Personal Narratives Research Articles

Preserving the Latvian Language Abroad: Personal Narratives and Institutional Support

Despite the widespread distribution of Latvians globally, the importance of heritage language for cultural connectivity remains underexplored. This study explores the preservation of the Latvian language among diaspora communities, employing linguistic autoethnography, participant observation, and communication analysis to examine the interplay between individual experiences and institutional support in maintaining cultural identity. Drawing from the author’s bilingual Latvian–Lithuanian background and based on the example of a mixed Latvian–Lithuanian family living in Finland, the study highlights the role of the family strategy in using languages at home, the role of grandparents, as well as heritage tourism, music, and arts in strengthening cultural ties. Through linguistic autoethnography, the article captures the essence of personal and collective efforts to sustain the Latvian language. Participant observation in diasporan activities and analysis of communicative practices reveal how diasporan Latvians actively engage in preserving their linguistic heritage. The Latvian Language Agency’s initiatives, including supporting language schools abroad, publishing educational resources, and organizing summer camps, are critically examined. The study advocates for a unified approach that combines personal commitment and structured support, emphasizing the crucial role of both in the vibrancy of the Latvian language abroad.

Healing: Reflections on My Identity as a Black Female Survivor of Childhood Sexual Abuse

ABSTRACT Black feminist survivors and advocates of sexual violence have been integral in recognizing their intersecting identity, using their voice and stories to enlighten society and to reinforce the importance of visibility and inclusion in the sexual violence research, prevention, intervention, and treatment. Despite the historical and present-day sexual violence against the Black female body, this population continues to find ways to heal and overcome the attack on her personhood. This article highlights the identities, unique needs, and considerations of the Black female survivor of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) in relation to the racism, sexism, and overarching oppression that are often added layers for this population. This article also explores the personal narrative of a Black female survivor of CSA, the discovery of self, and an encouragement to speak ones’ truth after victimization, into survival, and beyond. The article concludes with a focus on the significance of the Black female survivors’ reconnection to culture and the ancestors as a tool for healing.

“Constant dropping wears away a stone”: Chinese international women instructors’ duoethnography on advancing racial equity

Faculty of color are constantly experiencing trauma and racial inequities in inherently Eurocentric educational spaces where their histories, knowledge, and experiences are delegitimized and marginalized. Employing critical race feminism (CRF) and White racial identity development model, this article details ways in which two Chinese international women instructors grappled with tensions and trauma and celebrated (small) joys and successes within Predominantly White Institutions (PWI) in the United States. We drew on duoethnography, a dialogic methodological approach grounded in social justice, to make meaning of, (re)construct, and advance racial equity in pedagogy. We examined and analyzed four sources of data: our personal narratives, transcripts of eight Zoom meetings, reflection journals, and informal conversational exchanges. We identified three strategies for navigating dissonance and conflicts: 1) being vulnerable, 2) recognizing shared and differing marginalization or privileges, and 3) building allies intentionally and strategically.

Immersing into the lives of Punjabi women: Personal narratives on alcohol consumption

ABSTRACT Historically, alcohol has been seen as a male-dominated activity, leading to societal expectations for women to avoid excessive drinking due to their role in reproduction. This creates a repressive double standard, controlled through societal norms and family influence. Focusing on Punjabi Sikh women in Malaysia, this study is vital as it uncovers their experiences with alcohol, filling a gap in research on ethnic minority women. Through interviews, it explores diverse interpretations of religious and cultural norms, indicating that many women feel a sense of freedom and exhibit no reservations in their alcohol consumption, challenging conventional expectations.

Who Wants to Become a Role Model? Personal Narratives of Success and Internal Dynamics of Change in Nairobi’s Ghettos

Abstract This article contributes to an understanding of the internal dynamics of change in Nairobi’s ghettos (Kenya). Spaces of relegation for the urban poor, referred to by our interlocutors as “ghettos”, are often portrayed either as objects of international interventionism or as deprived areas neglected by national or metropolitan policies. We argue that social and material change in these spaces can be conceptualised at the interface between personal narratives of change and the structural urban dynamics at play. Using qualitative methods of individual narratives, we examine in particular how individuals identified as successful by those around them, born and raised in Nairobi’s marginalised neighbourhoods, construct their self trajectories as role models to invest themselves as vectors of change within their “ghetto”. Drawing on literature that focuses on the power of personal and collective narratives of social change, we explore how they perform their narrative and transform it into a “narrative capital”. This way, they contribute to the production of a narrative that is partially detached from external developmentalist imperatives, emphasising the importance of intergenerational links as a driving force for change, as well as the links that the ghetto maintains with its immediate urban environment.

