Narrative Questions Research Articles

Above chaos, quest, and restitution: narrative experiences of African immigrant youth\u2019s settlement in Canada

BackgroundAfrican Immigrant and refugee youth represent an increasing group of newcomers in Canada. Upon their immigration, youth experience challenges that have the potential to lead to poor health, yet little is known about their settlement journey. Accordingly, this qualitative study examines the settlement journey of African immigrant and refugee youth with a focus on how their experiences were shaped by the social determinants of health.MethodsWe conducted a total of 70 interviews with 52 immigrant and refugee youth (ages 13–29 years) who had arrived in Canada in the preceding six years. Qualitative data was analyzed using Frank’s dialogical narrative analysis approach (Frank AW, Practicing Dialogical Narrative Analysis. In: Varieties of Narrative Analysis, 2016).ResultsYouth experienced different settlement journeys that are described in the three narrative typologies of chaos, quest, and restitution. The chaos narrative of a long road ahead revealed the themes of ‘facing challenges’ and ‘still the outsider.’ The quest narrative of not there yet was represented by the themes of ‘stepping out of your comfort zone’ and ‘being relentless.’ The theme of ‘supportive environments’ depicted the restitution narrative of dreams become a reality. Youth highlighted the impact of social determinants of health in their settlement.ConclusionYouth experienced different settlement journeys that were mired in chaos and challenges. However, youth were more likely to experience restitution when they received social support and found a sense of belonging. In future, policies and programs that seek to improve immigrant and refugee youth’s settlement experiences need to be multifaceted, offer more support and promote a sense of belonging.

Giving Respondents Voice? The Feasibility of Voice Input for Mobile Web Surveys

More and more respondents are completing Web surveys on mobile devices. Some studies have found that responses to open narrative questions are affected by use of mobile devices, especially smartphones. Given the rise of voice input on smartphones in general, it is worth investigating the feasibility of voice input for answering open questions on smartphones. The goal of this research note is to study (1) the extent to which people already use voice input on their mobile devices (for “everyday” life), (2) the extent to which they would be willing to use voice input to answer open questions in Web surveys, and (3) the factors that may affect the willingness to use voice input. Based on data from a survey in Spain in 2016, we found that around half of our sample already uses voice input (at least sometimes) and that also around half of the sample is willing to use it to answer open narrative questions if this was possible. Several variables were found to have a significant association with the willingness to use voice input: the use of voice input in everyday life, the frequency of Internet access through a smartphone, and the perceived difficulty of answering the current survey.

“The Quest Narrative” Reconsidered:

“The Quest Narrative” Reconsidered:

Algebraic Thinking in Solving Linier Program at High School Level: Female Student’s Field Independent Cognitive Style

The aim of this study was to describe algebraic thinking of high school female student’s field independent cognitive style in solving linier program problem by revealing deeply the female students’ responses. Subjects in this study were 7 female students having field independent cognitive style in class 11. The type of this research was descriptive qualitative. The method of data collection used was observation, documentation, and interview. Data analysis technique was by reduction, presentation, and conclusion. The results of this study showed that the female students with field independent cognitive style in solving the linier program problem had the ability to represent algebraic ideas from the narrative question that had been read by manipulating symbols and variables presented in tabular form, creating and building mathematical models in two variables linear inequality system which represented algebraic ideas, and interpreting the solutions as variables obtained from the point of intersection in the solution area to obtain maximum benefit.

The Outlaw-Knight: Law's Violence in The Faerie Queene, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance , and The Dark Knight Rises

