Personal Storytelling Research Articles

Markers of identification in Indigenous academic writing: A case study of genre innovation

AbstractThis study contributes to research into genre innovation and scholarship exploring how Indigenous epistemes are disrupting dominant discourses of the academy. Using a case study approach, we investigated 31 research articles produced by Mäori scholars and published in the journalAlterNativebetween 2006 and 2018. We looked for linguistic features associated with self-positioning and self-identification. We found heightened ambiguous uses of “we”; a prevalence of verbs associated with personal (as opposed to discursive) uses of “I/we”; personal storytelling; and a privileging of Elders’ contributions to the existing state of knowledge. We argue these features reflect and reinforce Indigenous scholars’ social relations with particular communities of practice within and outside of the academy. They are also in keeping with Indigenous knowledge-making practices, protocols, and languages, and signal sites of negotiation and innovation in the research article. We present the implications for rhetorical genre studies and for teaching academic genres.

PERSONAL STORYTELLING IN PROFESSIONALIZED SOCIAL MOVEMENTS*

Professionalized movement organizations today rely on outside expertise in fundraising, recruitment, lobbying, management, and public messaging. We argue that the risks that accompany that development have less to do with experts’ mixed loyalties to the movement than with the tendency of expert discourse to remake political problems into technical ones, thereby obscuring the dilemmatic choices movement groups must make. We focus on expert discourse around personal storytelling, a strategy that has become popular for raising funds, advocating for policy, and building public support. Our interviews with activists and consultants and content analysis of stories they rated as successful point to an expert discourse that emphatically rejects “victim” storytelling. Instead, activists are instructed to tell stories of hope and resilience, avoid referring to the graphic details of abuse, and only hint at their emotional pain. Experts justify these strategies as the best way to avoid exploiting storytellers, and only coincidentally as also appealing to audiences. However, we argue that, rather than superseding the tension between empowering movement participants and persuading those outside the movement, storytelling as currently practiced has reproduced that tension.

Introduction to the Special Issue: Storytelling in the Uncanny Valley

Storytelling, Self, Society, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2021), pp. 1–9. Copyright © 2022 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201 Introduction to the Special Issue Storytelling in the Uncanny Valley Joseph Sobol and Ariel Gratch I n September 2017, the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival was held for the first time at a spectacular new site, along the serpentine footpaths of Ashton Gardens in Lehi, Utah, in the suburbs of Salt Lake City. Now indisputably the largest and most lavishly endowed storytelling festival in the United States, Timpanogos is set apart by having been founded, funded, and steered by a single private patron, the Ashton family, a major philanthropic force in central Utah. The storytelling festival is one of their signature projects. Another is Ashton Gardens at Thanksgiving Point, where a landscape tapestry of fourteen historic gardens has been overlaid and intensively irrigated atop the sandy desert soil of the Wasatch Valley. At Ashton Gardens there is a Grecian garden ranged around a plateau of primly roofless colonnades; a Roman garden complete with miniature aqueduct; a French garden with a Monet water lily motif framing a koi pond; a rose garden in the form of a monastic courtyard; a Secret Garden in the manner of Hodgson Burnett; a Garden of Gethsemane with Galilean flora and a life-sized (but discreetly vacant) timber cross; and so on. There is an amphitheater of sloping lawns that seats five thousand around a stage flanked with Jumbotron screens, and behind it a reproduction waterfall with sandstone cliffs that simulate the geology of southern Utah’s own Bryce Canyon. At the festival during the daytime the waterfall purls away in the distance, but for the evening concerts at the amphitheater the torrent is thoughtfully shut off, leaving an eerie and complex void. 2 n Introduction to the Special Issue Watching the contemporary narrative performance extravaganza play out amid this dense ecology of applied cross-cultural signifiers, all tightly bound within the soft power web of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, one can be forgiven for finding oneself lost in a kind of uncanny valley of storytelling. The uncanny valley is a term of art in robotics, animation, and artificial intelligence; it denotes the concave emotional landscape in which increasingly lifelike simulations of human and natural phenomena begin to shift the viewer’s responses from attraction and delight to unease, anxiety, and dread. Of course, it is easy enough to float through this parkland of artificial Edens with nothing but pleasure at their sumptuous surfaces and ingenuities of design. But at some level the sheer volume of water springing from the desert that this topiary magic show demands to sustain itself creates subsidence beneath the basement of the mind. Once a sinkhole opens, the landscape may never quite recapture its radiant first impressions. Storytelling during the COVID-19 pandemic era of the twenty-first century ’s third decade plunges us still deeper into the uncanny valley. In one swoop the watershed of venues that fed the contemporary storytelling profession was closed off like the cataract in Ashton Gardens’ sandstone canyon, leaving a similarly complex void. Storytellers being the resourceful performing animals that they are, the void began to be filled almost immediately with a hubbub of online voices. The contemporary storytelling movement by now represents a generational succession of movements germinating in distinct cultural domains. The festival -based storytelling movement of the 1970s and 1980s has been analyzed as a phenomenon of secondary orality (Sobol, 113–133, 150–165), a homeostatic post-hippiedom re-grounding reflex on the part of a society adrift in televisual, technologized spaces and cut off from their roots in oral/kinesthetic expression. The personal storytelling movement that exploded in the United States after the millennium expresses a very different phase in what Walter Ong called “the technologization of the Word.” Storytelling platforms like The Moth and other Story Slams were organically conceived as cross-platform events, grounded in live performance but filmed and recorded for curation into syndicated radio shows, audio podcasts, and YouTube channels. All these outlets feed back into the branding echo-system and build audiences for the live shows, becoming key elements of their media phenomenology (Sobol, 6...

