Narratives Of Self Research Articles

Narratives selves in the digital world: An empirical investigation

AbstractThe digital era has led to the extension of self into virtual space, resulting in changes to consumption patterns. The existing academic landscape in this area focuses on Western perspectives, in the context of early‐stage digital interventions. However, the dynamic digital world demands a constant exploration to understand the corresponding influences on consumer behavior across varied cultural contexts. This research focuses on unraveling newer dimensions of the digital self from non‐Western perspectives. We adopt an interpretive lens to understand the evolving nature of self through a grounded theory approach. The study establishes the presence of multiple independent narrative selves, co‐created with people, and technology. Each narrative addresses different segments of personal audiences, enabling new modes of self‐expression to overcome the challenges of digital expressions. Additionally, we highlight the exclusion of the digital presence of family in the formation of the narrative self. From a theoretical perspective, we extend and contrast the existing conceptualizations on self, such as dialogical selves, self‐extension and expansion, and the unified core self. Further, the practical implications emphasize the need for narrative analytic approaches to understanding consumers and avenues for brands to decode narratives, develop strategies to gain consumer attention, and become part of consumers' narrative selves.

Cognitive neurorobotics and self in the shared world, a focused review of ongoing research

Through brain-inspired modeling studies, cognitive neurorobotics aims to resolve dynamics essential to different emergent phenomena at the level of embodied agency in an object environment shared with human beings. This article is a review of ongoing research focusing on model dynamics associated with human self-consciousness. It introduces the free energy principle and active inference in terms of Bayesian theory and predictive coding, and then discusses how directed inquiry employing analogous models may bring us closer to representing the sense of self in cognitive neurorobots. The first section quickly locates cognitive neurorobotics in the broad field of computational cognitive modeling. The second section introduces principles according to which cognition may be formalized, and reviews cognitive neurorobotics experiments employing such formalizations. The third section interprets the results of these and other experiments in the context of different senses of self, both “minimal” and “narrative” self. The fourth section considers model validity and discusses what we may expect ongoing cognitive neurorobotics studies to contribute to scientific explanation of cognitive phenomena including the senses of minimal and narrative self.

Belonging to Nowhere: A Phenomenological Study of the Identity Crisis of the Second Generation of Afghan Refugees in Balochistan

This study investigates how the second generation of Afghan refugees who are born and raised in Balochistan feel about and express their sense of belonging and identity in the hosting community. The main purpose of this study is to analyze and understand how the second generation of Afghan refugees feel about their identity in terms of who they think they were, how they perceived themselves, whether they felt comfortable or uncomfortable identifying themselves Afghans in local community, and that how their identity affected their sense of belonging and their day to day life in Balochistan. This phenomenological study intended to explore the sense of identity of the young Afghan refugees by drawing on their individual and collective narratives of self and others as they struggle to be part of the social fabric and feel safe and accepted in Pakistani community. It also aimed to highlight how the identity crisis and the feeling of being other affected the needs, attitudes and perceptions of second generation Afghan refugees in the hosting community , and that how the second-generation Afghan refugees experience their sense of belonging and identification in two different national contexts (Afghanistan and Pakistan).This study uses qualitative phenomenological approach. It uses analysis of relevant secondary data, focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews. The findings reveal that the identity crisis is still a challenging and major issue for Afghan refugee children.

Personaje autónomo y yo narrativo. Una lectura de Bajo la red, de Iris Murdoch, en el marco de la perspectiva fenomenológica de Paul Ricoeur

Se analizan las dimensiones del yo narrativo —en cuanto tipología especial distinta y al mismo tiempo relacionada con el yo ontológico de la filosofía y el yo de la reflexión ética, descrito por Paul Ricoeur en Sí mismo como otro— en la identidad y posible autonomía de los personajes literarios. Se aplican las consideraciones de su estudio como método de análisis en los ejemplos provistos por una novela de la literatura inglesa del siglo XX, Under the Net [Bajo la red] (1954), obra de Iris Murdoch, una reconocida autora tanto de literatura como de filosofía, particularmente sensible a los temas de autonomía del individuo en la ficción en cuanto reflejo de la naturaleza humana.