The Outlaw-KnightLaw's Violence in The Faerie Queene, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and The Dark Knight Rises Cynthia Nazarian (bio) In Christopher Nolan's 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises, the hero begins as an outlaw, and an outlaw masquerades as a hero. Their names, Wayne and Bane, rhyme; they belong to the same secret martial order; both wear masks and love the same woman. As the plot unfolds these figures move between the same spaces, appropriating each other's weapons and motivations. Although the film embeds them in an allegorical discourse in which one represents justice and the other uncontrolled violence, their differences are often surprisingly minor. Legal and political theorists as varied as Walter Benjamin, Robert Cover, and Giorgio Agamben have asserted the inseparability of law and violence. In the modern state, Benjamin claims, "all violence as a means is either lawmaking or law-preserving" (287). How, then, does the state's violence distinguish itself from others, and how does it come to legitimize its own vision of law as "justice"? The problem is far older than Nolan's film. This essay explores a figure I term the "outlaw-knight," a curious hybrid who reappears from the early days of modern statehood to uncover a fundamental indeterminacy at the heart of state-sanctioned law and violence. The outlaw-knight is a fantasy of political nostalgia, one that reifies the processes and problems of modern state formation by turning to an idealized form of feudalism. This figure marks periods of political change with a backward-looking critique of modern statehood through the figure of the individual aristocratic hero. It appears in the early modern period notably as the Knight of Justice in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1596), written at a pivotal point of nostalgia for a feudal aristocratic past amid the centralization of the sixteenth-century Tudor monarchy. The outlaw-knight persists in modern cultural forms like the [End Page 204] American Western and superhero films, reifying the conflicts between violence and the law in the modern democratic state. A look at Book 5 of Spenser's Faerie Queene, John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises (2012) will illustrate how, in varied historical and political circumstances, the outlaw-knight returns to mediate clashes between rival laws, rival forms of violence, and rival symbolic interpretations, asserting the hybridity and indeterminacy of the state's means for dealing with threats to its sovereignty. As an early modernist, I want to argue for the importance of addressing precursors and histories of both political concepts and aesthetic figurations in modern cultural forms. Parsing their politics without also examining the past that these works call up and strategically idealize or misrepresent provides only a partial view of their artistry and political maneuvering. Although there are other examples of the outlaw-knight, I have chosen these three very different texts because of fundamental similarities in their genre and mode. First, all three of these works politicize nostalgia, idealizing a premodern past in order to criticize their contemporary politics. Furthermore, they romanticize the same past, the European chivalric Middle Ages. Second, these three works rely on fundamental similarities in genre and narrative technique, which they derive from that premodernity. They are nostalgic not only in their themes and figures but, much more intrinsically, at the level of their form. The epic-romance genre of The Faerie Queene, shared by the two films, particularly suits reflection on statehood in transition or under threat. Combining the wandering narratives, amorous escapades, aristocratic subjects, and heroic ascendancies of romance1 with the nation-building, collectivizing concerns of epic, The Faerie Queene's mixed genre is inherently backward looking.2 The heroism of the aristocratic individual is the central drama of all three works considered here, told in the form of quest narratives that deliberately project modern political concerns onto medievalized but equally politically freighted narrative landscapes. Third, all three of these works write epic-romance in the allegorical mode: their narratives follow emblematic dynamics in which characters are clearly referential, figuring larger social and political ideas.3 I propose that Ford's and...

이야기에서 질문 찾기 : 내러티브 접근에 기반한 문학수업

This study aims to explore the possibility of question based instruction based on the narrative approach. To achieve the goal, two studies were conducted. First, the necessity of narrative education and question based instruction is examined from the viewpoint of evolutionary psychology and pedagogy. Second, based on the theoretical basis, I designed the poetry class of high school literature course directly. To do this, used Carol Lauritzen and Michael Jaeger’s narrative curriculum design template. The process of designing is done in the order of 'considering basic goal and achievement goal', 'selecting narrative context', and 'generating inquiry question'.

ANALYSIS OF NARRATIVE MATHEMATICAL QUESTIONS ON TEXTBOOKS BASED ON SOLO TAXONOMY AND MATHEMATICAL POWER

This study aimed to identify the proportion of diversity and suitability of narrative mathematical questions with SOLO taxonomy level and mathematical power ability. The research was conducted through quantitative descriptive. Sources of data in the forms of narrations contained in mathematics textbooks. The research procedure was conducted by making the classification and determining the percentage of the narrations based on the compatibility of SOLO taxonomy and the mathematical power ability. The results showed that, the narrative mathematical questions with uni-structural level are of 7.5%, multi-structural of 33.8%, relational of 46.6% and extended abstract of 12.1 %. In terms of compatibility of the narrative questions were able to measure 23% reasoning aspect, 18% problem solving, 8.3% connection, 28% communication and 22.6% mathematical representation. In general, mathematics textbooks as the object of research should be revised, since they have not yet achieved the ideal alignment between SOLO taxonomy based on grade level and the objective of learning develop mathematical power

Nietzsche Or Aristotle? Reflections on Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue

