Personal Experience Narratives Research Articles

Romani Bildungsroman – On the Cultural Trauma of Coming-of-Age as Presented in the Novels - City of Pain and City of Sin by Meti Kamberi

The aim of this paper is to analyze the articulation of cultural trauma of coming-of-age as depicted in the novels City of Pain and City of Sin by the young Romani author Meti Kamberi. The common feature of these two novels is that they both explore the traumatic childhood and coming –of-age experiences through the main protagonist’s point of view, suggesting that they either belong to the genres of autobiography and bildungsroman. Both novels are examined from the ethnic/minority bildungsroman perspective, with a particular focus on the personal experience narrative of coming-of-age of a Romani minority member in post-socialist Serbia as described in either of the two. Through illustrative examples, this paper demonstrates that the literary and artistic creations of minority populations can be a valuable ethnographic source for investigating their self-representations. The pages of these novels represent a space for articulating ethnic as well as racialized traumas, caused by both personal and transgenerational experiences of discrimination, stigmatization, and marginalization of the Romani population in this region. The thematization of life between two worlds, the dichotomy between the community of origin and the mainstream society, is a key characteristic of the Romani bildungsroman.

Urban identity and perception of the city in management discourse

The discourse on the city, its forms, planning and management under uncertainty is undoubtedly the most widespread and relevant in the last ten years. The prospects for the development of the city and its urban community depend rather on the articulation and representation of the content of social demand from society, the population of specific cities, than on external factors. Citizens have a clear vision for the future and present of their city. The city perception of its inhabitants is correlated with the citizens’ ideas about the modern city and appears as a discourse in their judgments, opinions and assessments. Urban discourse is defined as positioning, representation of urban identity of citizens and reflection of the perception of the city identity. The presence of this discourse is found in the citizens’ narratives about the city. The study is based on the personal experience narratives, specifically the informants’ reflections upon their evaluation and perception of their city were analyzed. Narrative analysis, supplemented by sentiment analysis (positive or negative presentation of the material) was chosen as a research tactic, the research method is content analysis. The major purpose of this work is to study the perception of the identity of the city by citizens. The novelty of the work is determined by the design of the study, combining qualitative and quantitative approaches, the method of triangulation according to N. Denzin., as well as the choice of a subjective parameter (perception by citizens of their city) as a guideline for managerial actions in shaping the identity of the city in order to achieve connectivity “city – citizen”. An additional contribution of this paper is the construction of a paired logic of connectivity: “city – citizen” through the correlation between the citizens urban identity indicators and the identity of the city on the basis of empirical data of six cities in the Tyumen region. The study showed that citizens with a high level of urban identity perceive the city through personal participation in its life, through the manifestation of subjectivity.

Maģiskās glābšanas stāsti par svētās Agatas brīnumiem Stirnienes draudzē

In a small north-western Latgale community, Stirniene parish of St. Lawrence, personal experience narratives that highlight folk Christianity have been documented during the late 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. In these narratives, supernatural aid and miraculous salvation in crucial situations are frequently occurring motifs. The cult of saints has a significant role in Latgalian folk Christianity, and these narratives reveal the deep roots of one of the most popular cults of saints – the worship of Saint Agatha in Stirniene parish. Saint Agatha is the patron saint for fire and other disasters. On Saint Agatha’s Day – the 5th of February – bread, water, and salt are consecrated in Catholic churches in Latvia; these items are believed to prevent fire, cure humans and livestock animals, and protect against supernatural evil powers. The coexistence and interlapping of Christian and folk worldviews are presented in the paper, showing the appreciation of the sacramentalia consecrated on this day (bread, water, salt) and exposing the testimonies of miraculous aid through the use of such sacramentalia. Despite the profound political, economic, and cultural changes of the 20th century, and especially of the prohibition of religious practices during the Soviet occupation, it can be concluded that Saint Agatha’s Day traditions persevere both in older and younger generations. The corpus of personal experience narratives collected in Stirniene presents the miraculous salvation stories connected to Saint Agatha’s sacramentalia, thus displaying the continuity of the traditional worldview and values of the informants. The variety of different individual approaches to using Saint Agatha’s bread and water is characterised. The biographical method has been used in the research.

