Narrative Practices Research Articles

GUIDELINES FOR COMPUTATIONAL MODELING OF FRIENDSHIP

AbstractHumans participate in an immense variety of relationships with other persons and other entities: human and nonhuman, living and nonliving, tangible and intangible, real and imagined. Participation in relationships is considered a key benchmark of personhood. Some of these relationships, particularly friendships, involve close emotional attachments, and some friendships have been described since antiquity as spiritual in nature. Different types of friendship depend upon factors such as proximity, social formality, physical intimacy, information exchanged, and the costs and benefits of maintaining the relationship. There are time‐extended processes and narrative practices involved in forming and dissolving relationships. A question is raised how androids (hypothetical humanoid robots that people would accept as equals in society) can participate in friendships with humans and other entities. This article explores the space of friendships with the aim of formulating guidelines for a computational model that can make explicit the information processing requirements and step‐by‐step processes involved with participating in the many different types of friendships, including those known as spiritual friendships.

Curative handcrafted textiles: Healing generations

While natural disasters in the past, along with the recent COVID-19 pandemic, have disrupted livelihoods, they have also activated the structuring of handicraft as an age-old remedial practice with curative properties. Further, the need for communicating textile processes, in support of slow fashion, has allowed educational institutions to contextualize this teaching with the help of pedagogical models that define the role of both craft education and craft-based research. As an educator at Pearl Academy, India, what I can observe in the modern world today is that there is always a cross-cultural contact between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ and that, the much-discussed ‘global village’ is no longer a fantasy but a fact, despite numerous paradoxes. This article aims at giving an insight into my perspectives and experiences that shed light on the plight of handicraft in the most hand-skilled country in the world. It also lends a bird’s-eye point of view on the need to break barriers between modern and traditional, between urban and rural, etc., and look at the many avatars of handicraft and techniques being repurposed for modern applications such as luxury fashion, interior design and jewellery. This can result in the creation of works that are not only aesthetically pleasing but are also functional, sustainable and culturally sensitive and can help designers and artists navigate complex ethical issues that resonate with diverse communities. The article takes into consideration handcrafted textile samples developed by three postgraduate fashion design students at Pearl Academy, India, who have developed textile samples as part of their project called ‘Hybrid Textiles’. The samples create an epilogue to the context of this study through an ‘end of life’ narrative and craft practices in India.

The Stories Plants Tell: An Introduction to Vegetal Narrative Cultures

Abstract: Our introduction aims to contest narrative as an anthropocentric proper and delineates current theories, methods, and challenges of conceiving plants as both storytellers and storied matter. Our issue fits into the larger frame of a recent "vegetal turn" within the humanities that has long been used to find plants marginal, mute, or symbolic supplements to human stories. The introduction, therefore, focuses on forms of vegetal creativity and narrativity. It explores vegetal narrative cultures emerging when (1) plants co-author and shape narrative practices, (2) plant stories partake in the creation of multispecies societies, and (3) plant articulations are embedded in narrative contexts.

Critical Narratives Or Crime Stories? The Ethics And Politics Of Narrative Research In Criminology

Abstract Amid growing criminological interest in narrative, there is hope that the mainstreaming of ‘narrative criminology’ will yield a more critical disposition within the discipline. This article contends that critical practice does not simply entail attending to issues of harm, power and resistance or researcher reflexivity, but grappling with the complex ethics and politics of our research practices. Focusing on the field of ‘narrative criminology’, this article explores issues of voyeurism, empathy, listening and bearing witness and poses some questions to guide ethical narrative practice within criminology. It calls for criminologists to consider how we may use narrative more responsibly within our discipline.

Criticism and fiction: An autofiction experience. Serge Doubrovsky and Raymond Federman

The article looks at the origins of the concept of autofiction and compares S. Doubrovsky’s and R. Federman’s theories, emphasising the influence of American criticism on the concept’s development. Although often referred to as a hybrid genre first emerging in France in the 1970s and combining fictional and factual events, ‘autofiction’ at its inception was understood as a special narrative practice of traumatic self-reflection through the concept of fiction. In Doubrovsky’s critical works, fiction emerges not as a product of imagination but as a psychoanalytical practice of entrusting one’s experiences to writing. In parallel with Doubrovsky, another scholar, the French-American novelist of Jewish descent Raymond Federman, challenges the limitations of the traditional autobiography. His manifesto, Surfiction (1973), reflects on the boundaries between reality and fiction and questions the very possibility of an autobiographical experience representation. Along with Doubrovsky, Federman views autobiographical writing as an attempt to render a not-to-be-represented and traumatic experience.