Different narration, same history: The politics of writing ‘democratic narratives’ in Zimbabwe

Over the past five decades, Zimbabwe’s political trajectories were characterised by a historiographic revision and deconstruction that revealed varying ideological perceptions and positions of political actors. This article reconsiders the current shifts in the Zimbabwean historiography and focuses on the politics of positioning the self in the national narrative. The article analyses three Zimbabwean political autobiographies written by political actors from the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), particularly Michael Auret’s From Liberator to Dictator: An Insider’s Account of Robert Mugabe’s Descent into Tyranny (2009), Morgan Tsvangirai’s At the Deep End (2011), and David Coltart’s The Struggle Continues: 50 Years of Tyranny in Zimbabwe (2016). It also discusses how writing in Zimbabwe is a contested terrain that is bifurcated between oppositional and dominant imaginaries of politics, the revolutionary tradition, and past performances of power.

Personal Growth Experience among Parents of Children with Autism Participating in Intervention.

Guided by Pals' (in: McStay (ed) Identity and story: Creating self in narrative, American Psychological Association, Washington DC, 2006) model of self-making through a narrative lens in the context of adversity, this study investigated not only the difficulties but also the personal growth that parents have experienced while participating in the interventions with their children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in mainland China. Based on interviews with 16 purposively sampled parents, thematic analysis revealed themes concerning the parents' acknowledgment of stressful events and their emotional reactions, meanings of their experiences constructed through causal connections, and outcomes of their perceived improvement in self-understanding, parent-child relationships, and philosophies on life. Largely consistent with this theoretical model, such findings highlight the uniqueness of the personal growth process of parents of children with ASD in China's sociocultural context.

Varieties of the extended self.

This article provides an overview and analysis of recent work on the extended self, demonstrating that the boundaries of selves are fluid, shifting across biological, artifactual, and sociocultural structures. First, it distinguishes the notions of minimal self, person, and narrative self. Second, it surveys how philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists argue that embodiment, cognition, emotion, consciousness, and moral character traits can be extended and what that implies for the boundaries of selves. It also reviews and responds to various criticisms and counterarguments against the extended self. The main focus is on the link between the extended mind and extended self, which has received the most attention in recent literature. But accounts of the extended self developed independently of the extended mind are also briefly discussed. This article ends by drawing out some of the conceptual, methodological, and normative implications of the extended self and suggesting some directions for future research.

A New Shahrazad

Abstract In 1945, Mahmooda Rizvia, a prominent Urdu author from Sindh, published a travel account of her journey across the Arabian Sea from British India to Iraq during World War II. In her travel account, Rizvia conceptualized the declining British Empire as a dynamic space for Muslim renewal that connected India to the Middle East. Moreover, she fashioned a singular autobiographical persona as an Urdu literary pioneer and woman traveler in the Muslim lands of the British Empire. In her writings, Rizvia focused on her distinctive observations of the ocean, the history of the Ottoman Empire, and her home province of Sindh's location as a historical nexus between South Asia and the Middle East. In contrast to the expectations of modesty and de-emphasis on the self in many Muslim women's autobiographical narratives in the colonial era, Rizvia fashioned a pious, yet unapologetically self-promotional, autobiographical persona. In conversation with recent scholarship on Muslim cosmopolitanism, women's autobiographical writing, and travel literature, this article points to the development of an influential project of Muslim cosmopolitanism in late colonial Sindh that blurred the lines between British imperialism, pan-Islamic ambitions, and nationalism during the closing days of World War II.

Politics and notions of the self in depression narratives: Revisiting Martínez-Hernáez’s typology.

Politics and notions of the self in depression narratives: Revisiting Martínez-Hernáez’s typology.

Where is home? Diaspora and hybridity in contemporary dialogue

Diaspora is the first step towards an encounter with the other, forcing a re-negotiation of one’s cultural identity. This quest for the self, known as diasporic consciousness, is thought to be disruptive, having the power to de-essentialize national narratives. While diaspora does shake the core of individuals, this paper differentiates diasporic from hybrid consciousness as two distinct discourses of self. Maintaining a diasporic consciousness means to sustain the idea of a physical ‘home’ that has been forever lost. The constant desire to ‘return’ underscores an unconditional alliance to the homeland and its diasporic footprint. Consequently, the diasporic experience does not necessarily produce transgressive forms of cultural identification. On the contrary, those who dwell on diasporic consciousness reify national discourses abroad. The language of nationalism remains intact, and ‘native’ and ‘other’ constitute themselves through a dialectic but mutually exclusive relationship with devastating consequences for those who cannot cope with the binary. The alternative to diasporic consciousness is Bakhtinian heteroglossia, for it exposes national discourses as ‘epic,’ and de-territorializes ‘home’ to find it in language. Hybrid narratives of self connect diverse memories, images, and experiences into individual stories of identity that ultimately transform official discourses of national, gender, religious, and racial identifications.

