Narratives Of Past Research Articles

Toward Identifying Moderators of Associations Between Presurgery Emotional Distress and Postoperative Pain Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal Studies.

Presurgery emotional distress has had variable associations with outcomes of surgery in past narrative reviews. This meta-analysis was designed to evaluate the overall strengths of relations between presurgical emotional distress and key postsurgical pain outcomes (ie, pain intensity, analgesic use, functional impairment) and to identify moderators that might explain effect size heterogeneity between studies. PubMed, Web of Science, PsychINFO, Google Scholar, and Science Direct databases were searched to identify studies subjected to meta-analysis. Forty-seven studies of 6,207 patients metall 10 inclusion criteria. High presurgery emotional distress levels were associated with significantly more postsurgical pain, analgesic use, and impairment after surgery, with small to medium average effect sizes. Moderator analyses for relations between distress and pain intensity indicated effect sizes were larger in studies that assessed catastrophizing, anxiety, and/or depression than other types of emotional distress as well as those with lower rather than higher quality scores. Associations between presurgery distress and postoperative impairment were moderated by type of surgery. Heterogeneity in these relations was reduced or no longer significant after statistically controlling for moderators. Moderator analyses also supported the role of presurgery emotional distress as a risk factor for, rather than simply a correlate of, elevations in postoperative pain and disability. This meta-analysis indicates presurgery emotional distress has significant associations with postoperative outcomes but specific methodological factors and sample characteristics contribute to effect size variability in the literature. Considering emotional distress within presurgical assessment protocols may aid in identifying vulnerable patients who can benefit from interventions targeting distress reductions.

Self-continuity across time in schizophrenia: An exploration of phenomenological and narrative continuity in the past and future

BackgroundDisorders of the self, such as a reduced sense of personal continuity in time, are a core symptom of schizophrenia, but one that is still poorly understood. In the present study, we investigated two complementary aspects of self-continuity, namely phenomenological and narrative continuity, in 27 patients with schizophrenia, and compared them with 27 control participants. MethodsParticipants were asked to identify important past events and to narrate a story from their life that included these events. They were also asked to imagine important events that might happen in their personal future and to build a narrative of their future life. The vividness of these important life events and the proportion of self-event connections in the narratives were used as a measure of phenomenological and narrative continuity, respectively. ResultsOur study showed patients with schizophrenia experienced less vivid representations of personally significant events (p = .02) for both temporal directions (past and future) (p < .001). In addition, their ability to make explicit connections between personal events and self-attributes in life narratives was also impaired (p = .03), but only in the case of past narratives (p < .001). ConclusionsThese results shed new light on the cognitive mechanisms underlying self-disorders in schizophrenia. The clinical and therapeutic implications of these findings are discussed.

Emerging Dialogic Structures in Education Reform: An analysis of Urban Teachers’ Online Compositions

This paper contextualizes contemporary urban teachers’ online dissent in public discussions of education reform in relation to past educational crisis narratives to interpret recent shifts in the structure of education reform dialogue in the United States. It does so by examining the form and content of compositions in which teachers respond to education reform. The analysis is intended to describe the digitally mediated roles teachers are asserting in a complex public debate over the future of education in the United States. The structure and content of education reform discourse has often cast teachers in static roles, which inhibits their active participation in discussions of educational policy. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s position that language choices serve to stifle and/or reinvigorate dialogue, we examine contributions to online discussions and debate composed ostensibly by urban teachers in response to dominant discourses. The data were analyzed with respect to discursive choices and grouped subsequently as themed arguments and rhetorical moves. We argue that teachers’ strategic responses to education reform challenge stifling truisms that seek to suspend discussion of all other factors besides teacher quality. Teachers’ critical digital compositions thus re-create critical, multi-voiced conversations in place of monologues about school improvement. The online, public compositions point to the dynamic structure of reform discourse that has the potential to benefit those currently faulted for a variety of social problems. Nurturing and even exploiting the dynamic potential of educational reform discourse can create opportunities for teachers, policymakers, and educational researchers to mutually inform one another’s shared interest in educational improvement.