Nietzsche Or Aristotle? Reflections on Alasdair MacIntyre's <i>After Virtue</i>

Fragmentation, feuilleton, form: Balzac, Baudelaire, Zola

ABSTRACTBeginning with Baudelaire's preface to the Petits poèmes en prose, and spanning writers from early Dumas, Stendhal, Sand and Hugo to Zola, this article asks whether serialized fragmentation was quite the virtue Baudelaire's preface makes it, or more a double-edged commercial necessity. Raising Nodier's and Mérimée's querying of unity, it explores the questions of form, narrative and moral, that Balzac's La Vieille Fille presents, and traces the retreat from ethically (especially sexually) dangerous territory in Balzac's and Delphine de Girardin's contemporary and subsequent serialized texts. Hugo's Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné and Les Misérables are offered as counter-examples of fictions which were not serialized, perhaps because more thematically and formally unified than the feuilleton narratives discussed, and because, unlike them, they ask a more challenging, primarily moral rather than narrative question: not What? or How? but Why? A closing reflection on Zola indicates how journalistic serialization disseminated and made the novel as a popular, increasingly solipsistic genre, yet, in its dependence on money, almost destroyed the form.

Factors Associated with Grade Appeals: A Survey of Psychiatry Clerkship Directors.

In an effort to provide medical students with opportunities for accurate grading, some psychiatry clerkship directors allow for grade appeals. The authors examined the appeals process from the clerkship directors' perspective. A 23-item survey, consisting of multiple choice and narrative questions, was sent to allopathic and osteopathic accredited schools in North America. Questions included information about the medical school, the clerkship director, and the grade appeal processes. StatPlus sorted and analyzed the data, and grade challenge rates were compared between schools. The narrative responses were independently sorted by the authors. Sixty-one responses were received (35% of programs). A grade challenge rate was calculated for each response, using the number of appeals/students per year, allowing for further comparison of grade challenges. Clerkships with an honors/pass/fail grading schema had a higher grade challenge rate (p=0.002) when compared to all other reported grading schemas. Clerkships where the grade appeal could result in a lower grade had a smaller grade challenge rate (p=0.026) as compared to programs where a grade appeal could not result in a lower grade. The authors observed three common pathways for the processing of grade appeals and four common themes among clerkship directors as contributors to grade appeals. A grade appeal is often the final step in the grading process for medical students. By identifying factors that contribute to grade appeals, areas for targeted interventions in the evaluation process are potentially identified. Future study of grade appeals, including from the medical students' perspective, is warranted.

Can the oriental know justice? Can the subaltern tell stories?

In response to the contemporary American philosopher Michael J. Sandel’s tremendous popularity and ongoing engagements with Chinese philosophy, which are often offered as evidence of a deep resonance between his work and contemporary Chinese interests in justice, I argue that his conception of justice as a product of the storyteller’s narrative quest encounters two potential problems when considered from a Chinese perspective. The first is whether “Chinese” justice—which can be viewed substantially as a collective if not individual attempt to overcome subalternity as the Oriental subject—can be achieved through the foreign forms of moral reasoning that are perhaps guilty of consigning Chinese to their status as Orientals in the first place. The second questions whether the Western culture of storytelling, of the heroic subject who conquers the other (so often the Oriental in modern times), is not already a product and producer of injustice, and in its contemporary forms, a fantasy and fetish of capitalist society that is not only incapable of individual justice, but also complicit in injustices towards others. These points are raised in tandem with discussions of ongoing generational shifts in China largely attributable to the rapid expansion of a market economy and the growing normalization of Western-style heroic, justice seeking storyteller, which might in turn legitimize Sandel’s approach to justice. However, from a Marxist perspective, I argue that such developments might be Trojan horses for new forms of subjugation, alienation, and inauthentic being—in short, contra Western Orientalist universalism, the very injustices that China’s modernity project has aimed to overcome and with which it risks assimilation.

Omega Psi Phi Fraternity and the Fight for Civil Rights

The narrative of African Americans' quest for racial equality and social justice in the twentieth century is typically construed in the context of main-line civil rights organizations -- NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, and the like. However, for decades, black fraternal networks helped lay the groundwork for the major civil rights campaigns that culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Much of this history emerged from the efforts of the predecessors to black Greek-letter collegiate organizations -- black secret societies. Black secret societies were created in response to the racialization and racism experienced by blacks in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Blacks were subjected to legal, political, financial, and social exclusion, and this marginalization was institutionalized, which allowed for its perpetuation. As a result, black secret societies formed, not only as an act of self- and race-consciousness, but also to combat these oppressions. Through black secret societies, members entered into a bond of brotherhood and built a community among themselves and around the goals of racial uplift. Whereas black benevolent societies and churches also provided support, a key element that differentiated black secret societies was their organizing body. With an organizational structure that included local, regional, and national bodies, black secret societies provided an infrastructure for long-lasting organizations and impact, along with offering leadership training. This structure also solidified its power, which yielded a strong political voice. In addition to political voice, black secret societies’ power in numbers and solidarity enabled uplift through a multitude of objectives, such as buying and investing in real estate, providing educational opportunities, caring for the most marginalized within their communities, securing home and life insurance, and training for business ownership. Overall, the goal of black secret societies was threefold: first, it provided deep personal ties among members; second, it addressed exclusion both from white fraternal organizations as well as society generally; third, there was a focus on racial uplift. The influence of black secret societies can be seen through Black Greek Letter Organizations’ (“BGLOs”) organizational structure and purpose of providing support to members and the community-at-large.

