Narrative Dialogue Research Articles

Collective Stories of Exercise: Making Sense of Gym Experiences With Disabled Peers.

Using a dialogical narrative approach, we explored how disabled people made sense of their gym experiences as part of a peer group. Interviews were conducted with 18 disabled people (10 men and 8 women, aged 23-60) who had experience exercising in the gym as part of a group. Data were rigorously analyzed using a dialogical narrative analysis. Within their peer group, participants crafted a collective story that they used to resist disablism in the gym. The dialogical components of the collective story functioned to (a) validate participants' experiences of oppression in the gym, (b) forge an unspoken understanding with peers, (c) craft a more affirmative identity, and (d) instill a sense of empowerment in participants so that they can tell their own story. This study extends knowledge in the field of exercise and disability by showing that despite the oppression disabled people experienced in the gym, they can create a collective story, which is useful for helping to promote and sustain exercise in this space.

A visual and narrative dialogue on our collective past, present and future

A World Family Portrait is a joint project of the Consortium for Comparative Research on Regional Integration and Social Cohesion (RISC) and Regions and Cohesion. It aims to promote interdisciplinary and crosscultural communication through images and essays on the different faces of humanity, including, but not limited to, our similarities and our differences, our strengths and our weaknesses, our hopes and our concerns, our legacies and our aspirations, as well as our interactions with each other and our world. This project seeks to establish a dialogue between human experiences, academic reflections and shared ethics, such as mutual respect, the protection of human dignity and solidarity.

Religious education in the secularised Netherlands

Being a religious educator in Western Europe, especially in the highly secularised Netherlands, is a complicated job. There are concepts to be taught to a generation that is mostly religiously analphabetic. Religion is subject to many discussions that foremost include the media’s coverage of extremist versions of religion. It has become more difficult to teach children about religion and to have a narrative dialogue with them. In our research, we focus on different types of young people that can be found in the classroom; mixed patterns of commitment to religious institutes and variable amounts of concern with religion in forming their identity. A five yearly survey gives insight into values that pupils find important in their lives and shows whether they think of themselves as religious or believing, or not. Secondly, together with theological students and secondary school teachers, we have created and developed possible strategies for religious education. Developed lessons, activities and materials can be practiced and used by religious education teachers to educate the pluralistic but spiritual classroom they are faced with.

Embedded Stories and the Use of Ambiguity in Ancient Indian Narratives: Selfshadowing in the Anugītā