Narratives of stressful and traumatic personal experience disclosed by students with mental health conditions in medical consultations

Abstract This paper advances the field of narratives by focusing on the narratives of personal experience disclosed by students with mental health conditions, in particular depression, anxiety and borderline personality disorder, in medical consultations. I draw on sociolinguistic and discourse-analytic approaches to the analysis of narratives in interaction, viewing language as a tool for constructing social reality, and examine the content, structural properties and functions of the stories (Labov & Waletzky, 1967; De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2011). Engaging in self-disclosure and sharing stories of stressful and traumatic experience in medical consultations allows the students (1) to explain symptoms and interpret causes of their current health problems, (2) manage accountability, and (3) confront and cope with their painful experience and stigma.

Modeling the narrative viewpoint: narrative spaces and the labovian narrative structure

The article addresses the methodological challenge of studying narratives of various genres in their natural discursive environment. The proposed model combines the narrative spaces approach to narrative construction developed by Dancygier and the classic Labov & Waletzky narrative segmentation model. I undertake a modeling experiment targeting four narratives of personal experience, two oral and two written, from news, political, humorous, and oneiric reflective contexts. I accommodate the classic narrative structure model of Abstract, Orientation, Complication, Resolution, Evaluation, and Coda to tag narrative spaces rather than narrative clauses. This revised vision of the narrative structural elements combined with the cognitive narratology concept of narrative spaces aims to address the viewpoint configurations. Namely, I focus on the discussion of the elements of Abstract, Evaluation, and Coda, which position the narrative in its discursive context and essentially constitute the extra-narrative system. These elements allow embedding the narrative in the pragmatic context and account for its tellability. In turn, this discursive positioning depends on the viewpoint configuration of the narrative of personal experience. I regard viewpoint configurations as elements governed by the narrative genre. I argue that the viewpoint compression and decompression processes and narrative embedding strategies are genre-specific. Narratives of different genres demonstrate stronger or weaker extra-narrative system and varied tendencies towards multiple viewpoints and their compression.

'I Had a Dream, Which Was not All a Dream'

The article makes a case for a particular kind of conceptual metaphor, the viewpoint metaphor. The viewpoint metaphor is argued to be a tool employed by narrators in personal experience narratives in order to render their irregular perception mode. The viewpoint metaphor allows mapping on the narrated real experience the perception characteristics of other experiences such as watching a movie or having a dream. The research material consisted of a sample of 50 personal experience narratives (25 in English and 25 in Ukrainian) produced by the participants or witnesses, military and civilian, of hostilities mainly in Ukraine in 2014-2023 and in some other conflicts. It was found that two basic and most prominent viewpoint metaphors in this kind of discourse is EXPERIENCING THE EVENT is DREAMING OF THE EVENT or WATCHING A MOVIE OF THE EVENT. These metaphors are often reinforced by other viewpoint metaphors and they tend to repeatedly occur in the narrative. The function of the viewpoint metaphor is expressing the subjective experientiality, emotional condition and embodied perception mode at the time of the experience narrated. Viewpoint is therefore argued to be a part of the mental space’s construal. Studying the viewpoint metaphor allows to shed light onto the conceptual structure of viewpoint. It was found that the elements mapped from the source experience of watching a movie or having a dream include passive witnessing, reduced agency, hushed perception, unreality of events, timelapse, and slow motion.

Narratives of personal and professional experiences of psychotherapists working with cases of child and adolescent sexual abuse: A qualitative longitudinal study