Personal Meanings Inspired by the Beauty of Paintings

Abstract For many generations, works of art have been a source for experiencing beauty. They add to the wealth of our culture because they convey universal themes and values. In this study, we treat paintings as a stimulus for personal story-telling. The purpose was to explore the affective quality of personal meanings present in autobiographical narratives. Our findings show that subjective ratings of the beauty of figurative paintings are linked with the quality and theme of personal experiences recalled in response to viewing them, but not related to the length of the story. ‘Beautiful’ pictures elicit descriptions of desirable experiences associated with passive contemplation and satisfied self-enhancement motive. ‘Non-beautiful’ pictures call to mind difficult experiences linked with frustration. The experts formulated longer self-narratives inspired by paintings rated beautiful in comparison to laypersons, and laypersons formulated longer self-narratives inspired by paintings rated not beautiful in comparison to experts. The results are discussed in connection to the nature of the aesthetic experience and specificity of personal maenings.

Respecting, Embracing, and Honoring Cultural Practices through Collective Storytelling

This article discusses a final writing assignment for “Culturally Responsive Service Learning,” a course taught during a four-week experiential education program in rural Fiji. This elective course was situated in an undergraduate teacher preparation program but included students from a wide variety of disciplines and majors. This article discusses the theoretical and cultural framework for the assignment, the pedagogical decisions that led to the final paper, the process of sharing the assignment with the community through a public event, the limitations of using a storytelling framework from another culture, and suggestions for future adaptations. In alignment with the topic, the author uses two different voices to interweave personal storytelling with academic research. The article opens and closes with vignettes that demonstrate how the class arrived at new levels of critical consciousness through engagement with the readings and learning from Indigenous community partners. The body of this article is written in a traditional academic format. Storied vignettes are italicized for clarity.