Embedded Stories and the Use of Ambiguity in Ancient Indian Narratives:Selfshadowing in the Anugītā Scott R. Stroud (bio) and Jaishikha Nautiyal (bio) In the evolution of Indian philosophy, knowing one's self is a vital concern. Even more fundamental is avoiding mistaking oneself for something one is not. In the Indian tradition, one must not be deceived about the nature of oneself. To be confused in such a fashion is a "kind of ontological illness, and thus something that might be overcome only with the utmost arduous effort and disciplined attention" (Deutsch, "Self-Deception" 323–4). At the core of this ontological malady is a person who identifies his self "with the nonself" (318). Removing the causes of such a harmful misidentification or self-deception is the ultimate goal of much Indian philosophical work. Since a significant portion of these didactic texts take the form of narratives and myths (Oliver 45–60; Babbili 128–58), we must account for how narratives can play a role in removing the obstacles to self-knowledge, enlightenment, and true freedom. One interesting class of Indian narrative is that of the "gītā" or devotional texts. Some of these come from larger narrative contexts, yet all of them can be encountered in India and the west as stand-alone texts participating in the religious-philosophical discourse of the Indian tradition. While some work on Indian thought has focused on gītā texts and the means by which they aim for self-knowledge and enlightenment (e.g., Stroud, "Multivalent Narratives" 369–93, and "Narrative as Argument" 42–71), [End Page 167] an interesting case of related gītās has gone unexamined. Many have no doubt heard of the well-known episode from the epic Mahābhārata, the Bhagavad Gītā. This dialogic narrative portrays Krishna as explicating the way to enlightenment for Arjuna and, by extension, for the text's readers or hearers. Another, lesser-known part of the Mahābhārata is the Anugītā, a text that identifies itself as a retelling of the earlier episode known as the Bhagavad Gītā. The Anugītā is notable because it differs in form from the text it purports to retell. Instead of being a straightforward conversation between Krishna and Arjuna, the message of the Anugītā is buried in a series of narrators telling stories about other narrators in answer to different interlocutors. The divine Krishna shapes this process of storytelling in his response to Arjuna, but his controlling rhetorical influence quickly gets buried by new narrators creating new stories with their own narrating characters. Nevertheless, this unusual text represents itself as a retelling of the Bhagavad Gītā's central lessons on self and enlightened action. Scholars have endeavored to understand its content in light of the larger Mahābhārata story, but this enigmatic text always seems to resist straightforward readings.1 Instead, we propose to examine the form of the Anugītā as a key to explaining the text's rhetorical functioning, especially when placed beside the work it purports to echo. The Anugītā provides an excellent opportunity to ascertain the difference that overt and perplexing narrative structure makes in the practice of ancient Indian rhetoric. To understand why the Anugītā relies on a complex strategy of embedded or framed narratives—dialogic questions being answered by stories involving the retelling of other stories (Nelles 1–3)—we engage Gary Saul Morson's structuralist theory of narrative and his concept of sideshadowing.2 Morson's theory offers an intriguing and understudied structural approach to understanding narrative's effects on an auditor: it focuses on the reader's experience of the structure of an experienced narrative, and it provides a conceptual vocabulary to account for narratively induced value and belief change. Thus, it is aptly centered on the experiential issues of comprehension and persuasion. More than this, Morson also examines themes such as time, causation, and freedom, paralleling vital concerns in ancient Indian narratives such as the Mahābhārata (Hudson 146–177). Using this framework for narrative as a starting point, we argue that the complex narrative frames in the Anugītā function in a unique way...

Ekphrasis and Narrative, or the Ideological Critique of Artworks: Alma-Tadema, Ennio Flaiano and the Legacy of Heliogabalus

Just before his death in 1972, the Italian writer Ennio Flaiano wrote a short story entitled “La penultima cena” (The Penultimate Supper) in which Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s painting The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888) is referenced and the “myth” of Heliogabalus itself comes to play a fundamental role in the construction of the narrative. Though the scene recreated by the characters in Flaiano’s short story may be interpreted as a mise en abyme, through the transformation of Alma-Tadema’s original image using different modes of writing – in particular narrative dialogues and ekphrasis – Flaiano actually critiques an elitist and anti-historical use of art in literature. Building on a reference that the narrator makes to the Decameron , the article shows how the ekphrasis hosts an ideological conflict that opposes the narrator’s interpretation of Heliogabalus’s feast to the one reproduced and staged during a fancy dinner held by members of Rome’s high-society.

Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes: The Dialogic Narrative in the Educational Act

<p class="apa">This study used the story of <em>Sadako and the thousand paper cranes </em>by Coerr (1977) to discover similarities between the events of August 1945 in Hiroshima and the events of August 1990 in Kuwait. The participants in a children’s literature class at Kuwait University folded paper cranes and wrote in their journals to answer two questions: (1) what is the importance of the story of Sadako, the Japanese girl, in introducing the issue of Kuwaiti prisoners of war? and (2) what are the educational values that Kuwaiti students can extract from Sadako’s story? Three techniques were used, with a special focus on the participants’ remarks and their impressions of those remarks in written form. The researcher counted nine values that the participants mentioned while they folded the paper crane and five values after they realized the crane’s meaning. Several recommendations, suggestions, and remarks are also proposed.</p>

Poética, medicina e inquisição: o diálogo da perseguição nos Colóquios dos Simples e Drogas das Índias (1563) de Garcia da Orta