Perceptions of Black faculty encounters with racism through a collaborative autoethnographical lens: CRT and moral reasoning perspectives

Foreign-born scholars as allies from non-advantaged minoritized groups have historically provided critical insights about the racism that is directed at Black people in a racially driven U.S. society. The current collaborative autoethnography is based on the intersecting paths of three university faculty, a Black female scholar and two international J-1 scholars, who documented through personal narratives the racism that is directed at Black faculty at PWIs, drawing from critical race and moral reasoning interpretative frameworks. Building on previous research, the narratives shed light on how anti-Black racism persists at PWIs in the form of micro-aggressions and race-based hostility and that humanizing reparation efforts are warranted but may not be sufficient to ensure comprehensive change. Future research must explore the potential impact of group action initiatives among BIPOC and other minoritized faculty groups (national, international) to promote faculty protections in general while challenging anti-Black racism specifically.

Becoming and being a critical language teacher educator: A duoethnography

AbstractLanguage teacher educator (LTE) identity development is an emerging field exploring how LTEs learn to teach and negotiate their identities and how their identity construction processes help teacher candidates learn. The complexity of the issue has prompted researchers to explore their professional journeys and experiences in various contexts from differing perspectives. Still, the field is constantly evolving as LTEs strive to understand the multifaceted nature of the profession and its implications for teacher education. Within this perspective, through a duoethnographic study, in this research the authors aim to explore how they construct, negotiate, and enact their critical LTE identities and agency as two Turkish‐speaking, mid‐career English language teacher educators situated currently in two different higher education institutions in Türkiye. The researchers collected lengthy personal narratives recounting their experiences and thematically analyzed them through iterative coding. Three major themes concerning their meso and micro contexts emerged: their trajectories in becoming LTEs, issues of belonging and marginalization, negotiating their LTE identities, and exercising agency. Their narratives indicate how they followed different trajectories to become teacher educators, were positioned as others in their institutional settings, legitimized their LTE identities in time, and became empowered to practice their aspired identities. Despite being marginalized in different contexts, their narratives show they have consistently created counter‐hegemonic discursive and experiential spaces in their classrooms and institutional contexts as micro‐level policy‐makers enacting their critical LTE identities.

Personal Storytelling and Subjective Narratives of Local Reporters through Private Newsletters

ABSTRACT This study explores the emergence of personal, subjective narratives in private, digital newsletters, focusing on the SIDINL network’s role in transforming citizens into local news reporters in Sub-Saharan Africa. By analysing cases of newsletters in Nigeria and Cameroon, this study investigates how these local reporters can develop a distinctive personal style of reporting, engaging with niche Western audiences in an informal and affective manner. It highlights the significance of personalised storytelling in conveying the nuanced realities of local communities, emphasising the power of subjective voices in enriching the global conventional understanding of social and environmental issues. Through this lens, the study underscores the potential of these carefully monitored digital platforms in facilitating a deeper, interactive connection between local reporters and their small niche audiences, fostering a stronger sense of empowerment through shared narratives and discussions between the local people and the external audience.

Parables for planetary crisis: storytelling and multispecies migration in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