Prácticas adolescentes de publicación de contenidos en redes sociales

We aim to rethink personal digital storytelling in light of new forms of communication that have emerged on social networks, as well as to analyse the core value of image in all of them. Three specific objectives are proposed: i) to know the habits and practices of young people in relation to the publication of digital (and other) narratives in social networks, ii) to identify profiles and types of young publishers, iii) to characterize the differentiating elements between the types of young publishers. For this purpose, we have designed a questionnaire on young people’s social network posting practices. The sample corresponds to 835 young people between 12 and 22 years old from Ibero-American countries (Spain, Chile and Colombia). Our analysis of the results of the questionnaire shows certain differences according to age, country and gender, along with several significant similarities. The respondents have been classified according to posting frequency and type of posts. Last of all, we make some considerations on how to incorporate the results of the questionnaire in the training methodology of personal digital storytelling.

‘My story is like a magic wand’: a qualitative study of personal storytelling and activism to stop violence against women in Turkey

ABSTRACT Background: Telling personal stories of violence has been central to recent advocacy efforts to prevent violence against women around the world. In this paper, we explore the use of personal storytelling as a form of activism to prevent femicide in Turkey. This study is part of a broader storytelling initiative called SHAER (Storytelling for Health: Acknowledgement, Expression and Recovery) to alleviate the psychological and emotional suffering of women who have experienced gender-based violence in high-prevalence settings. Objectives: We conceptually explore personal stories of violence as a form of both distributed agency and activism. This conceptual framework is used to answer the following research question in the Turkish context: How do women use their personal stories of interpersonal violence for their own benefit (support) and that of others (activism)? Methods: Our study is based on 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews with women who have experienced violence and were purposefully recruited by the ‘We Will End Femicide’ Platform in Istanbul. Interviews were conducted between March and August 2019. We used inductive and deductive thematic analysis to identify instances of personal storytelling at three levels: intrapersonal, relational and collective. Results: Our results show how the use of personal storytelling can provide a means of healing from experiences of violence. However, this process is not linear and is often influenced by the surrounding context including: the listener of the story, their reaction, and what social networks the woman has to support her. In supportive social contexts, personal storytelling can be an effective support for activism against violence: personal stories can provide opportunities for individuals to shape broader discourses about violence against women and the right of women to share their stories. Conclusions: Telling one’s personal story of violence can both support women’s agency and contribute to the collective struggle against violence against women more broadly.

Just a Robot Keeping It Real

One of the surprising outcomes of the social media era of the Internet is its internal contradiction between the endless possibilities for fiction, identity play, performance, and lying, and the profile structure, with its insistence on a single, unified, and quantifiable self. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg insists “you have one identity” while the entire history of Internet culture suggests one, in fact, has many. As a result, the meaning of authenticity becomes a crucial point in determining the future of online life, and in this respect, it represents a contradiction that the world of performance is uniquely familiar with. This project reconsiders virtual performances of authenticity and realness as platform-specific social texts, using performance theory to complicate the idea of univocal self-construction in online life. I present the story of Miquela, a virtual Instagram influencer whose complex creation story and dramatic reveal prompts large and nebulous questions about the nature of authenticity, performance, and self-branding in social-media space. I develop three forms of authenticity that Miquela deploys throughout her career to perform as an influencer and Instagram microcelebrity, and update connections between authenticity, intimacy, and self-image to adapt to late-2010s ways of self-branding and personal storytelling online. Further, I argue these same tools are reflected by corporate brands to further compel audiences to entangle brand identity with their own selves. The tropes of Instagram self-performance are deployed across a spectrum of personal, political, social, and capitalist modes, with authenticity enabling this new height of context collapse.