On Being a Homeless Work of Fiction

In this piece the author takes a journey into the meaning of quests through the philosophical terrain of existential phenomenology and authenticity. Unlike quest narratives in literature and popular culture, our life narratives are not yet finished, but ongoing. Comparing the idea of existential homelessness with its undeniable and constant change to that of autoethnographic writing, he examines narrative and memory and how current life events change our understandings of past narratives and our sense of identity. Our life narratives are made up of fragmented thoughts and ideas, the stories others told before we were born—and will tell about us after we are gone.

Thailand. A sarong for Clio: Essays on the intellectual and cultural history of Thailand — inspired by Craig J. Reynolds Edited by Maurizio Peleggi Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2015. Pp. 208. Appendix.

A sarong for Clio: Essays on the intellectual and cultural history of Thailand--inspired by Craig J. Reynolds Edited by MAURIZIO PELEGGI Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2015. Pp. 208. Appendix. This edited volume is a fitting tribute to Craig J. Reynolds, who for over four decades has influenced the field of Thai studies as a scholar, teacher, and mentor. The introduction, penned by volume editor Maurizio Peleggi, offers a brief but revealing assessment of Reynolds's career arc and commentary on his scholarship. Peleggi describes Reynolds as a master of the 'hermeneutical essay' which reinterprets historical facts in an attempt to tease out possible alternate readings of past narratives. In this volume, an impressive assembly of scholars has used a similar approach, isolating variables within Reynolds's own scholarship and re-calculating them to extract different meanings or pursue new directions. One of Reynolds's most important contributions to the field lies in his ability to shed light on the relationship between the Thai intellectual tradition and the hegemonic nature of the state. This thoughtful and provocative collection of essays raises two important questions related to that crucial intersection of ideas. What role has historical writing played in establishing systems that regulate the proper exercise of power in Thai society? And what intellectual strategies have been deployed to challenge the established order? Many contributors focus on the subversive. Reynolds himself has written on the lives of dissidents and intellectual mavericks in order to understand the condition under which they acquired these labels. Several essays in A Sarong for Clio take up this theme, examining how acceptable practices become subversive as cultural and intellectual paradigms shift from traditional to modern. One example is Thongchai Winichakul's essay on the case of Mr Kulap, a discredited Thai historian whose name became synonymous with the practice of 'fabrication'. Reynolds's own work on Mr Kulap argued that he was ostracised for transgressing class boundaries, since he helped break the royal monopoly on both printing technology and the production of historical knowledge. Thongchai, however, recasts the infamous writer as a casualty of the transition from folk writing towards a new historiography based on empiricism. Mr Kulap was guilty of employing a hybrid methodology that blended both western models and the traditional use of legend and chronicle that other intellectual elites had already abandoned. Likewise, James Ockey's biographic analysis of the Thai politician Kru Cham illustrates how premodern strategies for individual empowerment lost their potency in the scientific age. Kru Cham's erratic behaviour cultivated the impression that he was 'mad', which generated enormous publicity and helped him win provincial elections. His constituents interpreted this madness as a form of 'possession' and thus believed it gave him power to challenge ruling authority. Once psychiatry became the acceptable means of explaining madness, however, Kru Cham was diagnosed as an unstable and irrational character, unsuited to political life. A final subversive figure from this volume is the exiled Prince Prisdang, the subject of Tamara Loos's research on the distinction between Buddhist 'life-writing' and modern autobiography. Having fallen from royal grace, the Prince used biography as a means to restore his place in history, rather than to enact a moral display of penitence. This violation of the code of life-writing explains why his work was banned from the acceptable canon of Thai literature. Other scholars demonstrate how royalist power has proved surprisingly nimble as it neutralises potential intellectual threats to its dominance. …

From Event to Node: How Nodal Structures Impact on Teaching and Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences

While Past Narratives have events as their basic units, Future Narratives characteristically operate with nodes. A node is a situation that allows for more than just one continuation. Therefore, by definition, Past Narratives are uni-linear, while Future Narratives are multi-linear. Thus, by operating with nodes, Future Narratives cannot only talk about the future, but they perform aspects of futurity that seem essential: its openness, its contingency, and the fact that behind each present moment there opens up a space of possibilities that has not yet coagulated into actuality. Since Future Narratives can be found in all genres and media and, what is more, bridge the fiction/non-fiction divide, the impact of Future Narratives and their conceptualization is across the board and of greatest importance not only to media studies and teaching, but also to any kind of communicating about the future.