AbstractBackgroundStudies delving into the personal and professional experiences of psychotherapists working with children and adolescents who have been sexually abused are scarce and mostly cross‐sectional.AimThe present qualitative longitudinal study aimed to describe the narratives that therapists construct about their personal and professional experiences of working with children and/or adolescents who have been victims of sexual aggression during different moments of the psychotherapeutic process.MethodEight psychologists were interviewed and asked about the psychotherapy of 12 cases they were developing. These cases were of children and adolescents who had been sexually abused. Each participant was interviewed at different moments of the cases' psychotherapy (6 months into the process, 12 months into the process and once more at the end of therapy for those who received therapy for longer than 12 months). A total of 34 interviews were conducted and studied through narrative analysis.ResultsThree major themes involving the personal and professional experiences of psychotherapists emerged: regarding the patient and their family; regarding the institutional context; and regarding the personal/professional experience. Also, identified and analysed convergences and divergences that appear within these themes at different points in the participants' interviews are highlighted.DiscussionThe findings suggest that therapists manage to navigate the most complex and distressing aspects of each intervention case in the earlier moments of the psychotherapeutic process and later are likely to have an emotional connection with pleasant or satisfactory elements in their work and are likely to end treatment with an appreciation for the learning experiences they have had working with challenging cases and a sense of amazement at the resources and resilience of the children and adolescents they work with.

Parents’ Narratives on the Online Content Risks among Filipino Children

It is prevalent that the internet has become a part of a child's life. However, this accessibility comes with risks that start at the age of 8. Hence, this Narratology explored the experiences of these Filipino children with online content risks as told by their parents. The deductive method was used to analyze the data using the Personal Experience Narrative (PEN) and the 4Cs: Classifying Online Risks Among Children as frameworks for the story structure. Based on the study's findings, all online content risks are observable, which usually happens at home. Aggressive content risks are common to all and interconnect with other risks. Parental supervision was also emphasized as a critical factor affecting these children's exposure. The findings of this study could be a basis for developing Information, Education, and Communication (IEC) materials and other related future research.

Gender Gap in the Writing Practice and Identity Experienced by Male University Students in South Kalimantan

The gender gap between male and female teenage authors causes considerable difficulty in literature. In this work, I employed qualitative research methods to unearth the intricate narratives of personal experiences masked by quantitative research approaches. I used a semi-structured interview format to talk with the participants about their ideas in greater detail. Five university students aged 17 to 19 took part in the study. According to the findings, the absence of gender equality in the writing development of male adolescents is a contributing factor to the gender gap that exists in male adolescents' writing growth. Male and female writing abilities differ significantly, severely impacting young males' educational and professional objectives. By learning more about the writing experiences of college-bound male teenagers, I could gain insights that could be used to improve educational policy and practice. Therefore, it is essential to understand male adolescents' writing identities and provide them with a voice. Additionally, it is essential to learn more about and comprehend the policies and practices that can assist in closing the gender success gap in writing practice.

The Pragmatics of Fiction: Literature, Stage and Screen Discourse

The Pragmatics of Fiction: Literature, Stage and Screen Discourse

Sociolinguistic prompts in the 21st century: Uniting past approaches and current directions

AbstractAs technology (particularly smartphone and computer technology) has advanced, sociolinguistic methodology has likewise adapted to include remote data collection. Remote methods range from approximating the traditional sociolinguistic interview via synchronous video conferencing to developing new methods for asynchronous self‐recording (Boyd et al., 2015; Leeman et al., 2020). In this paper, we take a close look at the question prompts sent to participants in an asynchronous, remote self‐recording project (“MI Diaries”). We discuss how some of the techniques initially developed for obtaining a range of styles in a traditional in‐person sociolinguistic interview can be fruitfully adapted to a remote context. Of this range of styles, we give particular focus to Narratives of Personal Experience (Labov & Waletzky, 1967), and provide an analysis of how the theme, style, and development of prompts can encourage narratives from participants. We end with a short discussion of prompts that have successfully elicited other speech styles, and prompts that are especially fruitful with child participants.

Thinking about life in COVID-19: An exploratory study on the influence of temporal framing on streams-of-consciousness.

The COVID-19 global pandemic led to major upheavals in daily life. As a result, mental health has been negatively impacted for many, including college students who have faced increased stress, depression, anxiety, and social isolation. How we think about the future and adjust to such changes may be partly mediated by how we situate our experiences in relation to the pandemic. To test this idea, we investigate how temporal framing influences the way participants think about COVID life. In an exploratory study, we investigate the influence of thinking of life before versus during the pandemic on subsequent thoughts about post-pandemic life. Participants wrote about their lives in a stream-of-consciousness style paradigm, and the linguistic features of their thoughts are extracted using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). Initial results suggest principal components of LIWC features can distinguish the two temporal framings just from the content of their post-pandemic-oriented texts alone. We end by discussing theoretical implications for our understanding of personal experience and self-generated narrative. We also discuss other aspects of the present data that may be useful for investigating these thought processes in the future, including document-level features, typing dynamics, and individual difference measures.