Das Archiv von JUDr. Vendelín Laca und sein Zeugnis über den Kampf der Mitglieder der Untergrundkirche um vollwertige Eingliederung in die offizielle Kirchenstruktur nach 1989

The present article provides a detailed description of the personal archive of one of the secretly ordained priests of the Underground Church (or Clandestine Church as they prefer to say), namely Vendelín Laca (1932–2015) from the Slovak town of Šurany (close to Nitra). The complex issue of how the secret priests were integrated into the official structures after the fall of the Communist regime is tackled here from a special point of view: the focus is on one concrete group of married priests whose letters, articles, and memories are stored in the archive. In the first and second sections, the paper reports growing difficulties which arose as the official bishops in Slovakia refused to recognize the priestly status of those individuals, whose ordination originated from Bishop Felix Davídek. The church authorities forced these priests to undergo an ordination ‘sub conditione’, but nobody was able to bring up any evidence as to why Davídek’s ordinations should be questioned. Moreover, this option was only open to celibate men. The third and fourth sections describe the protracted conflict which led to the disenchantment and frustration of those married priests who were only admitted to a limited form of service in the Greek-catholic Exarchate (in Czechia) or, worse, completely excluded and charged of schism in Slovakia. The sixth and last section as a moving coda tells of the well-meant efforts of four outstanding priests who tried to engage in pastoral activities on their own. Before that, the fifth section brings witness to mutual misunderstandings and animosities within the Underground Church itself. Thus, the quotations and paraphrases of archival texts through their telling of personal stories shed light on the history of the remarkable phenomenon of the Underground Church with its glory and martyrdom without denying its shades.

“Our Stories Are Powerful”: The Use of Youth Storytelling in Policy Advocacy to Combat the School-to-Prison Pipeline

The use of narratives and storytelling has become an increasingly common strategy in grassroots organizing and advocacy efforts to influence policy change. Drawing on qualitative interviews and observations, Jeffrey Moyer, Mark Warren, and Andrew King present a case study of the successful campaign by Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (VOYCE) to pass SB100, a progressive Illinois law aimed at ending the school-to-prison pipeline. The authors show that personal storytelling, when combined with other approaches, constitutes an effective strategy for youth organizing groups in low-income communities of color to achieve racial equity and educational justice policy goals. In this case, youth leaders involved in VOYCE told legislators their personal stories of the harm done to them and their friends by zero-tolerance school discipline and spoke to the racial inequities they faced. In doing so, they countered previously held narratives of youth of color as troublemakers and violence-prone and created a moral urgency for legislators to act. Youth leaders used storytelling and data to build a larger alliance of supporters, which contributed to the passage of a bill that limited harsh discipline, promoted restorative justice alternatives, and took steps to close racial gaps in suspensions and expulsions.

The Imperative to Narrate: Personal Storytelling and LGBT Norm Translation in China

The Imperative to Narrate: Personal Storytelling and LGBT Norm Translation in China