Abordaremos, no presente artigo, que os aspectos relativos à medicina oriental se revelam como parte constituinte e não matéria única dos Colóquios dos Simples e Drogas da Índia de Garcia da Orta, médico particular do navegador Martim Afonso de Sousa. Na disposição dialógica por ele apresentada no citado texto, notaremos como os aspectos de sua identidade judaica trazem, à narrativa, tensões que visam driblar a censura inquisitorial, registrando as marcas poéticas suscitadas pelos vários conflitos político-religiosos travados com os católicos durante o Renascimento. Desse modo, fica nossa investigação longe de limitar-se à análise do registro dos fármacos Orientais até então desconhecidos no Ocidente, pois levaremos em consideração que, nos Colóquios, os diálogos ganham também um outro sentido ao se centrarem na marca dessa diáspora provocada pelos crimes e discriminações sociais de que os judeus e cristãos-novos ibéricos eram vítimas há tempos. Isso nos incentivará, por fim, a tomar os diálogos de Garcia da Orta como parte de uma larga literatura renascentista que se revela promissora para o estudo do campo estético em contextos de intensa censura, bem como para o estudo sobre o gradual surgimento de uma estrutura narrativa que prenuncia o romance burguês.

“Neither Ākhūnd nor Fukulī”: Munāzirah and the Discourse of Iranian Modernity

Iranian modernity has chiefly been examined in the context of a dialectical antagonism between “traditionalists” and “modernists”—the main categories comprised of related sub-headings such as “Islamist” versus “secular,” “reactionary” versus “revolutionary,” and “regressive” versus “progressive.” Following this binaristic approach, Iranian adaptations of modernity have often been (de)historicized as a theatre of national “awakening” resulting from the toils of secular intellectuals in overcoming the obstinate resistance of traditional reactionaries, a confrontation between two purportedly well-defined and mutually exclusive camps. Such reductionist dialectics has generally overwritten the dialogic narrative of Iranian modernity, a conflicted dialogue misrepresented as a conflicting dialectic. It has also silenced an important feature of Iranian modernity: the universally acknowledged premise of the simultaneity and commensurability of tradition with modernity. The monāzereh (disputation or debate) is the account of the interaction between rival discourses that engaged in opposing, informing, and appropriating each other in the process of adapting modernity. Narrativizing the history of Iranian modernity as the conflict between mutually exclusive binaries overlooks its hyphenated, liminal identity—a narrative of adaptation rather than wholesale adoption, of heterogeneity rather than homogeneity, of dialogics rather than dialectics. The monāzereh is the account of modern Iranian histories.

Do desejo de traduzir à transcriação: apontamentos sobre a decodificação jornalística do discurso científico, com base em conceitos de Haroldo de Campos, José Paulo Paes e Paul Ricoeur

Os mecanismos jornalísticos de decodificação e edição do discurso da ciência implicam a necessidade de ressignificação das investigações especializadas, ligadas às mais diversas áreas do conhecimento, e a sublimação da terminologia técnica – transfigurando-a em narrativa dialógica, com linguagem e formato mais próximos à(s) experiência(s) daquele a quem se destina (leitor, espectador, usuário etc.). Baseado na noção de transleitura, proposta por José Paulo Paes (1995), em diálogo com os desafios do processo de tradução abordados por Paul Ricoeur (2011), este artigo reflete sobre o uso do neologismo “transcriação” – criado por Haroldo de Campos – para discussão de práticas ligadas à cobertura da ciência pelo jornalismo.

Curriculum homeplacing as complicated conversation: (re)narrating the mentoring of Black women doctoral students

ABSTRACTThrough personal and dialogical narratives, we explore the ways Black women mentors (do not) reveal to their mentees their lived-experiences and the personal pain associated with the pursuit of careers in higher education; how and why their narratives of pain and pursuit are negotiated, sanctioned, and/or strategically altered; and the impact these decisions have on the development of Black women graduate students. Drawing on hooks’ notions of ‘imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ (2015), ‘radical honesty’ (2004), and ‘homeplace’ (1990), we deploy the concept of curriculum homeplacing to more critically examine Black women’s mentoring relationships.

