratives have continued onscreen into the twenty-first century. We examine the myriad representations from both the Cold War and post-Cold War period, noting the typical narrative constructions that focus on femme fatales, psychological and sexual trauma, and economic precarity, and how these have continued in contemporary popular culture to shore up notions of Western cultural and political superiority. The characters and the situations in which they find themselves, as spies, assassins, and double agents, continue to send messages about danger and dominance regarding both gender and geopolitics.

Advancing Organizational Science With Computational Process Theories

Organizational scholars commonly refer to organizations as complex systems unfolding as a function of work processes. Consequently, the direct study of work processes necessitates our attention. However, organizational scholars tend not to study work processes directly. Instead, organizational scholars commonly develop theories about relationships among psychological construct phenomena that indirectly reference people’s affective, behavioral, cognitive, and/or social processes as underlying explanations. Specifically, construct-oriented theories summarize processes in operation across actors, time, and contexts, and thus, provide limited insights into how focal phenomena manifest directly as a function of process operations. Construct theories remain one-step removed from articulating sequences of actions and two-steps removed from describing generative mechanisms responsible for observed actions. By “missing the action,” construct theories offer incomplete explanatory accounts and imprecise interventions. We assert that researchers in organizational science can make progress towards addressing these concerns by directing greater attention to developing computational process theories. We begin by presenting a framework for differentiating theories based on their focus (constructs versus processes) and modality (narrative versus computational). We use the framework to contrast narrative construct theories to computational process theories. We then describe key design principles for developing computational process theories and explain those principles using a leadership example. We use simulated data, from the computational process model we develop, to explicitly demonstrate the differences between construct and process thinking. We then discuss how computational process theories advance theory development. We conclude with a discussion of the long-term benefits of computational process theories for organizational science.

O LAMPIÃO HISTÓRICO NUMA NARRATIVA CORDELÍSTICA

Regarded as the most famous and famous of the cangaceiros, Lampião embarked on his saga in the period between the First Republic and the Estado Novo, milestones in the History of the Brazilian Republic. His celebrity leads to the construction of several narratives about his person and his deeds, as a cangaceiro, between the years 1922 and 1938. A significant part of these narratives have no historical anchoring, in terms of research and, therefore, reveal themselves to be report devoid of scientific value, since it is based on popular imagination. This text, which uses cordel as a vehicle for its discussion, brings to light a lampionic historicity, that is, it seeks to show the cangaceiro as a subject of a specific temporality and active in a specific spatiality: the northeastern backlands. A cordel in the form of sextiles is used, previously written, based on facts and anchored in theory. Specific literature was used, both academic and from memoirists. The writing of this text is understood to be justified, since, regarding the lamp figure, in a large part of the narratives about her, folklorization prevails.

Modus narrandi sceleris: Temporal shift in the crafting style of crime narratives

Abstract This study contributes to a methodological debate within narrative studies, emerging from the specific context of narrative criminology. It examines the evolution of storytelling styles, focusing on how the narrative selection process shapes a narrative, thereby revealing both the origins of narratives and their capacity to offer critical insights into the narrator’s perspective. This research specifically investigates the change of how narratives about the same events or topics, as recounted by two different individuals, change over time in terms of their narrative construction. Focusing on crime narratives provided by two participants – a drug dealer and a gangmaster – first in 2019 and again in 2023, the study demonstrates how these narratives not only evolve in structural complexity but also incorporate more sophisticated elements that highlight the narrators’ agency, rationalize or justify their criminal actions, or depict complex criminal identities. The findings underscore the potent methodological contributions this approach can make to narrative criminology, offering new insights into criminal behavior and dynamics that might not be as apparent in single-time-point interviews. This approach thus enriches the broader narrative studies discourse by applying its techniques and insights to the unique challenges and structures of criminal narratives.

Ghost Hunting Events and Storytelling

Ghost hunting events are a popular leisure activity providing visitors with an immersive dark experience, connecting them with the dark heritage and supernatural legends of a place. This research note aims to conceptualize the role of storytelling in the promotion, production, and participatory aspects of ghost hunting events. In doing so, the article argues that ghost hunting events draw upon coproductive and experiential forms of storytelling, and proposes a cyclical model to illustrate an ongoing, iterative process of narrative construction. As this research note suggests, preexisting narratives framed by the dark history and supernatural legends of a place help to frame promotional discourse and the production of events. However, extraordinary personal experiences, mediumistic intuition, and the collective interpretation of unusual activity shape and transform existing narratives. As such, this research note concludes that ghost hunting events are shaped by, and shape, storytelling through interactive and interpretative processes.