Diet of the prehistoric population of Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) shows environmental adaptation and resilience.

ObjectivesThe Rapa Nui “ecocide” narrative questions whether the prehistoric population caused an avoidable ecological disaster through rapid deforestation and over‐exploitation of natural resources. The objective of this study was to characterize prehistoric human diets to shed light on human adaptability and land use in an island environment with limited resources.Materials and methodsMaterials for this study included human, faunal, and botanical remains from the archaeological sites Anakena and Ahu Tepeu on Rapa Nui, dating from c. 1400 AD to the historic period, and modern reference material. We used bulk carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses and amino acid compound specific isotope analyses (AA‐CSIA) of collagen isolated from prehistoric human and faunal bone, to assess the use of marine versus terrestrial resources and to investigate the underlying baseline values. Similar isotope analyses of archaeological and modern botanical and marine samples were used to characterize the local environment.ResultsResults of carbon and nitrogen AA‐CSIA independently show that around half the protein in diets from the humans measured came from marine sources; markedly higher than previous estimates. We also observed higher δ15N values in human collagen than could be expected from the local environment.DiscussionOur results suggest highly elevated δ15N values could only have come from consumption of crops grown in substantially manipulated soils. These findings strongly suggest that the prehistoric population adapted and exhibited astute environmental awareness in a harsh environment with nutrient poor soils. Our results also have implications for evaluating marine reservoir corrections of radiocarbon dates.

Hunting for Nature’s Treasures or Learning from Nature?: The Narrative Ambivalence of the Ecotechnological Turn

Scientists need narrative structures, metaphors, and images to explain and legitimize research practices that are usually described in abstract and technical terms. Yet, sometimes they do not take proper account of the complexity and multilayered character of their narrative self-presentations. This also applies to the narratives of ecotechnology explored in this article: the treasure quest narrative used in the field of metagenomics, and the tutorial narrative proposed by the learning-from-nature movement biomimicry. Researchers from both fields tend to underestimate the general public’s understanding of the inherent ambivalence of the narratives suggested by them; the treasure quest and tutorial narratives build upon larger master narratives that can be found throughout our culture, for instance, in literature, art, and film. We will show how these genres reveal the moral ambivalence of both narratives, using two well-known movies as illustrations: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Disney’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1940).

Research Methods for Studying Narrative Identity

This article provides a primer for researchers seeking an introduction to quantitative narrative research methods. It represents a consensus document of most common practices used by the coauthors. Key elements of conducting narrative research (e.g., asking narrative questions, designing narrative prompts, collecting narratives, coding narratives) are discussed along with limitations to this approach and future directions.

An Unheard, Inhuman Music: Narrative Voice and the Question of the Animal in Kafka’s “Josephine, the Singer or the Mouse Folk”

In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida wonders whether it would be possible to think of the discourse of the animal in musical terms, and if so, whether one could change the key, or the tone of the music, by inserting a “flat”—a “blue note” in other words. The task would be to render audible “an unheard language or music” that would be “somewhat inhuman” but a language nonetheless. This essay pursues this intriguing proposition by means of a reading Kafka’s “Josephine, the Singer or the Mouse Folk,” paying careful attention to the controversy regarding the status of Josephine’s vocalizations, which, moreover, is mirrored in the scientific discourse surrounding the ultrasonic songs of mice. What is at stake in rendering this inhuman music audible? And furthermore, how might we relate this debate to questions of narrative and above all to the concept of narrative “voice”? I explore these and related questions via a series of theoretical waypoints, including Paul Sheehan, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy, with a view to establishing some of the critical parameters of an “animal narratology,” and of zoopoetics more generally.