Personal Experience Stories at the Crossroad of Archaeology and Folklore

"Archaeological heritage of Turkey has been suffering for ages from severe destruction through the activities of local antiquities looters. The main reasons for this escalating phenomenon among the Turkish population include poverty, enhanced global demand for looted archaeological material in the worldwide market, gaps in laws, folklore, and the addiction to adrenalin experienced by looters. To comprehend the ongoing archaeological destruction caused by looters in Turkey, we need to be willing to investigate their folklore formed in the framework of illicit looting. Even though Turkish law strictly states looting as a crime, Anatolian-Turkish folklore, including oral tradition, does not condemn looters even as deviants. Hence, folklore must be listed as one of the significant excuses why Anatolian archaeological heritage keeps being looted. In recent decades, the destruction of archaeological sites of Anatolia and the loss of cultural heritage have entered a dangerous phase due to local looters having access to technological devices, software, and international connections, as well as folkloric spiritual, ritualistic guidance. My research aims to understand how and under which circumstances looters become looters in the first place. Keywords: Turkey, cultural heritage, folklore, antiquities looters, personal experience narratives. "

Contesting ‘Integration’: Personal-Experience Narratives of Scotland’s Immigrants

This chapter unpacks ‘integration’ by problematizing the term’s nebulous usage in political contexts and by re-examining it through the personal-experience narratives of immigrants in North-East Scotland. By focusing on three emergent narrative themes, the chapter explores how immigrants recount and make sense of their own experiences and encounters with integration. It considers the concept with relation to other immigrants, Scottish society more generally, and British migration policy. Emphasizing the creative narrative expressions of those most affected by wider discussions of integration, the author calls for the use of ethnographic methods to better examine immigration and integration from a groundlevel perspective.

An Analysis Of PBSI Students' Ability and Component Levels Of Narrative Texts

This research was structured with two objectives, the first, to describe the ability to write personal narrative essays of PBSI USD students with Storybird media. Second, describe what components of narrative writing need to be improved in Creative Writing lectures. This research is included in quantitative descriptive research. The population in this study were sixty-nine PBSI USD students who took the Creative Writing course. The source of the data in this study is the result of a narrative essay made by the sixty-nine PBSI USD students who took the Creative Writing course. To determine the level of ability to write narrative descriptions, the components of narrative writing that have not been mastered by students include orientation, complications, evaluation (if any), resolution, code, linguistics of narrative essay, and spelling. This research data collection was carried out using a narrative writing test using the Storybird media. Based on the results of calculations and data analysis, two results were obtained from this study. First, the ability to write narratives of personal experiences of PBSI USD students using Storybird is in the medium category with an average of 5,33, the standard deviation of 1.94, and is in the score interval of 4.36-6.2. Second, there are two narrative components that need to be improved in creative writing training, especially in narrative writing. The two components include the structure of the narrative text and linguistic components at the phonological, morphology, syntax, and spelling levels.

Antibiotic assemblages and their implications for the prevention of antimicrobial resistance

Individual antibiotic use for common infections is a focus for public health efforts seeking to prevent antimicrobial resistance (AMR). These approaches employ a binary opposition of responsible and irresponsible antibiotic use with a focus on the knowledge, behaviours and intentions of the individual. To overcome these unhelpful tendencies and reveal new entry points for AMR prevention, we adopted assemblage theory to analyse personal experience narratives on individual antibiotic use in community settings. Antibiotic use was irregular, situationally diverse and shaped by factors not always under personal control. Individuals were focussed on preventing, moderating and treating infections that threatened their health. Our analysis shows that antibiotic assemblages are both cause and effect of individual efforts to manage infections. We suggest that AMR prevention needs to look beyond the antibiotic as object and the (ir)responsible use binary to engage with the antibiotic effects individuals seek in order to manage infectious diseases. This antibiotic assemblage orientation is likely to be more meaningful for individuals seeking out methods for promoting their health in the face of common infections.