Folding organizational paradoxes: Narrative practices for legitimation amid competing stakeholder demands

In paradoxical situations, organizational actors face various demands that are contradictory and interdependent at the same time. While the current literature focuses on how organizational actors respond to these paradoxical demands, it does so in a depersonalized manner with little attention to the stakeholders behind these demands. Therefore, it fails to explain how organizational actors legitimize their responses to paradox to those stakeholders who bring up the paradoxical demands. Using a narrative sensemaking approach, we study how social entrepreneurs legitimize their efforts to respond to paradoxical stakeholder demands for both delivering and measuring social impact. We find that social entrepreneurs legitimize their responses to this paradoxical situation through a narrative mechanism of folding. Through folding, narrators construct legitimizing accounts by narratively producing temporary alignments with some stakeholder interests, while opposing others. Through the recurring and consistently inconsistent use of the narrative practices of embodying and positioning, narrators produce a legitimizing account that overall portrays their responses to paradox as balanced and non-biased. As our main contribution, we offer a model of folding as a narrative, interest-based mechanism that explains how organizational actors legitimize their efforts to navigate paradoxical situations by portraying themselves as attending to paradoxical demands through a temporary and fluid shift between momentary alignments and oppositions of stakeholder interests.

“That’s all it takes to be trans”: counter-strategies to hetero- and transnormative discourse on YouTube

Abstract The discourse surrounding transgender people has for a long time been influenced by certain narrative practices necessary to authenticate people’s trans status to medical professionals. This conventional narrative (master narrative), based on ideals of hetero- and cisnormativity, has led to stereotypical representations of trans identities. These largely continue to exist today. Nevertheless, counter-discourse to these stereotypical representations is becoming more prominent. Particularly YouTube has become an increasingly popular platform for counter-discursive action. The current case study therefore focusses on two transgender YouTubers who challenge the normative ideals by creating their own counter-discourse. The YouTubers address four major topics of stereotypical representation: the ideal of binary gender, heterosexuality, the wish to transition in order to pass as cisgender, and the belief that transgender people have always identified as the other gender. The two creators recognise the discursively reproduced stereotypes and use a combination of five different strategies to refute them: Inversion, Parody, Complexification, Shift, and Personal Experience. Making use of these strategies, the subjects’ positive discourse aims at presenting a multi-faceted representation of transgender identities.

Managing couples with recurrent miscarriage: A narrative review and practice recommendations.

There is significant variation in practice when managing couples with recurrent miscarriage (RM), with guidelines differing on the definition of RM, recommended investigations, and treatment options. In the absence of evidence-based guidance, and following on from a paper by the authors-FIGO Good Practice Recommendations on the use of progesterone in the management of recurrent first-trimester miscarriage-this narrative review aims to propose a global holistic approach. We present graded recommendations based on best available evidence.

Through the Lens of Grief: Re-reading performance through pregnancy loss

The grief of miscarriage is a disenfranchised form of sorrow (Watson, Jewell and Smith, 2018). Not only is it difficult to grieve an embryo or foetus whose status is culturally contested, the stigma surrounding miscarriage produces a ‘cultural silence' that works to isolate those suffering this form of loss (Layne, 2003; Peel and Cain, 2012). Unlike collective practices of mourning, miscarriage is understood in western culture as a ‘solitary moment of loss' (Watson, Jewell, Smith, 2018: 1). As an ‘untold sorrow', there is a lack of communal rituals and narrative practices, to serve as healing acts of grief work (Westlund, 2019). I draw on Butler to consider how miscarriage is rendered ungrievable by society , through the production of normative ‘exclusionary conceptions’ to argue for the invisibility of experiences of miscarriage as a form of oppression. (Butler, 2004 xiv-xv). The article explicates the grief of early miscarriage through a re-reading of my performance artwork Fluid Flesh (2020). Originally an exploration of the embodied experience of becoming a mother, the work has come to represent the grief of subsequent miscarriages. The fluid, pink, vital, pulsing flesh of the growing bodies of mother and child, now the dripping threads of pregnancy loss. I situate my lived experience in an Irish, postcolonial, post-Catholic context. I examine how pronatalism and concepts of femininity in an Irish context, work render experiences of miscarriage ungrievebale. Re-reading these performance works through the lens of grief, I aim to make visible an occluded lived experience, as well as to find ways to speak, in tangible and material terms, a grief that is silenced and rendered conceptually ambiguous. I aim to open out wider understandings of sadness by writing this specific, gendered and culturally specific experience into the lexicon of grief.