Capturing/captured by stories of marginalized young people: Direct scribing and dialogic narrative analysis

Examining the results of the “narrative turn” in social work in their seminal article for Qualitative Research in 2005, Riessman and Quinney found themselves disappointed with the size and quality of the research corpus they reviewed. However, they also identified three exemplars of promising work, including the research of Faye Martin (Martin, 1998). Riessman and Quinney highlighted Martin’s narrative-gathering strategy, devised on the basis of her practice experience and dubbed “direct scribing.” The direct scribing method of narrative data collection disciplines the work of the researcher, who becomes the “scribe,” and elaborates the roles of the interviewees as authors of the narratives that they create. This article on capturing (and being captured by) the narratives of marginalized young people is situated in an increasingly significant movement in the social work literature that promotes giving voice to young people, so that they may have their views taken into account. We highlight the benefits of direct scribing as a means of narrative-gathering in social work and then address the challenge of interpreting these narratives, drawing on examples from our research. We suggest connections between direct scribing and the interpretive approach of dialogic narrative analysis as a method of interpretation that requires “letting stories breathe.” (Frank, 2010). The aim of this contribution is to describe specific ways in which linking direct scribing and dialogical narrative analysis may contribute to the advancement of narrative research in social work, and, in particular, to the enhancement of efforts to amplify “youth voice” in social work policy and practice.

Formulating Place, Common Ground, and a Moral Order in Lachixío Zapotec

Abstract People make reference to places in the variable formulations afforded by their languages and to multiple ends that in addition to picking out a referent, simultaneously build conceptual common ground about seen and unseen landscapes, including moral stances about the social geography. This paper examines the different ways that Lachixío Zapotec speakers of Oaxaca, Mexico, formulate and interpret place references in the dialogic narratives of their conversations. I examine sequences of interaction within stories that emerged in conversations as joint social actions. These sequences include both speakers’ place formulations and addressees’ responses that publically display their uptake and stances toward the references. I describe resources of the Lachixío Zapotec language for referencing place and show how place references are entangled with person references, references to historical events, and participants’ moral stances toward such references. Through examining references to locations within sequences of conversational story telling we gather some evidence for how conceptual common ground and moral value is developed through the step-wise progression of turn-taking and how stances about places come to be culturally shared or contested between interlocutors dialogically.

Diagnostic Emplotment in Q’eqchi’ Maya Medicine

ABSTRACTMedical diagnosis is a process of illness discrimination, categorization, and identification on the basis of careful observation and is central in biomedicine and many traditional medical systems around the world. Through a detailed analysis of several illness episodes and healer interviews among Maya communities in southern Belize, we observe that the diagnostic processes of traditional Q’eqchi’ healers reflect patterns of narrative ‘emplotment’ that engage not simply the individual patient but also significant spiritual and cosmological forces. Three diagnostic techniques of the Q’eqchi’ Maya healers are described and their connections to Maya concepts of personhood and cosmovision are presented. This research fosters an appreciation of how Indigenous knowledge systems shape clinical encounters and healing dramas, widening the spheres of clinical narrative co-construction and dialogue beyond the material and physical contexts implicit within Western clinical encounters.

Medical student stories of participation in patient care-related activities: the construction of relational identity.

Professional identity formation is acknowledged as one of the fundamental tasks of contemporary medical education. Identity is a social phenomenon, constructed through participation in everyday activities and an integral part of every learning interaction. In this paper we report from an Australian ethnographic study into how medical students and patients use narrative to construct their identities. The dialogic narrative analysis employed focused on the production of meaning through the use of language devices in a given context, and the juxtaposition of multiple perspectives. Two stories told by students about their participation in patient care-related activities reveal how identities are constructed in this context through depictions of the relationships between medical students, patients and clinical teachers. These students use the rhetorical functions of stories to characterise doctors and patients in certain ways, and position themselves in relation to them. They defend common practices that circumvent valid consent processes, justified by the imperative to maximise students' participation in patient care-related activities. In doing so, they identify patients as their adversaries, and doctors as allies. Both students are influenced by others' expectations but one reveals the active nature of identity work, describing subtle acts of resistance. These stories illustrate how practices for securing students' access to patients can influence students' emerging identities, with implications for their future disclosure and consent practices. We argue that more collaborative ways of involving medical students in patient care-related activities will be facilitated if students and clinical teachers develop insight into the relational nature of identity work.