From “former comrades” to “near enemy”: the narrative template of “armed struggle” and conflicting discourses on Violent Dissident Irish Republican activity (VDR)

ABSTRACTThis article critically evaluates how competing discourses on what has been labelled Violent Dissident Republican activity (VDR) can be mapped onto pre-existing narrative templates on “armed struggle” that have featured in internal Irish republican politicking for generations. As such, this article conducts an in-depth dissection of how competing narratives on the utility of VDR, the scale of and support for VDR, and the underlying motivations behind it have drawn neatly from pre-existing scripts adroitly constructed during many of the previous splits within that constituency. In looking beyond the mere rhetorical value of respective discourses, it interrogates the political value in adapting past narratives for present consumption in an increasingly fragmented constituency where the gulf between the pragmatic and the pure has immeasurably widened in recent years. Drawing out narratives of pragmatism and purity, of the “micro-group”, “felon setting” and the “near enemy”, the article establishes how these narratives are vitally important to the parent group as it tries to maintain its dominance while embracing constitutional politics and, equally vital to the breakaway group, as it seeks to justify its very existence in a rapidly changing political context where there is ever-decreasing communal appetite for “armed struggle”.

Self-continuity across time in schizophrenia: An exploration of phenomenological and narrative continuity in the past and future

Disorders of the self, such as the “loss of continuity” of the self in time, are a core symptom of schizophrenia, but one, which is still poorly understood. In the present study, we investigated two complementary aspects of self-continuity, namely phenomenological and narrative continuity, in 27 patients with schizophrenia, and compared them with 27 control participants. Participants were asked to identify 7 important past events and to narrate a story taken from their life that included these events. They were then asked to imagine 3 important events that might happen in their personal future and to build a narrative of their future life. The memory vividness of these important life-events and the proportion of self-event connections in the narratives were used as a measure of phenomenological and narrative continuity, respectively. Our results showed that the difficulty for patients to construct vivid representations of personally significant events was observed in both temporal directions, past and future. Patients’ ability to establish explicit connections between personal events and attributes of self in life narratives was also impaired, but only in the case of past narratives. Our results yield a fresh understanding of the cognitive mechanisms of self-disorders in schizophrenia. The clinical and therapeutic implications of these findings are discussed.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

(Re)writing Identities: Past, Present, and Future Narratives of Young People in Juvenile Detention Facilities

ABSTRACTUsing the published work of incarcerated youth in the United States, this paper explores how the youth creatively constructed their past, present, and future identities as students, sons, love partners, siblings, and juvenile offenders. The paper focuses on how writing transgresses the physical boundaries of confinement, while simultaneously reifying the centrality of incarceration as a life-changing experience; an experience had by tens of thousands of young people in the US year after year. An analysis of written work published in the publications of InsideOut Writers, a non-profit organisation that provides creative writing classes to incarcerated youth in Los Angeles County, CA, indicated that many youth engaged themselves as objects of study. More to the point, they studied themselves in: 1) remembered/reconstructed past interactions and/or contexts; 2) (re)constructed present contexts; and in 3) imagined future contexts and interactions with others, including society as a whole. Relying on the literature on social literacy practises and our sociological understanding of the self, reflexivity, abjection, and stigma, we argue that incarcerated youth use their creativity to reflect on their physical confinement and their lives, (re)inscribe their life narratives, and (re)write their past, present, and future selves. The paper closes with our reflection of our three years as volunteer teachers with InsideOut Writers.

Into the IRIS: a model for analyzing identity dynamics in conflict

ABSTRACTI propose a lens model for understanding how core identities (ethnic, sectarian, racial or national) are affected by past interactions and narratives increasing the chances of the outbreak of violent conflict. The model can be used to show how core identities are polarized during conflict escalation and how they might de-polarize during periods of de-escalation and conflict resolution, leading to potential transformation of core identities in post-conflict situations. Northern Ireland will be used to illustrate the Integrated Relational Identity Structure model, showing how conflicting identities have changed, or not, as a result of history, the conflict and the peace process.