THE RIVER SVĒTUPE IN PLACE NARRATIVES IN VIDZEME

This publication explores the features of identity of the River Svētupe in Vidzeme by analysing the place narratives in relation to the Svētupe as a river and a place name that occurs in bothmicrotoponyms in the Svētupe flow and on its banks. The place narratives of the River Svētupe and its banks are evidence of the local history and daily scenes on the banks of the river at various periods of time. The written oral testimonies reveal the functions of the river and its use by the local inhabitants both historically and at present. In such a context, the River Svētupe is mainly regarded and utilised for daily and household needs (water, collection of herbal teas, extraction of treatment clay, spending leisure time, hay making, etc.). In the opinion of the local people the Svētupe is recognised with the help of the names of the constructions on the river banks (the mill, the bridge, houses) or the names of river bays (usually they are named after the closest landowners or houses) or the peculiarities of the river flow – deeper places or the so-called pits where it is impossible either to fish or to swim. The micro- toponyms of the Svētupe and its banks are entwined with place narratives of personal experience and they are related to the history of the district. The Svētupe is not just a geographical place, a hydrological site; it is a significant part of the space that includes individual and collective experience and refers to both the emotional and the social dimensions.

The film script as oral narrative of personal experience in Aleksandr Rzheshevskii’s oeuvre

ABSTRACT This article is devoted to the study of the film scripts by Aleksandr G. Rzheshevskii (1903–1967). In contrast to the concept of the ‘emotional scenario’, which emphasises the textual structure, this article suggests a reading of his scripts in connection with the problems of an oral narrative of personal experience. Such an approach allows us to consider important creative principles for Rzheshevskii’s work, in particular the link between the film script with biographical experience and orality, both at the level of composition and in the course of the presentation of the text. As compositional markers of oral speech, the article analyses elements of poetic syntax, indefinite pronouns, onomatopoeias, blasphemy and abusive terms, which are the result of storytelling about the events of the Civil War and its consequences.

Narrative and folklore as methodologies for studying emotions, embodiment, and water during the 2014 Elk River chemical spill in West Virginia

ABSTRACT Water is an urgent topic of research in cultural and feminist geographies. Geographers study water through interdisciplinary approaches including critical resource geography, political ecology, and feminist theory. An emerging area of research within cultural and feminist geography considers the affective, emotional qualities of water as part of water’s social and political ramifications. Methodologically, the emotional qualities of water are commonly explored through data on everyday lived phenomena and respondents´ narratives. Although emotions have been studied by feminist geographers for at least two decades, geographers continue to debate the range of approaches and methodologies for studying emotions and suggest that methodological gaps remain. An underdeveloped area of research on the emotional geographies of water acknowledges the contextual and performative aspects of narrative. We explore the performative aspects of narrative using folklore studies and its methodological usage in emotional geography. We connect emotional geography with folklore studies concepts of context and performance. We do this through a case study of the 2014 Elk River chemical spill in West Virginia to explore personal experience narrative as a methodological tool for analyzing emotions to contribute to methodologies of emotional geography.

Suicide Games, Abandoned Houses, and Thirst For Danger: The Youth’s Personal Experience Narratives and the Media’s Moral Panics about Semi-Supernatural Challenges in Estonia

The article looks at the dynamics of the media and real life in relation to the so-called dangerous folklore of teenagers, which includes, for example, contacts with aggressive (semi-)supernatural fear creatures, frightening experiences in abandoned houses and notions of so-called suicide games. The authors analyse the interactions between media reality and youth behaviour and related developments in folklore. It is concluded that the presentation of media information in the form of moral panic mainly based on the concept of young people’s vulnerability, which focuses on extreme risk examples, does not support safer coping, but focuses only on certain types of risk behaviour, often ignoring other concerns and the complexity of problems but also natural self-protecting mechanisms of the youth.