Editors' Note

Sobol and Senehi Editors’ Note Storytelling, Self, Society, Vol. 16, No. 2 (2020), pp. 149–152. Copyright © 2021 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201 Editors’ Note Joseph Sobol and Jessica Senehi A t the outset of Storytelling, Self, Society, the editors set a course that reflected a certain prevailing understanding of the storytelling field around the turn of the millennium. Storytelling was at its core a live, unmediated transmission of story between designated tellers and sets of listening partners. Articles in the journal would be curated to place this primary act of narrative communication at the hub of a wheel of contemporary mediations and purposes, but unless we could manage, even after heavy squinting, to discern in a piece some chain of begats tracing back to the narrative Adam of orality, we would bar the door. This position was compensatory, perhaps, for revival storytellers’ own persistent sense of dispossession. Because oral storytelling had been silted under by centuries of technological strata, leaving it obscured in a cultural landscape full of shiny new narrative forms, we wanted the journal to display only the clearest and cleanest of our efforts to excavate and polish the lost inheritance. Applied storytelling work, with its artistic aims sublimated to a variety of social or institutional objectives—this would be the journal’s bread and butter, expressing the vernacular vigor of the art in a range of utilitarian settings. But storytelling as a traditional and contemporary performance art was to be set at the head of the feasting table. Even as this disciplinary model was being constructed, the cultural ground was shifting underfoot. In an article for this journal in 2010, one of the coeditors wrote, “Our decades of storytelling revivalism have seen the rise of the personal computer, that summary aggregation of all previous electronic mediating 150 n Editors’ Note functions into one exponentially powerful and pervasive cultural presence” (Sobol). As media prophet Marshall MacLuhan had foretold, this transformation in the technological environment begat an expansion or more properly an explosion of the cultural frame through which storytelling would be practiced and understood. Among the first to formalize the conjunction of storytelling and digital technologies were Dana Atchley and Joe Lambert of the California-based Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS). Atchley was a filmmaker, photographer, graphic artist , performance artist, and new-media savant as well as a storyteller fascinated by the emotional resonances of personal narratives and family artifacts. His experiments with the intersections of live and prerecorded storytelling pieces in digital media frames became a touchstone of a new format, crystallized in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the programs of the CDS. Lambert, who had run a local theater company in San Francisco focused on community oral histories, helped Atchley to transmute his long-form solo pieces into an easily transferable template for creating three- to five-minute “digital stories.” These would be developed in community workshop settings, using inexpensive portable technologies to mix recorded narration, visual montage, and evocative musical soundscapes. The techniques blended the appeal of family scrapbooking, the allure of new media, and emotionally accessible, populist aesthetics. This first iteration of the digital storytelling concept was one of several cultural developments around the turn of the millennium that reframed and complicated the contemporary storytelling movement. Others included the insurgent personal storytelling events embodied in The Moth mainstages and story slams and the spread of popular oral histories on radio, podcast, and social media. A defining thread to these developments is the tightly recursive layering of individual storytellers’ time-stamped voices in fractal webs of digital preservation , replication, and distribution. The 2010 article by Sobol continued: Digital media provide a democratic cultural matrix in ways that its predecessor media could not and never attempted to match. Armed only with cheap digital audio and video recording devices attached to their PCs, an international brotherhood and sisterhood of isolated geek youth can chat, hook up, clown around, make art, and broadcast their self-instructed self-expressions to potential audiences of millions around the globe, completely bypassing the Sobol and Senehi n 151 gatekeepers that have traditionally rationed out the products of prior cultural systems. (p. 75) In the decade since...

THE TRANSFORMATIVE CAPACITY OF COMMEMORATION: COMPARING MNEMONIC ACTIVISM IN PHILADELPHIA, MISSISSIPPI

Much attention has centered on the causes and composition of commemorations, yet research on commemorations' causal consequences remains relatively unexplored. This study examines the relationship between commemorative events and subsequent mnemonic activism through a comparative historical study of two seemingly similar mnemonic projects with divergent outcomes: the twenty-fifth and fortieth anniversary commemorations in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the city notorious as the site of the 1964 “Mississippi Burning” murders. Drawing insights from the social psychological literature on intergroup contact clarifies how members of the 2004 commemoration task force developed a distinct collective identity across significant social divides through personal storytelling, a development that encouraged local mnemonic activism beyond the commemoration itself. More generally, this research suggests that commemorations both emerge out of and catalyze associated memory movements, and that a commemoration's transformative potential lies in its planning process.

Staging the family unfamiliar: the queer intimacies in Ramble-Ations: A One D’Lo Show

ABSTRACTQueer personal narratives that include family storytelling draw attention to normative conventions that produce queer family members’ sexuality as a “stage” through which they pass. Simultaneously, queer personal narratives call on nonnormative discourses to generate queer worldmaking sites of kinship and belonging. In this essay, I look to the ways D’Lo’s Ramble-Ations: A One D’Lo Show uses personal narrative and family storytelling to stage refusals and reconfigurations of familiar splits among race, sexuality, and gender. Using performative writing and critical analysis, I use stages and stagings to argue the family unfamiliar opens queer intimate relations with and through an audience.