Ulka Anjaria (ed.), A History of the Indian English Novel

LITERARY histories conventionally track a linear graph of works and influence from past to present that is often seamless and always free-standing. Arguably, such a methodology is suited to comprehend bodies of literatures produced by largely monolingual cultures, but it is obviously inadequate when literatures from more polyglot communities such as India are in question. Nonetheless, Ulka Anjaria claims, literary historians of the Indian novel in English have invariably presented the corpus as a concatenation of three broad stages that detail the ‘emergence [of the Indian novel in English], its “realist” phase, and its “modernist” one’ (1). This, she says, is a reductive narrative and A History of the Indian Novel in English is an attempt ‘to complicate, enrich, and at times challenge’ (1) it. Anjaria lists four substantive ways in which her edited volume inflects disciplinary practices. First, it focuses on the knotted network of continuities, transformations, and differences ‘between and within’ the trifurcated eras carved out by conventional literary histories of the Indian novel in English. Resisting the tendency to read texts merely as political tracts or as socio-historical shorthand, A History also attends to ‘literary form—to questions of genre, narrative, and literary aesthetics …’ (2). Premised on the assumption that ‘modernism is not always surpassed by postmodernism’ (2), it insists, furthermore, that ‘the contemporary novel … is not necessarily a continuation of, or development on the Rushdie generation’ (2). Finally, it ‘demonstrates’ that ‘the story of the Anglophone novel’ cannot be told in isolation from ‘the rich history of the Indian novel—and … Indian literature, more generally—in other languages’ (2).

Qualitative Analysis of Student Perceptions Comparing Team-based Learning and Traditional Lecture in a Pharmacotherapeutics Course

Objective. To qualitatively compare students' attitudes and perceptions regarding team-based learning (TBL) and lecture. Design. Students were exposed to TBL and lecture in an elective pharmacotherapeutics course in a randomized, prospective, cross-over design. After completing the course, students provided their attitudes and perceptions through a written self-reflection and narrative questions on the end-of-course evaluation. Student responses were reviewed using a grounded theory coding method. Assessment. Students' responses yielded five major themes: impact of TBL on learning, perceptions about TBL learning methods, changes in approaches to learning, building skills for professional practice, and enduring challenges. Overall, students report TBL enhances their learning of course content (knowledge and application), teamwork skills, and lifelong learning skills. Conclusion. Students' attitudes and perceptions support TBL as a viable pedagogy for teaching pharmacotherapeutics.

Intimate Antagonisms: Re-Imagining the Scene of Resistance in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora

I introduce the concept of “intimate antagonisms” to examine literary representations of intraracial conflict. The radical unity of Black politics exacerbates the painful injuries inflicted by intraracial abuses in the microsocial sphere. At the same time, however, the radical disunity enunciated in critiques of intracommunal rejection and repudiation serve as key sites for redefining racial resistance and augmenting understanding of racial justice for the entire group by calling attention to the ways that intraracial acts of aggression and abandonment reproduce rather than resist the injustices of racism. I explore these questions in Gayl Jones’s neoslave narrative Corregidora. Emboldened by Civil Rights and Black Power struggles, the neoslave narrative questions the relationships between literacy and liberation and between liberation and freedom. Addressing intimate conflict in Black life is central to the meaning of resistance and struggle in these narratives. Because the exercise of racism positions Black people as the witnesses and symbols of each other’s oppression, I demonstrate how the depictions of “intimate antagonisms” create the opportunity to examine how intraracial conflicts impact Black political consciousness. I argue that depictions of intra-group relations represent critical sites where the realities of racist subordination are negotiated, arbitrated, inculcated, and resisted.

Missing life stories. The narratives of palliative patients, parents and physicians in paediatric oncology.

Illness narratives have become very popular. The stories of children, however, are rarely ever studied. This paper aims to provide insight into how children, parents and physicians make sense of progressive childhood cancer. It also explores how this meaning-giving process interacts with cultural dominant stories on cancer and dying. The presented data come from 16 open-ended face-to-face interviews with palliative paediatric patients, their parents and physicians. The interviews were carried out in eight paediatric oncology centres in Switzerland. Data analysis followed Arthur Frank's dialogical narrative analysis. Quest narratives were relatively rare compared to both chaos and restitution stories. All participants welcomed chaos stories as a liminal haven between quest and restitution. The possibility that the child could die was either ignored or briefly contemplated, but then immediately pushed away. Except for one patient, children never directly addressed the topic of death. The way in which death was presented raises important questions about how the social discourse on dying is framed in terms of choice, autonomy and individuality. This discourse not only determines the way in which children and adults relate to the minor's death, it also constitutes an obstacle to children's participation in decision-making.