The Dialogical Tradition of Iranian Modernity: Monazereh, Simultaneity, and the Making of Modern Iran

Iranian modernity has chiefly been examined in the context of a dialectical antagonism between “traditionalists” and “modernists”—main categories comprised of related sub-headings such as “Islamist” versus “secular,” “reactionary” versus “revolutionary,” and “regressive” versus “progressive.” Following this approach, Iranian adaptations of modernity have often been (de)historicized as a theater of national “awakening” resulting from the toils of secular intellectuals in overcoming the obstinate resistance of traditional reactionaries, a confrontation between two purportedly well-defined and mutually exclusive camps. Such reductionist dialectics has generally overwritten the dialogic narrative of Iranian modernity, a conflicted dialogue misrepresented as a conflicting dialectic. It has also silenced an important feature of Iranian modernity: the universally acknowledged premise of the simultaneity and commensurability of tradition with modernity. The monazereh (disputation or debate) is the account of the interaction between rival discourses that engaged in opposing, informing, and appropriating each other in the process of adapting modernity. Narrativizing the history of Iranian modernity as the conflict between mutually exclusive binaries overlooks its hyphenated, liminal1 identity—a narrative of adaptation rather than wholesale adoption, of heterogeneity rather than homogeneity, of dialogues rather than dialectics. The monazereh is the account of modern Iranian histories.

De Verga à Visconti

The Bakhtinian concept of “monological narrative” as opposed to that of “dialogical narrative” can be used to understand Visconti’s cinematic adaptation of Verga’s novel made three quarters of a century ago. The central character of both the movie and the book fails in his project to create a better situation for his family. The novel, however, because of inherent polyphonicity provides a place for the dissonant voices of the community, while the revolutionary ideal of Visconti’s epic hero offers a glimpse into a distant world of justice for both Sicily and the rest of the world.

Dialogical Narrative as the Method of Moral Education in Elementary School

Dialogical Narrative as the Method of Moral Education in Elementary School

Relações de gênero e ruralidade nos projetos vitais e noções de si de jovens mulheres

Resumo O presente artigo apresenta os resultados de uma pesquisa qualitativa com 48 jovens mulheres do meio rural do Rio Grande do Sul, focando aspectos do protejo vital e marcadores identitários presentes na construção dos mesmos. A aproximação metodológica consistiu de uma combinação entre entrevistas narrativas de caráter biográfico e uma proposta de fotocomposição, ambas com roteiro de produção semiestruturada. Os resultados indicam que as relações comunitárias de ruralidade e de gênero são importantes marcos dos projetos vitais dessas jovens, que pendem entre leituras tradicionais dos papéis de gênero e possibilidades subversivas do feminino, em um processo narrativo dialógico.

Democratic Dialogue as a Process to Inform Public Policy

An exploration of the collaborative reconceptualization of a provincial Supervisory Officer’s Qualification Program (SOQP) through the use of dialogic approaches is the focus of this inquiry. The stories, perspectives, and lived experiences of supervisory officers, principals, teachers, parents, students, and members of the public in Ontario were included as essential voices and information sources within policy development conversations. These narratives of experience revealed the forms of knowledge, skills, dispositions, and ethical commitments necessary for effective supervisory officers today and in the future. They also illustrated the transformative nature of narrative dialogue to enlighten, deepen understanding, and alter perspectives. The policy development processes used in this publicly shared educational initiative
 serve as a model of democratic dialogue. The inclusive and dialogic methods
 employed to collectively reconceptualize a supervisory officer formation program illustrate
 an innovative framework for developing policies governing the public good.

Collective stories and well-being: using a dialogical narrative approach to understand peer relationships among combat veterans experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder.

Using a dialogical narrative approach, this original research explored how combat veterans experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder made sense of peer relationships with other veterans and what effects these relationships had on their well-being. Interviews and participant observations were conducted with 15 male combat veterans (aged 27-60 years) and one member of the civilian emergency services, the majority of whom were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder following traumatic exposure in a range of armed conflicts. All participants were part of a surfing charity for veterans experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder. Data were rigorously analysed using a dialogical narrative analysis (DNA). Findings revealed the collective story that veterans used to make sense of peer relationships within the group. This collective story worked for the veterans to shape their experiences of well-being by fostering camaraderie, stimulating deeper connections and countering the negative effects of post-traumatic stress disorder. Potential therapeutic effects of the collective story were also identified. This article extends previous knowledge on combat veterans and social relationships and advances the field of narrative health psychology through the empirical application of a sophisticated dialogical narrative approach.