PROTOCOL: Police Training Interventions to improve the democratic policing of protests

PROTOCOL: Police Training Interventions to improve the democratic policing of protests

Grammatical constructions and cross-text generalizations

This paper investigates two tense-based constructions in English and Greek and one complementation construction in Greek, whose import is to effect a deictic shift and allow narration to proceed from the point of view of the narrated events and a participant therein. In addition to the individual formal and discourse-pragmatic properties of the patterns at hand, I focus on properties of the embedding context, showing that these unrelated constructions impose similar formal and interpretational requirements. This, in turn, supports the statement of generalizations at the level of genre, in this case empathetic narration as a special kind of narration that departs from the default past narrative which is deictically anchored to the narrator and the conversational coordinates. While the analysis adopts a bottom-up, language-driven approach to genre, it also refutes its exhaustive equation with linguistic conventions, arguing that a Bakhtinian view of genre, which includes both linguistic and socio-cultural dimensions, is more appropriate for the data at hand.

A Critical Comparative Reading of Nationalism in Pramoedya A. Toer and Ngugi wa Thiong’o

This article tries to explore how the conception, birth, and development of novel can become a tool to shed lights to our understanding of the conception, birth, and development of nationalism. The discussion departs from a powerful finding by Edward Said that prominent exiles he happened to know and befriend with had deliberately chosen to be novelists. According to Said, the choice to write novels was fueled by intense feeling of homelessness, which in turn took shape in dream of an imaginary homeland. Novel as a genre is in perpetual search for epic; and since that epic is elusive, what novel can offer is an imagined form. It is in this shared feeling, the same desire to imagine a perfect home, the constant fabrication of narratives of the epic past, the invention of quasi-sacred texts alongside with the heroes and enemies, the dynamics of including and excluding of people that novel and nationalism inform each other. As reader, we turn to postcolonial Kenyan Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat and Indonesian Toer’s This Earth of Mankind. By commenting on the main characters of these novels we make intellectual exploration into the idea of nationalism. The results are two tentative conclusions regarding the relationship between novel and nationalism, i.e. (1) the pretense of novel to be epic is comparable to the claim of nationalism as the historically overarching set of identity of modern society, and (2) the dynamics of the characters in novel is a metonymy of the dynamics of nationalism bildungsroman.

Placing the enslaved at Oak Alley Plantation: narratives, spatial contexts, and the limits of surrogation

ABSTRACTAs iconic landscapes of the American South and significant heritage tourism destinations, Southern plantation museums have traditionally erased slavery and the enslaved from their narratives of the antebellum past. Recently, some plantation museums, such as Oak Alley Plantation in Louisiana, are commemorating the enslaved within their landscapes and narratives, although often in limited and insufficient ways. In this paper, I draw on theories of symbolic excavation and commemorative surrogation to understand both the difficult memory work necessary to include the history of slavery at plantation museums and the fact that such museums or memorials act as surrogates for the lives of enslaved women and men that have been lost from our social memory. Using photographic documentation, content analysis, and textual analysis, I then examine the Slavery at Oak Alley exhibit to argue that fully assessing the efficacy of such commemorative surrogates requires that they be placed within the spatial narratives of both the plantation museum and the history of slavery more broadly.

Witnessing, Memory, Poetics: H. G. Adler and W. G. Sebald ed. by Helen Finch and Lynn L. Wolff (review)