How the Character of the Narrator Constructs a Narratee and an Implied Reader in Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights

How the Character of the Narrator Constructs a Narratee and an Implied Reader in Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights

Deconstructing Digital Rhetoric to Face Geopolitical Challenges: A Social Media Narrative Analysis Framework

Skyrocketing technological advancement along with changes in environment dynamics allowed people, states and governments to influence each other’s diplomacy, security and international relations, using words and images, strings of events, to construct narratives. The rhetoric of power and conflict is distributed in chameleonic volatile environments, targeting members of the society to challenge security status and power balance, while new media instruments feed people`s thirst for information to challenge their beliefs into tailoring attitudes and behaviours. Defined by many as a “portrayal of events surrounding change” (Dunford and Jones, 2000) or as “central feature of modern influencing across borders (Wagnsson and Lundström, 2023) in a continuous “battle”, (Van Noort, 2017), strategic narratives bear multiple meanings, generated by the versatility of the digital dissemination channels. Understanding these meanings enlighten many directions, like international relations, diplomacy and politics, resulting in risk-free engagement, vulnerability- awareness and controlled decision-making policies, just by using narrative analysis as the appropriate instrument. However, the classical analytical models do not provide enough lenses to grasp all the components generating meaning in a digitally disseminated content and many features are thus ignored, mutilating paramount intelligence otherwise needed to complete the picture. That is why, this paper advances a model framework for a digital narrative analysis that looks at components of the textual narrative backed by the features of the environment, the characteristics of the audience and the dynamics of the dissemination, coupled with more recent social media metrics. To this end, we reviewed literature on Russian formalism (Propp, 1928), (Tomashevsky, 1965) structuralist narratology (Todorov 1969, Genette 1988, Bal 1977), poststructuralism (Chatman,1978) and postclassical narratology (Herman, Fludernik, 1999) to the most recent digitally related approaches (Georgakopoulou, 2020), (Bal, 2021) and then advanced our analysis framework that adds specific traits which social media environments enhance. We thus intend to contribute to the large body of literature with an analytical model, to render a mould of the strategic narratives in the security, defence, politics and international relations.. This paper is part of a larger study, the framework will be piloted in further research, where data will be gathered to validate the model.

Ecological dynamics in the third space: a diffractive analysis of academic development

In this article, we conceptualise the maintenance and evolution of third space practice using an ecological heuristic. This considers the dynamic balance between stabilising and destabilising processes that require third space practitioners (particularly academic developers) to be active curators of this space. These processes drive the phases of the adaptive cycle as it evolves from an epistemologically singular perspective towards one that accommodates epistemological plurality. A pictorial representation of the ecological dynamics is offered as a frame to support the construction of a personal professional narrative. This provides an exemplar of reflection on practice, and highlights the need for epistemic humility within this professional arena.

Collective memories and social roles: the case of the Paris terrorist attacks of 13 November 2015.

The present study was based on empirical data collected during the first phase (2016) of Study 1000, part of the 13-November Program: a corpus of 934 individual interviews conducted 6-11 months after the events. To process this empirical material, the authors used integrated TXM software, which provides several classic textometry tools. They mainly used the lexical specificity analysis tool, which statistically measures the irregularity of the word distribution according to the parts of the corpus. They also analyzed the concordances of certain very specific lexical forms. Analysis revealed the important influence of social roles on the construction of memories and narratives of this event. Application of textometry tools highlighted lexical fields specific to the different social roles played by the interviewees in this social drama, and showed that it was through these specific vocabularies that they remembered and recounted this extraordinary story. Social roles therefore influence the formation of memories both individual and collective, by modulating the way in which individuals select what to remember and what to forget. The article opens up several interesting avenues for future analyses, mainly a longitudinal perspective (including phases 2 and 3 of Study 1000) for the study of flashbulb memories and the gender issue to fine-tune the analysis of social roles.

Beyond Event-Centric Narratives: Advancing Arabic Story Generation with Large Language Models and Beam Search

In the domain of automated story generation, the intricacies of the Arabic language pose distinct challenges. This study introduces a novel methodology that moves away from conventional event-driven narrative frameworks, emphasizing the restructuring of narrative constructs through sophisticated language models. Utilizing mBERT, our approach begins by extracting key story entities. Subsequently, XLM-RoBERTa and a BERT-based linguistic evaluation model are employed to direct beam search algorithms in the replacement of these entities. Further refinement is achieved through Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), which fine-tunes the extensive 3 billion-parameter BLOOMZ model specifically for generating Arabic narratives. Our methodology underwent thorough testing and validation, involving individual assessments of each submodel. The ROCStories dataset provided the training ground for our story entity extractor and new entity generator, and was also used in the fine-tuning of the BLOOMZ model. Additionally, the Arabic ComVE dataset was employed to train our commonsense evaluation model. Our extensive analyses yield crucial insights into the efficacy of our approach. The story entity extractor demonstrated robust performance with an F-score of 96.62%. Our commonsense evaluator reported an accuracy of 84.3%, surpassing the previous best by 3.1%. The innovative beam search strategy effectively produced entities that were linguistically and semantically superior to those generated using baseline models. Further subjective evaluations affirm our methodology’s capability to generate high-quality Arabic stories characterized by linguistic fluency and logical coherence.