Throughout his oeuvre, Amitav Ghosh deals with storytelling and migration. Exploring legacies of empire and entanglements between the human and non-human world, his writing is driven by an ethical imperative to excavate “forgotten” stories, and, especially in his later texts, to find new forms of storytelling suited to capture pasts, presents, and futures shaped by a growing sense of planetary crisis. Gun Island (2019), a generic mix of personal quest narrative, thriller, romance, and folk tale, depicts a world disrupted by different forms of multispecies migration. Linking the Indian subcontinent, the US, and Europe, it chronicles voluntary and forced journeys of humans and animals between the Global North and South, intertwining refugee and climate crises in the Mediterranean and Bangladesh with the morally charged legend of the gun merchant, a seventeenth-century world traveller. The text brings current and historical links between migration and climate change, which are comparatively rarely treated in literary fiction, into sharp focus. As this essay argues, it highlights specifically the need to broaden the notion of migration literature and its subgenres to include both human and animal migration and the impact of globalization and current realities of climate change. Exploring genre and poetics in Gun Island, this essay reads the novel against the broader aesthetic and cultural-historical arguments made in Ghosh’s The Great Derangement (2016) and The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021). To explore Ghosh’s poetics, which fuse everyday realism with the uncanny, the improbable, and the mythical, this essay also draws on Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose’s notions of “ethography”. It argues that Gun Island, as a multispecies climate migration novel, responds to the author’s call for a rediscovery of storytelling beyond Western-style realism or SF, as a means to capture human and non-human subjectivities and to undo demarcations between rationality and spirituality.

Between Inevitability and Surprise

Using personal trans narrative toward framing a transgender historical method, this essay describes the large-scale historical trends that have led to the present moment in the history of trans people, the way that the Internet provides a place for everyone to act as their own historians, and the potential insights that transgender auto-historiography offers to feminist and gender scholars. This essay is part of a PHR forum on the theme of “Personal Reflections on Feminist Historical Methods,” with additional essays by Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Natalie Marine-Street, and Natalia Mehlman Petrzela. The forum is part of a larger PHR special issue, Feminist Histories.

Meowmy, Pawrents and Menschenwelpen ‘human puppies’: Linguistic practices of Doing Interspecies Families on German Instagram

Looking at cute animal images and videos has become a popular online pastime and animals themselves increasingly appear as actors in social media who have their own accounts and profiles from which they ‘speak’ to and ‘interact’ with us. This development goes hand in hand with a change in human-animal relations in most of Western cultures, where pets – especially cats and dogs – are more and more often seen and treated as family members while the animals we eat are rendered invisible in factory farms that are spatially detached from everyday human life. The familial relationships between humans and their pet companions are constructed by a variety of sociocultural means, one of which is language. By talking about pets as babies and children and oneself as cat or dog moms, the connection between the human and the pet is discursively established as one of kinship and intimacy rather than one of ownership and obedience. Social media have become a prolific space for performing “interspecies families” (Owens, 2015), where self-acclaimed pet parents can interact with each other and build communities of practice in which pet accounts post and engage with each other from an imagined pet perspective. This article uses a quantitative corpus-based approach to study the discursive construction of interspecies families on German-speaking Instagram. By analysing more than 20,000 posts from dog and cat accounts offering first person narratives, the article provides insights into the ways human pet owners speak about themselves and their relations with their pets from an imagined pet perspective. The analysis shows that the caption texts accompanying the posted pictures and videos are highly anthropocentric: at the centre of these short texts stands the – usually female – human pet owner. Using family terminology for both humans and other animals in these posts serves the linguistic construction of interspecies families in which pets and their human companions are held together by love and kinship ties rather than ownership.

The Socialism of Fools

As a personal discussion on the topic of anti-Semitism, this article brings together the common issues that lead to the conceptual complexity of anti-Semitism. The breach of anti-Semitism into public politics and the organized left through the two-axis points of Israel and conspiracy theories are discussed, in particular recent controversies in the Labour Party, attacks on religious centers, and discordant views on what qualifies as anti-Semitism. Weaving together personal narratives, the essay unpacks the difficulty of considering anti-Semitism in the contemporary understanding of oppression, colonialism, and white supremacy. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2024 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.] KEYWORDS: Conspiracy Theory, Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, Palestine, Labour Party, White Nationalism.

Strangers in the North: Critical narratives on the postgraduation career transitions of international doctoral students

AbstractData show higher enrollment of international graduate students compared to undergraduates in the United States in 2022, with the trend expected to continue. Many international doctoral students pursue education in the United States, hoping to seek employment and/or employment‐based permanent immigration after graduation. Through critical personal narratives (CPNs), the authors use their stories to reflect on employment‐seeking experiences during their time as international graduate students. The narratives depict a 20‐year time span of ongoing issues faced by international graduate students. These first‐person accounts authentically recognize the challenges and provide an avenue for institutions to subsequently address the areas of immigration policies, hiring practices, career development, and cultural responsiveness for international doctoral students.