Reviewed by: Witnessing, Memory, Poetics: H. G. Adler and W. G. Sebald ed. by Helen Finch and Lynn L. Wolff Margarete Landwehr Helen Finch and Lynn L. Wolff, eds., Witnessing, Memory, Poetics: H. G. Adler and W. G. Sebald. Rochester: Camden House, 2014. 300 pp. W. G. Sebald dedicated ten crucial pages of his fictional masterpiece Austerlitz (2001) to H. G. Adler’s foundational study Theresienstadt 1941-1945: Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemein-schaft: Geschichte, Soziologie, Psychologie (1955). This significant source of information on the camp in a climactic scene in Sebald’s work as well as the recent scholarly and popular interest in Adler’s writings provided the impetus for a symposium on both writers’ works as well as this subsequent collection of essays. Despite his literary aspirations, Adler has principally been known for his insightful report on the Theresienstadt “ghetto.” After spending 1942 to 1945 in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, among other Nazi concentration camps, Adler began writing his scholarly and literary testimony on his camp experiences. His Theresienstadt became known as a pioneering documentary work and established Adler as a renowned authority on this camp. He was even called upon to provide expert evidence at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961. In the wake of this alleged new openness to Holocaust testimony, Adler’s testimonial novels Eine Reise and Panorama, along with his study of the deportations Der verwaltete Mensch, were eventually published. If Adler constitutes one of the “first voices” to bear witness to the Holocaust, then Sebald has been regarded as one of the 1968 Generation, whose long prose works mark a new era in the literary engagement with memory and the Holocaust and as a “locus of moral authority.” Sebald bestowed this [End Page 153] authority on Adler’s work, which recently (2008-2013) has seen a renaissance with English translations of The Journey and Panorama, which have been well received and reviewed in prestigious publications. The essays in this volume are divided into four broad topics: Intertexts in Context; Witnessing Trauma and the Poetics of Witnessing; Memory, Memorialization, and the Re-presentation of History; and Literary Legacies and Networks. The essays vary in the scope and depth of their discussion. The first and last sections focus on more specific issues. The former includes studies of Adler’s and Sebald’s different writing styles, such as their use of narrators, and the volumes in Sebald’s Nachlassbibliothek. The latter focuses on the particular relationships and influences between Adler and/or Sebald and Kafk a, Broch, Adorno, and Boell and thus probably would appeal more to those interested primarily in postwar German literature. The essays in sections 2 and 3 focus on broader issues, such as the numerous affinities between these two scholar-writers, including a fascination with institutions of memory (the museum, the archive, the collection), their exploration of the relationship between literature and history, scholarly research and literary portrayals of the Holocaust regarded as an ethical imperative of bearing witness to past atrocities, and the creation of texts that elude traditional genre classification and explore innovative narrative modes of portraying the past. Comparisons of their different writing styles and unique perspectives on the Holocaust shed light on the works of both men. If Adler as a survivor draws upon his personal experiences in his documentary and fictional writings that are dominated by the narrative present, then Se-bald’s works of “postmemory” bear witness secondhand, as they incorporate multiple sources of past narratives. For example, the various ways that Theresienstadt is remembered and rewritten by the two writers traces the ways in which cultural memories of Nazi crimes have developed in the decades after World War II. In particular, Adler’s documentary evidence as a direct witness in Theresienstadt and his high modernist fictional style contrasts with Sebald’s postmodern intertextual citations, melancholy bricolage, and engagement with media (film, photography, material traces) in his texts. As Finch and Wolff note, “In remediating Adler’s Theresienstadt, Sebald’s Austerlitz interrogates the text not only as a historical document of a past atrocity but also as an allegory of cultural memory” (10). In the most illuminating essays, the intertextual relationship that connects Adler to Sebald serves...

Cartographic Constructs: A Case Study of Nantucket Island Oral Histories

The island of Nantucket has, in the last fifty years, undergone great social and environmental changes. Using geographic information systems (GIS) and building on principles of grounded visualization—the visualization of qualitative data to detect trends and patterns—and mixed methods research, we employ a cartographic construct of oral histories to investigate how changes were perceived on the island. We found that respondents concentrated largely on economic factors rather than abstract concepts when articulating change and interpreted historical events, even relatively distant ones, employing a narrative of the island's past that was largely a construction of a small elite of visionaries.

Toward a Post-Appalachian Sense of Place

This article utilizes recent developments in postsouthern theory to explore Appalachian literature and culture. Analyzing novels by Ron Rash, Terry Roberts, and Charles Frazier, I argue that Appalachian literature will likely follow a trajectory similar to the one identified by scholars in southern literature more broadly. Despite the seeming persistence of historicity among leading Appalachian writers, I anticipate that the homogenization of the region will increasingly lead writers either to commodify outdated notions of Appalachian exceptionalism or to rely upon an ironic, parodic relationship with past Appalachian literary narratives.