「望む性」を生きる自己の語られ方 ある性同一性障害者の場合

「望む性」を生きる自己の語られ方 ある性同一性障害者の場合

Older adults’ perceptions of early rehabilitation and recovery after hip fracture surgery: a UK qualitative study

Purpose To explore older adult’s perceptions of early rehabilitation and recovery after hip fracture, as a complement to the UK standards for acute physiotherapy after hip fracture. Methods In-depth semi-structured interviews with 15 adults aged 60 years or more in hospital after hip fracture surgery. A thematic analysis approach with interpretation informed by Bury’s biographical disruption theoretical framework. Results Participants voiced the importance of self-determination, professional support, meaningful feedback, and social capital after hip fracture. Collaborative working with staff was required for meeting the UK standards. Participants voiced anxieties about their hip fracture when considered in conjunction with their age and co-existing conditions, anticipating a disruption to their previous physical and social activities. This new, more dependent, life situation was not acceptable to participants. Conclusions This study suggests hip fracture alone, was not perceived as a biographical disruption by older adults although it is presented as a potential tipping point in the loss of independence, contributing to the wider disruption of advancing age and co-existing conditions. For successful implementation of the UK standards, goal setting should consider patients in the wider context of their advancing age and co-existing conditions to empower them to define a fresh narrative of self. Implications for rehabilitation Hip fracture was perceived as a potential tipping point in the loss of independence, contributing to the wider disruption of advancing age and co-existing conditions. Participants expressed uncertainty over their ability to recover their previous identity in the absence of professional support and/or social capital. Healthcare professionals need to educate and empower older adults to take charge of their own recovery. For successful implementation of the UK standards for acute physiotherapy, there is a need to contextualize goal setting to empower patients to define a fresh narrative of self.

Health Biometrics and the Narrative Self

Abstract This essay aims to highlight how the current state of medical biometrics produces a transitional state of being between measurement and data recollection in which there no longer is an analogon for the self, how this is affecting our traditional image of the narrative self, and consequently how it directly impacts our very belief in a life-story.

Books for Idle Hours: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading

Donna Harrington-Leuker, professor of English at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, has written a detailed, thoroughly researched overview of the development of summer reading as an American phenomenon, something that most of us simply take for granted today. Utilizing a wide variety of primary documents, including publishers' records, book reviews, diaries and correspondence of readers, and the popular novels of the period themselves, she demonstrates that the concept of “summer reading” was a consequence of the rise of the middle class in the nineteenth century, with the accompanying concepts of summer travel and summer leisure. Of particular note is her consideration of the educated African American elite and the summer resort communities that catered to their needs.The work illuminates the role of nineteenth-century periodicals in marketing summer reading to vacationers and, in particular, to female vacationers, presenting it as a “genteel performance” (41) taking place in a gendered space under the gaze of marriageable males. Harrington-Leuker also reveals the cultural work of the American summer novel, exploring individual authors and titles in depth. She clearly demonstrates how the early American summer novel, set in summer resorts and “ostensibly about summer leisure … became a narrative of self and society at a transitional moment in nineteenth-century culture.” This section is perhaps the least successful, as it requires a familiarity with those authors and titles and she admits herself that most of them have passed into obscurity, Louisa May Alcott being a notable exception. Her “blood-and-thunder tales” are presented as an example of the way that “the season's saturnalian possibilities … remained a part of the public discourse of summer.” Apparently, what happened at the summer resort stayed at the summer resort.Of particular interest to library historians will be the section on the role of space and place in American Victorian summer reading, including as it does descriptions of social and solitary summer reading, and the establishment of libraries at hotels and summer resorts. These include the Athenaeum library at Saratoga and the library at the Poland Spring resort in Maine. Other than a fascinating mention of guests at various resort communities hosting fundraisers for the local public library, there is no consideration of the public library and summer reading, although the public library does appear in many of the diaries and letters that she cites. Rounding out the volume is a chapter on the Chautauqua Assemblies, other summer schools, and the Catholic Reading Circles, which bear witness to the continuing tension between the desire for light, leisurely summer reading, and the cultural pressure for self and social improvement through reading “the best books.”The book is of interest to anyone interested in the social and cultural history of reading in the United States. It fills a gap in the current literature on print culture in nineteenth-century America in regard to popular fiction. While works such as Sarah Wadsworth's In the Company of Books: Literature and Its “Classes” in Nineteenth-Century America and Lawrence W. Levine's Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America include popular fiction among the topics they explore, Harrington-Leuker's is the only work devoted specifically to popular fiction and to summer reading and to the role of the publisher in that phenomenon. It provides a background to works such as Joan Shelley Rubin's The Making of Middlebrow Culture, which focus on popular fiction, book club, and reading groups in the twentieth century. It also creates a need for additional works on summer reading in the nineteenth century that would approach it from different perspectives. Certainly there is room for additional work on African Americans and summer reading, as well as the previously mentioned public library and summer reading, and, of course, for the history of children and their summer reading beyond their participation in library summer reading programs.