The Digital Bytes Project: Digital Storytelling as a Tool for Challenging Stigma and Making Connections in a Forensic Mental Health Setting.

This article reports on the findings of a study that explores the utility of digital storytelling as a narrative practice and learning tool for social work in an Australian secure forensic mental health hospital. The short digital stories, or Digital Bytes Project, centered on capturing the lived experience, hopes and perspectives of the hospital's service users by giving voice to their experiences through digital technology. The project was collaboratively designed and co-delivered with social work students, hospital staff, and service users. It aimed to not only destigmatize people with lived experiences of mental distress and criminal justice system involvement but also to give staff and students further insights into understanding who they are working with. Through a series of 11 semi-structured, one on one interviews, this research aims to explore social work student and forensic mental health staff experiences and perceptions in relation to the utility and impact of these digital bytes, reflecting on how the prototype bytes may have impacted their learnings, or practice, including how they then interact with service users. This research investigates how these digital bytes could be used further within forensic mental health organisations and contexts. The research findings demonstrate the overall value of digital bytes in challenging different kinds of stigma, shifting power dynamics and staff perspectives; strengthening rapport and understanding through enhancing engagement and sharing power between students, staff, and consumers; as well as providing insight into the utility of digital bytes for learning and making connections between theory and practice. The preliminary findings from this research suggest the need for greater accessibility, integration, and consideration of these digital tools, with their potential to be translated across multiple human service sectors.

Universal Design for Learning as a Pathway for Accessible Narrative Writing Practices for Diverse Adolescents

Equitable learning opportunities are critical for students to meet writing standards. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a scientifically based framework for planning and implementing instruction that supports a broad range of diverse learners. In this article, the UDL framework is briefly described, including its principles and guidelines. Vignettes are shared throughout to illustrate how one teacher applied the UDL framework to plan a narrative writing unit for a diverse group of adolescent learners. Adopting the use of the UDL framework during the instructional planning process ensures that instructional practices are centered on student strengths and offer avenues for accessible and equitable learning experiences for all students. This article closes with digital tools that promote 21st century learning and offer a pathway to accessibility.

Narratives and recovery from negative symptoms in psychosis – a co-constructive study

Recovery is a hot topic in current psychosis literature. However, popular models on recovery, like CHIME-DTAR, fail to address the relationship with factors that might hamper recovery, like experiencing negative symptoms. This study explores how narratives can play a role in recovery from negative symptoms. As a mixed team of researchers, some with lived experience of psychosis, others with a background in clinical psychology or special needs education, we co-constructed an understanding of how narratives played a role in the experiences of Pete and Tanguy. Two major themes stood out: narratives can serve as points of support; and the importance of claiming ownership over your own narrative practice. The authors conclude that recovery can be promoted by creating opportunities for service users to articulate personal narratives and get recognition for these. Our collaborative approach not only highlighted these aspects, but also provided an opportunity for articulating narratives.