Living Through an Early Pregnancy Loss: an Autoethnographic Account

Challenging the norm of silence around miscarriages in Indian society, this paper is my attempt at reflecting, documenting, and sharing the personal experience of living through an early pregnancy loss and subsequent grief. Here, I narrate the story of my “delayed miscarriage” and reflect on the implicit social scripts associated with pregnancy and motherhood in Indian metropolitan context. Additionally, I share the details of my encounters with various healthcare practitioners during the course of my short-lived pregnancy while simultaneously critiquing the healthcare practices adopted for patients of early pregnancy loss at hospitals in metropolitan cities in India. Methodologically, the inquiry adopts an autoethnographic approach wherein the researcher uses personal storytelling, self-reflection, and analysis to illuminate and theorize the cultural experiences and psychosocial meaning-making processes. “Pressures and contradictions of pregnancy scripts,” “silent suffering and discounting of loss,” “mystery of loss and meaning making,” “alienation,” “objectification of the pregnant body,” and “busy business of healthcare” emerged as significant themes for discussion in the autoethnographic account. Through a discussion of these themes, I highlight the ways in which the implicit cultural scripts attached to pregnancy and motherhood take away agency from women. I further argue for the necessity of challenging the prevailing the trend of silent mourning after miscarriages in India to promote mental health and well-being of women. With respect to the healthcare practices in India, I advocate for implementation of an ethically grounded biopsychosocial approach to caring for early pregnancy loss to restore women’s agency. Finally, reaffirming the autoethnographic stance, I discuss the possibility of healing through research and writing in the end.

The first women accounting masters in Italy: between tradition and innovation

ABSTRACTThis study aims to bridge a research gap that concerns the role of female scholars in the field of accounting providing an innovative contribution on a topic that has remained marginal or ‘left out of’ the scientific debate in a non-Anglo-Saxon-setting (Italy). We adopt a historical perspective and focus our attention on Italian women academics from the 1970s to 2000. The research design follows a multidimensional scheme, based on the dimensions of the bodies of knowledge and social practices, used to analyse the scientific productivity, the career progression, and the visibility of women scholars among the governing bodies of Italian academia and the Italian schools of thought. Finally, we consider the personal story-telling of two pioneering female academics. Findings point out the processes and mechanisms which they encountered during their research process and network creation in academia, in order to develop research capital and to gain visibility and reputation. Therefore, the study provides useful insights into the challenges faced by women accounting scholars in progressing in their career, achieving recognition, and participating in academic debates.

Celebrating the Self, Remembering the Body: Desire, Identity, and the Confessional Narrative in Autofictional Verse