ПСИХОЛОГІЧНІ ОСОБЛИВОСТІ ОБРАЗУ Я ВАГІТНИХ

Статтю присвячено вивченню психологічних особливостей образу Я вагітних, що перебувають на різних термінах вагітності. Образ Я розглянуто як установку особистості щодо себе, складно структуроване та динамічне утворення особистості. В структурі образу Я виділено когнітивний, емоційно-оціночний, поведінковий, соціально-перцептивний аспекти та визначено їх функції. Зазначено, що формування та становлення образу Я відбувається в процесі життя, а під час вагітності значно трансформується, переходячи від образу «Я – вагітна» до образу «Я – мати», а потім – «Я і дитина».Розглянуто психологічний бік змін в ідентичності вагітних. В результаті проведеного дослідження визначено особливості емоційно-оціночного аспекту образу Я вагітних, а саме виявлено наступні особливості: виражене позитивне самоставлення і самовпевненість; середній рівень поваги до себе, аутосимпатії та самоприйняття; більшість вагітних виявили самопослідовність, самоінтерес і низький рівень самообвинувачення. Констатовано високий рівень самооцінки вагітними здоров’я, зовнішності, впевненості у собі; адекватна оцінка розуму, здібностей, характеру та загальна самооцінка. У діапазоні соціально-перцептивного аспекту з’ясовано, що найбільш вираженими є середні показники оцінки ставлення, особистісна ідентичність, емоційно-позитивна форма позначення статі. Констатовано, що для більшості вагітних сексуальна роль та учбово-професійна не є важливими у даний період, натомість велике значення має сімейна приналежність. У рамках когнітивного аспекту виявлено, що серед вагітних переважають жінки з: емоційно-полярним типом особистості, високим рівнем рефлексії, позитивними ідентифікаційними характеристиками, вираженою сімейною та персональною перспективою. Для більшості досліджуваних найбільше значення мала сфера сім’ї, вагомим для досліджуваних був також фізичний образ. В межах поведінкового аспекту більшості досліджуваних жінок діагностовано здатність сконцентруватись на собі, стриманість, виваженість вчинків, дипломатичність, уміння працювати зі своєю напругою, зберігати емоційну стійкість. Встановлено, що відчуття безпеки, довіри, впевненості, низький рівень тривоги, ворожості та конфліктності властиві більшості досліджуваних.

Embodied self-other overlap in romantic love: a review and integrative perspective.

Romantic love has long intrigued scientists in various disciplines. Social-cognitive research has provided ample evidence for overlapping mental representations of self and romantic partner. This overlap between self and romantic partner would contribute to the experience of love and has been found to be a predictor of relationship quality. Self-partner overlap has been mainly documented at the level of conceptual or narrative self, with studies showing confusion between one's own and partner's identity aspects, perspectives, and outcomes. But the self is not restricted to abstract, conceptual representations but also involves body-related representations, which, research has revealed, are linked to social-cognitive processes. In this article, we review the emerging evidence that romantic love involves not only a blurring of conceptual selves but also a reduction of the distinction between self and romantic partner at a bodily level. We discuss the potential function(s) of self-other overlap in romantic relationship at the level of body-related representations and consider possible mechanisms. We conclude with possible future directions to further investigate how romantic love engages embodied self-other representations involved in social interactions.

Storytelling Philosophy and Self Writing—Preliminary Notes on Elena Ferrante: An Interview with Adriana Cavarero

In this interview, Italian feminist thinker Adriana Cavarero discusses the complexity of Elena Ferrante's narratives. Connecting Cavarero's storytelling philosophy and Foucault's concept of self writing, the exchange between Cavarero and the young scholar Isabella Pinto shows how the materiality of Ferrante's identity emerges from the philosophical landscape of the "narratable self" and the "relationality in a concrete situation," thereby establishing a new "pact with the reader." Furthermore, the interview shows how Italian feminist thought can be used to reread literary tradition, to critique academic methods of transmission of knowledge, and to criticize the subduing effect of social networks on writing the self.

Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England by Julie Orlemanski

Reviewed by: Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England by Julie Orlemanski Rebecca Krug Julie Orlemanski. Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. ix, 333. $69.95. Julie Orlemanski's Symptomatic Subjects demonstrates that representations of physical bodies as "symptomatic"—that is, subject to both decay, death, and sickness and, also, to interpretation—were central to late medieval English imaginative writing. The book ranges with great energy over well-known works such as Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Henryson's Testament of Cresseid; marches through readings of less-familiar texts, including tales from the Gesta Romanorum, Hoccleve's Series, and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament; and runs through excerpts from medical works by Arnau of Vilanova, John Arderne, Guy de Chauliac, and Roger of Parma. The ambitious scope of the project—bodies, medicine, and causation—is somewhat overstated but exciting. Through her dynamic readings of texts that feature descriptions of bodily processes, Orlemanski shows that late medieval literary writers had come to see literary production as a space in which embodiment, textuality, and signification could be explored. Both bodies and written texts had become subject to interpretation and narration in late medieval England. Orlemanski explains that her book "tells the story of how embodied subjectivity was narrated in its entangled relation to the world in the era of medicine's unprecedented textual vitality. In that, it offers one approach to the phenomenology of medieval selfhood, or, what it was [End Page 429] like, within the era's mix of discourses, to reflect on both having and being a body" (2). The book traces patterns of causation and embodiment and draws a picture of late medieval textual etiology as a force that can be observed at work in literary writing. It defines etiology as concerned with "projects of explanatory invention" that explore causation in multiple ways. Like late medieval readers, whom the book's author describes as "bricoleurs of etiology" (3), Orlemanski herself gathers up literary writings representing physical ailments to create a collage of late medieval literature and its relation to medical/literary causality. The etiology that Symptomatic Subjects finds most interesting is generic. Following two synthetic chapters that trace a broad history of medieval medicine, the book is composed of six chapters focused on literary works. These chapters develop a narrative about the representation of bodies and generic expression in the period. As this is the heart of the book, I first outline chapters 3 through 8. The discussion of genre in these chapters is underwritten by recent scholarship on the link between narration and medicine. It is rooted, first, in the appearance in medical discourse of satire. Taking up a point from Douglas Gray's analysis of Henryson's "Sum Practysis of Medecyne" linking jargon and satire, Orlemanski produces readings of Henryson and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament that underscore the difficulty of reconciling the linguistic and the material. From satire she turns to exemplary stories, which she sees as functioning like medicine because both involve judgments concerning relationships between the general and the particular. Such adjudication, she observes, was subject to revision and, in some cases, incoherence. This, then, becomes the subject of a section about romance conventions in Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Henryson's Testament of Cresseid. Both texts focus on dying or diseased bodies and can be seen as doing so in relation to reflections on narrative closure. She turns then to the narration of self in Hoccleve's Series and Margery Kempe's Book. The Hoccleve chapter enacts Orlemanski's claims most effectively as it demonstrates that the Series can be seen to wrestle with "the self's inability to master its own materiality and the signifier's incapacity to guarantee its own meaning" (220). Her discussion of Kempe focuses on the Book's representation of involuntary crying, discussed in all its physicality, and movements between first- and third-person narration. The outline above demonstrates the complexity of the book. Because this is the case, I describe two chapters in detail below to provide a sense [End Page...

The Narratable Self Lost in a Cave: Tracing Hints of Humanity in an Instagram Trope

The Narratable Self Lost in a Cave: Tracing Hints of Humanity in an Instagram Trope

Affectivity and the distinction between minimal and narrative self

In the contemporary phenomenological literature it has been argued that it is possible to distinguish between two forms of selfhood: the “minimal” and “narrative” self. This paper discusses a claim which is central to this account, namely that the minimal and narrative self complement each other but are fundamentally distinct dimensions. In particular, I challenge the idea that while the presence of a minimal self is a condition of possibility for the emergence of a narrative self, the dynamics which characterise narrative selfhood do not have a structuring effect on minimal self-experience. I do so by drawing on both classical and contemporary phenomenological literature to show that at least certain forms of affective experience are complex phenomena in which minimal and narrative forms of selfhood are deeply entwined. More specifically, I claim that, due to their evaluative character, intentional and non-intentional affective states convey a pre-reflective experience of constitutive aspects of the narrative self. This enables me to argue that minimal and narrative selfhood are phenomenologically inextricable.