OTHR-06. NARRATIVE MEDICINE AND THE PRACTICE OF PEDIATRIC NEURO-ONCOLOGY: GRAPPLING WITH THE UNTHINKABLE

Abstract As pediatric neuro-oncology team members work with patients, they engage in life and death struggles on behalf of children. Among patients who survive, many are left with intellectual decline, psychological difficulties, inability to take on daily life skills, and an overall decrease in health-related quality of life (Castellino et al., 2014). Absorbing the weight of these stories of illness and complex survival leads to risk of burnout and moral distress. This research sought to understand how pediatric neuro-oncology team members at a U.S. hospital interact with, interpret, and make meaning of the illnesses, complex recoveries, and deaths of patients as a result of participating in a series of narrative medicine workshops. In the workshops, team members encountered fictional stories of loss and longing for restoration as they engaged in close reading and discussion of a text. Writing about the text after participating in discussion helped members connect more deeply to their own formative stories. Further, it enlarged their capacity to connect to the stories of fellow team members and the narratives of patients and their families. Those who practice narrative medicine seek “to recognize, absorb, interpret, and be moved to action by the stories of others” (Charon et al., 2017, p. 1). Its methods harness creativity and insight to equip those in healthcare not only to diagnose and treat their patients but to bear witness to what patients undergo (Charon et al., 2017). If team members train themselves to see the beauty, pain, complexity, and ambiguity in a work of art, they may in turn see their patients and one another as works of art. The act of engaging in narrative medicine practice as a healthcare team in and of itself alleviates distress and fosters collaborative relationships among team members as they grapple with unthinkable loss in their work.

Exploring Interactivity in Digital Comics

The digital revolution has reconditioned our media landscape, instigating hybridity in traditional forms and reshaping the nature of storytelling through enhanced interactivity. This paper scrutinizes the transformative interplay of digital technologies and comic books, engendering new media narrative forms such as interactive comics and redefining conventional sequential storytelling. As a reflection of this evolution, comic books, long recognized as sequential art, have broadened their narrative scope by integrating elements of motion, interactivity, and game-like attributes. This research explores four distinct types of digital comics: Meanwhile: An Interactive Comic Book (Zarfhome Software, 2018), Framed (Noodlecake Studios, 2014), Florence (Mountains Studio, 2018), and Our Plague Year (Burton, 2022). By adopting Sheldon’s categories of interactivity and Lebowitz and Klug's interactive story spectrum, we analyze these stories' levels of interactivity and linearity. The findings indicate that the complexity, diversity, and multitude of reader agency do not necessarily render a story interactive in terms of content. While these digital comics vary significantly in design, most still adhere to a traditional linear narrative framework despite the diversity and many interactive elements. Only “Meanwhile: An Interactive Comic Book” deviates from linearity, manifesting non-linear, web-like narrative structures and branching story paths. This analysis unravels the nuanced hybridization of digital media and comic books, illuminating how digital technologies reshape and augment our narrative practices. The digital revolution has not only brought about a new storytelling habitat but also expanded our understanding of co-authorship, thus pushing the boundaries of sequential storytelling in an ever-evolving digital culture. It also highlights the importance of recognizing the differences between interacting with the medium and interacting with the story itself. Consequently, this research contributes to the understanding of the intricate relationship between digital technologies, interactivity, and sequential storytelling, paving the way for further exploration in the field of digital comics.

The Inheritance and Development of Chinese Narrative Medicine Practice to the Philosophical Wisdom of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Starting from the inheritance and promotion of Chinese life philosophy and traditional Chinese medicine wisdom by Chinese narrative medicine practice, this paper discusses the inheritance and echo relationship between the “close textual reading ability” in Chinese narrative medicine practice and the “four diagnoses” in traditional Chinese medicine wisdom, narrative mediation and the “mind-body holistic philosophy” in traditional Chinese medicine, and narrative wisdom and Dao Sheng in Chinese life philosophy. Meanwhile, by analyzing the stories of contemporary doctors’ practice of narrative intelligence, this paper expounds that Chinese narrative medicine is a new model of medical education and clinical practice based on the absorption of Chinese traditional life wisdom and the essence of traditional Chinese medicine culture, and the integration of western narrative medicine concepts. It also advocates Chinese scholars to actively build the discipline of “narrative traditional Chinese medicine,” constantly translate the academic achievements to foreign countries, and create a good narrative ecology of traditional Chinese medicine.