Celebrating the Self, Remembering the Body: Desire, Identity, and the Confessional Narrative in Autofictional Verse Michael Skafidas (bio) Literary self-expression is as old as literature. Autobiographical poetry, which until now has been an underrepresented research area, constitutes an underlying influence rooted in antiquity. As this article will demonstrate, autofiction—a neologism of the modern era—existed long before Serge Doubrovsky coined the term in the 1970s. The first-person narrative prose is not disengaged from the confessional subtleties of the lyric “I” that preceded it. Distinct though the standards of the two traditions are, they both rely on the authority of subjective experience in personal storytelling. Indeed, as argued by current scholars, autofiction is an intergeneric practice that is already ancient. How ancient? We can detect early traces of the weakening of the boundary between the self and the outside world in the works of Hesiod and in The Homeric Hymns. After them, Sappho appears as an example of an archaic poet whose intimate lyrical confessions generated an autofictional testimony driven by secret passions. In addition, as an early case of an autofictional poet, Sappho demonstrated in her poetry some of the generic features ascribed today to autofiction in that she tended to be both the narrator and the central character in her poems, used her real name, described “daily life often [End Page 85] inventing or modifying certain facts,” and did so “in search not only for truth and justice but for the self” (Tuck 1). Most significantly, I will juxtapose two foundational modern voices whose private and emotional verses, in harmony with Sappho’s unfettered lyricism, conveyed homoerotic desire as a legitimate autobiographical literary theme. As I see it, Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy, two poets standing on the two opposite ends of the world, the old and the new, east and west, in the crossroads of modernity, authored autofictional testimonies of the self and the body that anticipated the psychoanalytic inflections of the twentieth century and depicted desire as the kernel of existence, the “afflatus of the body,” in Whitman’s terms, that surges and surges into memory. Both poets rose above and beyond the general and the impersonal to remember the experience of the body and by doing so they ended up poeticizing the history of their personalities. Unlike autobiography, autofiction accepts the malleability and evasiveness of memory, as well as its inability to “provide an accurate representation of the past, even if identity is constructed largely based on our mnemonic capacity” (Ferreira-Meyers 213). Yet, as poets know since the days of Homer, memory is the ark of lost time, and literature is the art of reviving and exteriorizing memory that contains both fantasy and history. Long before the term was coined, the personal writing of Whitman and Cavafy prefigured the essence of autofiction as a “border area” (cited in Ferreira-Meyers 206), where recollections, fantasies, illusions, aspirations, cultural imagery rooted in the writer take form and content. Cavafy in particular came of age with the determination of the early twentieth century modernist artist to turn the imprecision of memory into the most trustworthy revelation about the meaning of a life lived amidst the negations of modernity. In Whitman’s and Cavafy’s autofictional poems the poets’ recollections form a narrative of confession. In Foucault’s analysis, the act of confession is described as a disclosure of knowledge “extracted from the body” (59). The confessional tone of Whitman and Cavafy and the emotional reciprocity their poems elicit activate the sensory channels of the reader. If reading, as Proust contemplated, is the “urging force” (49) that unlocks the gates of spaces we could not otherwise enter, the enterprise of reading Whitman and Cavafy entails a process of illumination in which the reader intuits feelings, sensations, and spaces previously unknown or beyond reach. Reading the two poets is a sensual act itself; the reader is drawn into a reverie that often awakens private notions of desire, and thus reading [End Page 86] triggers a response to an iconic language that involves both thoughts and senses. In the last section of this essay I will consider the intimacy between autofictional poetry and twentieth-century visual...

Personal storytelling in aphasia: a single case study of LUNA therapy

Background: There is growing consensus that aphasia treatment should support everyday real-life communication. Intervention that targets narrative discourse may offer the essential bridge from clin...

Personal storytelling in mental health recovery

PurposeCreating more positive individual narratives around illness and identity is at the heart of the mental health care recovery movement. Some recovery services explicitly use personal storytelling as an intervention. The purpose of this paper is to look at individual experiences of a personal storytelling intervention, a recovery college Telling My Story (TMS) course.Design/methodology/approachEight participants who had attended the TMS course offered at a UK recovery college were interviewed. Data were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis.FindingsFive key themes, namely a highly emotional experience, feeling safe to disclose, renewed sense of self, two-way process and a novel opportunity, were emerged.Originality/valueThe findings suggest that storytelling can be a highly meaningful experience and an important part of the individual’s recovery journey. They also begin to identify elements of the storytelling process which might aid recovery, and point to pragmatic setting conditions for storytelling interventions to be helpful. More time could be dedicated to individuals telling their story within UK mental health services, and the authors can use this insight into the experience of personal storytelling to guide any future developments.

Teachers and students with severe learning difficulties working together to co‐construct personal narratives using Storysharing®: the teacher perspective

The telling of personal stories is a feature of everyday life. Young people with learning difficulties may find it difficult to report what has happened to them. A project was set up to investigate the impact of Storysharing® on the co‐construction of personal narratives by staff and students in a special school. The current study investigated the teacher's perspective. The sample was comprised of four special education teachers who had been involved in the implementation of Storysharing®. Semi‐structured interviews were carried out at the end of the intervention period. The data were analysed using thematic analysis. Three organising themes emerged from the data: ‘Enactment Process’; ‘Benefits to Child’; and ‘Curriculum.’ The Storysharing® intervention appeared to be positively associated with perceived changes to the educational practice of the teachers, revealing its potential for developing narrative in the classroom.