Feminist Theory

Abstract As an overview to this year’s works in feminist theory, this chapter focuses on the use of personal narrative in feminist writing published in 2023. Overall, I contend that five overlapping motivations give way to contemporary feminist autotheory: first, a sustained interest in addressing the structures of feelings or affects that subtend and give shape to everyday life; next, an exhaustion with and suspicion of both empiricism and poststructuralism; still more, an interest in using writing and scholarship to promote healing or practice care; in addition, an insistence on complexity and particularity and the refusal of generalization; and, finally, a reparative turn towards mothers, especially Black and Brown mothers. The review begins by briefly contextualizing the works in relation to autotheory. The remainder is divided into three sections: 1. Affect, the Everyday, and the Black and Brown Maternal, which considers Moon Charania’s Archive of Tongues and Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes; 2. Beyond Positivistic Empiricism, which turns to Carol Ulises Decena’s Circuits of the Sacred and Ed Cohen’s On Learning to Heal; 3. Attending to Pain and Loss, which reflects on Ayu Saraswati’s Scarred and Megan Sweeney’s Mendings. It ends with a brief conclusion considering autotheory in the university classroom.

Paratextual mediation and (re)framed narratives: a case study of Ganxiao liuji

ABSTRACT Translation is not merely a textual transformation but involves paratextual mediation. Linking Genette's notion of paratext to Baker's narrative theory, this paper examines Yang Jiang's Ganxiao liuji, a personal narrative set during the Cultural Revolution but focusing on everyday occurrences, to uncover how three publishing houses mediate paratextual materials (titles, prefaces, blurbs, notes and afterwords, and visual images) in their translations of this book, and what larger narratives are (re)framed and reinforced in this process. It discloses that while the Hong Kong publishing house prioritises the original personal narrative content and style in its paratextual presentation, its American counterparts foreground the political background while overshadowing Yang's personal narrative and reframing it as part of the larger narratives of a repressive, inhumane China with an authoritarian government and suppressed masses. Such mediation responds to and reinforces Western narratives of the problematic, dystopic China, and directs readers to understand it through a skewed angle, thereby perpetuating established stereotypes of this non-Western country. This research further unveils how paratextual mediation resonates with and contributes to the larger narratives circulating beyond the immediate text, guiding receivers into (re)framed narratives which impact their perceptions and behaviour in the society, and ultimately shape the social world.

Exploring Resilience and Post-traumatic Growth Among Bereaved Adults in Kosovo.

The study explores resilience and posttraumatic growth in adults in Kosovo who have experienced grief, using the Resilience Portfolio Model as a guiding framework. Twelve participants shared their experiences through semi-structured interviews, aiming to capture detailed personal narratives and insights into coping with loss. Thematic analysis of the data revealed three main themes: "Reaction to Loss," "Navigating through Loss and Embracing Adaptations," and "Resilience and Posttraumatic Growth." The findings highlight the transformative experiences contributing to personal development and resilience, emphasizing the significant role of cultural dimensions in shaping resilience and posttraumatic growth. The study underscores the importance of considering cultural context in therapeutic approaches to better support individuals in their recovery and growth from experiences of loss.

Rot, White, and Blue: A scholarly personal narrative on the lived experiences of a white, German international graduate student in the United States

AbstractThis scholarly personal narrative offers insight into the everyday lived experience of a white international student from Germany living and studying in the United States. In this narrative, she explores her life between discrimination in the form of anti‐German sentiment and white privilege. The narrative focuses on discrimination from a systemic as well as an interpersonal level and is a first attempt in offering a more stratified and complex insight of the experiences of a white, German international student in the United States.

Afro-Spanish countervisual genealogies of Blackness in Rubén H. Bermúdez’s Y tú, ¿por qué eres negro?