White women in racialised spaces, or Claire Denis’s double vision of ‘Africa’

ABSTRACT This article proposes an examination of the white woman’s positionings within the French postcolonial structures of race and gender in two of Claire Denis’s films: Chocolat (1988) and White Material (2009). Using an intersectional frame of reference which combines postcolonial theory, Third World feminism and geography/spatiality, this article demonstrates that these two films unearth structures of power and inequality that situate the white female of the colony not as subjugated by the patriarchal order, as has been argued, but as an agent of imperialism in herself. This analysis shows that Denis’s films anchor their aesthetic sensibility and narrative discourse within pictorial and narrative practices specific to, or appropriated by, imperialism, such as mapping, landscape painting and cinema. These films reveal a rhetorical and visual inventory of colonial tropes that ineluctably structure Denis’s cinematic Africa as a space which, through racial privilege, the white woman claims as her own.

Fishers’ Cultural Funds of Knowledge and Translanguaging Praxis for the Development of Contextualized Instructional Material: A Narrative Ethnography

The implementation of K to 12 curriculum in coastal villages in the Philippines posed a pressing concern on the dearth of contextualized instructional materials (IM). This study aimed to generate the cultural funds of knowledge and translanguaging praxis of migrant fishers as bases for the development of contextualized IM. Under the lens of narrative ethnography, knowledge, beliefs, and practices of migrant fishers were documented in memory bank charts from six months of immersion in the coastal villages. Translingual narratives of purposively chosen participants were analyzed in the QDA Lite Miner software. Three translingual storybooks and teacher’s guides were developed, validated, evaluated, and pilot tested. It resulted to “very acceptable” for the storybooks and “excellent” rating for the teacher’s guides. The study recommends that school heads, teachers, and parents in the coastal villages may interact beyond the classroom setting and their indigenous knowledge will be used in the development of IM.

Narrative therapy with children: A qualitative interview study with Danish therapists about the application of narrative practices

AbstractPurposeTherapists' insights into practising narrative therapy (NT) with children can elucidate the strengths and challenges associated with this practice.AimThe aim of this study was to investigate how therapists experience the application of NT with children.MethodNine Danish narrative therapists working with children participated in semi‐structured qualitative interviews. The data were analysed using Braun and Clarke's thematic analysis.ResultsThree overall themes were identified; “you have to be crazy about children,” “practised ethics” and “practical challenges.” Two subthemes were generated: “acting is the key” and “the importance of the system surrounding the child.”ConclusionThe narrative therapists experienced NT as applicable for children due to its potential to facilitate a safe place that integrates the child's current stage of development. NT does not serve to “fit” the child but should be perceived as a practised ethic. Therapists accentuated challenges working with NT, specifically related to outsider‐witnessing and staying in a decentred position. The results are discussed regarding their contribution to the evolvement of the narrative therapy profession and to the training and supervision of novice practitioners.

Psychological assistance to the individual in situations of life crises using narrative practices

This article examines the theory and practice of using narrative techniques to provide psychological support to people facing life's obstacles and crises. Researchers are studying the key aspects of the narrative approach, its effectiveness, and ways to combine it with classical methods of psychological assistance. The article aims to discuss an alternative perception of social reality based on the ideas of postmodernism about psychological support and to reveal in more detail the narrative practice as an innovative counseling technique. The research methodology is based on the analysis of narrative practice and its fundamental principles, such as separating the problem from the individual, recognizing the patient as an authority in his life, and concentrating on considering the context of communication, where speech plays a central role. The main conclusions demonstrate the effectiveness of the narrative approach as a tool for psychological support in crises. This technique ensures that each case's characteristics and specifics are considered, contributing to the successful solution of problems and restoring the psychological balance of individuals. A more detailed analysis of narrative methods may contribute to their further integration with traditional approaches and lead to the creation of new models of psychological assistance.

Spatialisation of non-linear narratives through intertextual reading

This paper explores spatial strategies created through a non-linear continuity of narratives, instead of chronological ones. It employs the creation of multiple narrative possibilities by spatialisation mechanism as a new way of reading an intertextual narrative. This research explores different themes of spatial narratives based on the book Penguin Hate Stuff by Greg Stones. The study utilises the mechanism of spatial manipulation using horizontal and vertical axis towards the episodic events portrayed in the book, questioning the original intertextuality of the book's text, and opening up multiple re-interpretations. The explorations of non-linear narratives demonstrate strategies of spatialisation based on the stitched landscape, the opposition of roles, and collective multiverse possibilities. This study expands the current practice of narratives and architecture by re-reading narrative episodic events in a non-linear way, creating open-ended possibilities.