Tēnā koe Hēmi Kāwana: A Ngāti Maniapoto Half-Caste from Kihikihi Greets Mr James Cowan

This article explores and evaluates, from an iwi/Māori perspective, the presence of James Cowan in the early twentieth-century collection and recording of Ngāti Maniapoto’s tribal knowledge, past narratives and Pākehā encounter history on the “frontier” border around the Pūniu River. This includes the extent to which Cowan empathised, identified with, and participated in the lives of the Māori people he studied, and recognised them as subjects and not objects of their history. The article argues that Cowan, the early oral historian who connected “places, people and memories” and captured Maniapoto voices speaking in their cultural present, has enriched our shared understanding of the tribe’s past and traditions. The author, a Ngāti Maniapoto half-caste from Kihikihi, illustrates Cowan’s contribution by locating his own personal journey of historical curiosity about his Maniapoto-Pākehā identity in the life and works of James Cowan.

디지털 미디어 융합과 영화 내러티브의 인터랙티비티

본 연구는 지금까지의 극장을 중심으로 한 수동적 영화 관람을 벗어나 더 능동적인 참여를 통하여 영화 내러티브에 개입하고자 하는 관객의 욕망이 영화의 내러티브 구축 방식을 어떻게 바꿀 것인가 하는 문제에 대한 철학적 배경을 논의하고자 하는 목적을 갖는다. 빅스크린을 중심으로 한 집단적인 관극 경험이 과거의 영화적 정체성을 규정짓는 것이었다면, 다양한 디지털 미디어 융합이 이루어지고 있는 매체 다변화의 시대에 있어서 점점 극장이 갖는 절대적 가치는 해체되고 있다. 이러한 상황은 책이라는 매체에 대해 롤랑 바르트가 예견했던 저자의 죽음에 비교되는 것으로, 이제 이와 같이 새롭게 등장하는 '영화'들에 대해 논의할 시대이다. 이러한 논의에서 가장 중요한 것은 미래의 영화 내러티브의 변모 양상으로, 특히 3막 구조, 카타르시스를 불러일으키는 구성 등이 과거의 내러티브를 규정짓는 것이었다면, 이제 미래의 영화 내러티브는 관객의 참여를 통해 내러티브에 적극적으로 인터랙션하는 구조로 바뀌게 될 것이다. 본고에서는 특히 게임이 아니라 영화만이 줄 수 있는 수동적 경험성이라는 측면의 가치를 중시하면서 가능한 관객 인터랙션 방식을 고민해보고 지금까지의 인터랙티브 시네마의 시도와 향후의 가능성을 확인해보고자 하였다. This study has a main purpose on discussing the issue how the construction of film narrative will be changed by audience's desire to intervene into film narrative through the active participation, out of watching a film passively in movie theater. Compared with the collective theatergoing experience in big screen was defined as the past cinematic identity, the absolute value of movie theater fragmented increasingly in the era of media diversification facing with digital media convergence. As this situation can be compared with "the author's death" Roland Barthes predicted on the mono-media of the book, thus, we are to take the time to discuss the new emerging 'movies'. The most important thing in this discussion is the aspect of the transformation of narrative in the future screening. Especially, while 3 act structure and configuration evoking a catharsis in film narrative are elements defining aspect of the past narrative, then, the future narrative in film will change to the structure interacting with audience actively. This paper had a discussion how could be possible the aucience interaction in only movie valuing the passive experientiality uniquely in screening over the other media through investigating the attempts of interactive cinema so far and the possibility of future.

Banking on the Nation: How Four Danish Central Bank Governors Used and Reproduced the Logics of National Identity

In this article, I analyse the narratives of four Danish central bank governors from the late nineteenth century until the mid-1990s. By conducting a historical analysis informed by neo-institutional theory, I show how these central bank governors were continuously involved in public debates over the appropriateness and desirability of their decisions and policies. In these debates, interpretations and reproductions of Danish national identity were central to the governors’ claims to legitimacy. I argue that past narratives of the Danish central bank and its governors enabled and framed future legitimacy claims and that the central bank and its governors gradually became embedded in national identity. Thus, the article highlights the historical development of the co-configuring relationship between Danish national identity and the legitimacy of monetary organization.