In Y tú, ¿por qué eres negro? Spanish photographer Rubén H. Bermúdez constructs a personal and autobiographical visual narrative of Afro-Spanish Blackness. Utilizing Nicolas Mirzoeff’s notion of the “countervisual” as that which runs counter to notions of visual authority and asserts the “right to look” by marginalized communities, I argue that the text calls attention to how viewers view the images and thus questions notions of visual authority that have determined how Blackness is seen in Spain. Y tú also employs countervisuality by using found images of US and international Black racial icons to show how these stand in for localized struggles of African and Afrodescendants in Spain. Y tú visualizes an Afro-Spanish subjectivity that argues for more inclusive notions of Blackness and the African diaspora as it simultaneously rearticulates normative ideas of Spanish identity. In doing so, the text underscores the power of images to reshape and challenge prevailing perspectives on identity, diaspora, and national and cultural belonging.

The Student Empowerment through Narrative, Storytelling, Engagement, and Identity Framework for Student and Community Empowerment: A Culturally Affirming Pedagogy

For people from communities experiencing poverty and oppression, education, particularly higher education, is a means to ensure upward socioeconomic mobility. The access to and attainment of education are issues of social and economic justice, built upon foundational experiences in primary and secondary settings, and impacted by students’ cultural and socio-political environments. 6. The 2020 murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement, ongoing discourse around immigration, and COVID-19-related hate targeting people of Asian American descent prompted national calls to dismantle social and systemic racism, spurring diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) initiatives, particularly in education. However, these efforts have faced opposition from teachers who have told students that all lives matter, and racism does not exist in many American classrooms Loza. These comments negate students’ experiences, suppress cultural and identity affirmation, and negatively impact student wellness and academic performance. Forged in this polarized environment, two longtime community organizers and educators, an indigenous person living away from her ancestral lands and a multiracial descendant of Japanese Americans interned during WWII, whose identities, experiences, and personal narratives shape the course of their work in and outside of the physical classroom, call on fellow educators to exercise y (2018) component of the archeology of self, a “profound love, a deep, ethical commitment to caring for the communities where one works”, by adopting a framework to encourage this profound love in students, acting not just as a teacher, but as a sensei. The word sensei is commonly understood in reference to a teacher of Japanese martial arts. The honorific sensei, however, in kanji means one who comes before, implying intergenerational connection. Sensei is an umbrella expression used for elders who have attained a level of mastery within their respective crafts—doctors, teachers, politicians, and spiritual leaders may all earn the title of sensei. The sensei preserves funds of knowledge across generations, passing down and building upon knowledge from those who came before. The Student Empowerment through Narrative, Storytelling, Engagement, and Identity (SENSEI) framework provides an asset-based, culturally affirming approach to working with students in and beyond the classroom. The framework builds on tools and perspectives, including Asset-based Community Development (ABCD), the Narrative Theory, Yosso’s cultural community wealth, cultural continuity, thrivance, community organizing tenets, and storytelling SENSEI provides a pedagogy that encourages students to explore, define, and own their identities and experiences and grow funds of knowledge, empowering them to transform their own communities from within. The SENSEI framework begins by redefining a teacher as not simply one who teaches in a classroom but rather one who teaches valuable life lessons that transcend colonial conceptualizations of the teacher. In colonized contexts, teachers function to maintain hegemony and assert dominance over marginalized populations. In the SENSEI framework, teachers are those who disrupt colonial patterns and function to reclaim the strengths and voices of the communities they serve. In the SENSEI framework, students are not relegated to those enrolled in classrooms. As with a sensei, a student exists to counter hegemony by embracing and enacting their cultural wealth Educators must help counter harmful narratives and encourage students to identify the strengths that lie within themselves and their communities. Collective forms of narrative that value identity can ensure the continuity of a community or a people. The stories of students’ histories, traditional practices, and resilience can help disrupt harms, many that have lasted for generations, so they may not just survive, but thrive.

Hearing the voice of a graduate Indian international student in the United States: Why my voice matters

AbstractThis contribution focuses on the experience of an emerging scholar practitioner within higher education who also identifies as an Indian international doctoral student. By using a scholarly personal narrative, the author has described their life experiences and negotiations as a part of their study abroad journey from India to the United States. Using various student development theories to understand international student experiences, the author has critiqued the use of a western lens and discussed the need for scholarship that allows practitioners to view international student experiences from a different perspective. This piece also discusses the emergence of the Indian student population within the United States over the last few years and calls out the need to have more research in areas that focus on their student experiences, the development of student development theories that allows practitioners to better understand Indian students’ experiences and future implications for international higher education within the United States.