Process Of Narrative Construction Research Articles

The Narrative Construction of State (il)Legitimacy in Colombia's Peace Laboratory1,2

How is state legitimacy established in areas where it has long been lacking? While scholars have generally explained the construction of legitimacy as a consequence of state actions and used survey research or experiments to describe local evaluations of the state, in this article I describe the microprocesses that link the two: how communities experience the state, collectively make sense of it, and behave in ways that consent to or challenge state power. Based on 3 years of ethnographic fieldwork in a rural Colombian village experiencing growing state presence after decades of armed group control, I theorize the emergence of state legitimacy or illegitimacy as a process of narrative construction. Locals facing a landmark peace process and a coca substitution program that has destroyed the local economy make sense of the state by constructing narratives about it that spread throughout the community. These narratives combine with material need to influence forms of social action that demonstrate assent to or defiance of state power—behavior that communities also understand through public narratives. Fine‐grained ethnographic description of the narrative construction of legitimacy demonstrates the importance of collective meaning‐making processes to political beliefs and behavior.

The disruptive effect of a mango. Giving a voice to the unexpected in the study of the intercultural

This paper investigates the process of constructing the self and the other in a field-work experience. In analysing some storified excerpts from the author's ethno-graphic notes, the concepts of narratives, small culture formation and the intercul-tural are applied. Narratives and small cultures can be used to rethink the role of the researcher, as they permit focusing on the observation as a process of narrative construction. Additionally, it is based on small cultures involving both the re-searcher and the participants that this process takes shape. The concept of the in-tercultural, as applied to this work, aims to challenge the essentialist, established view of culture in its association with national belonging to focus on the negotia-tion of meanings that construct culture. What the author finds is that in these ne-gotiations, each social actor engages with a set of personal narratives that come into play according to contextual needs and their resonances with other participants.

Relato de la información y construcción de una controversia sobre educación

Mediante el estudio de una controversia sobre educación en dos diarios españoles, analizamos el proceso mediante el que el relato informativo de un asunto polémico contribuye a la construcción de una controversia, al mismo tiempo que esta condiciona la construcción del relato informativo. Se observa como el relato informativo se distingue del de ficción, en especial, por su dependencia de la cotidianidad. El principio y el final del relato, los hechos narrados, la reacción de los sujetos del discurso y de los lectores y coherencia de los hechos, constituyen factores que escapan al control del narrador. Mientras, mantiene el control de aspectos como enmarcado, perspectiva, punto de vista del relato o elección de las voces y estrategias para dar coherencia al relato. Se construyen dos relatos: uno narrado de forma aparentemente objetiva, definible desde el discurso, y otro «inencontrable» en el discurso en el que el medio aparece como actor de la controversia.

Teaching Teachers and Learning from Young Learners

At its best, education is an important training for citizenship, and the content we teach plays an important role in this process. One’s ability to ask questions is often a function of what one knows, but may also be a function of what one does not know. History is an argument about the past. Power relationships—who has the ability to legitimize their own stories, whose stories matter, whose stories are in the spotlight and which ones remain in the shadows—are part of the mix. A major challenge of US history teaching and learning is that our narrative is primarily a celebratory one. While not unique to the United States, efforts to avoid the more troubling aspects of our past too often obscure the contributions of an increasingly large segment of our current student population, our future leaders. All nations have a compelling interest in presenting a narrative that is engaging, that is inspiring. However, one casualty of the process of narrative construction is that troubling or controversial aspects of a nation’s history are often relegated to the dustbin. This can leave many wanting, or lead them to become cynical. We need to engage with our past if we are to meet the challenges of our present. Many of today’s most pressing challenges are directly connected to the past.

Una propuesta de tipo investigativo - interventivo para construir resiliencia

<p style="text-align: justify;">Este artículo continúa con las reflexiones planteadas en la tesis magistral "Procesos de construcción narrativa que organizan experiencias resilientes en familias en situación de desplazamiento, en la interacción institución familia" (articulada a la Maestría de Psicología Clínica y de Familia de la Universidad Santo Tomás), en las que se pretende comprender los procesos de construcción narrativa y el interventivo busca movilizar dichos procesos hacia la emergencia de experiencias resilientes. El texto muestra algunos resultados de la intención interventiva, definiendo la resiliencia desde diversas perspectivas, para luego conectar dichos significados con los procesos de construcción narrativa. Finalmente se proponen ideas acerca de cómo en un escenario conversacional de tipo reflexivo es posible movilizar procesos hacia la construcción de experiencias resilientes.</p><p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Palabras clave: </strong>Escenario conversacional, investigación, intervención, movilización, resiliencia.</p>

The Potential Role of Life-Writing Therapy in Facilitating ‘Recovery’ for Those with Mental Illness

This article addresses the experience of designing and conducting life-writing workshops for a group of clients with severe mental illness; the aim of this pilot study was to begin to determine whether such writing about the self can aid in individual ‘recovery’, as that term is understood by contemporary health professionals. A considerable amount has been written about the potential of creative writing in mental health therapy; the authors of this article provide a brief summary of that literature, then of the concept of ‘recovery’ in a psychology and arts therapy context. There follows a first-hand account by one of the authors of being an arts therapy workshop facilitator in the role of a creative practitioner. This occurred in consultation with, and monitored by, experienced mental health professionals.

Outsider Law in Literature: Construction and Representation in Death and the Maiden

LITERATURE ALLOWS FOR THE RECOUNTING OF NARRATIVES according to broadly-defined and variously-practiced norms such as character consistency, agential movement, and author-hero relations.' In legal settings, claimants, witnesses and lawyers provide evidence, give summaries, or offer background information according to similar norms, but for dearly defined ends: they are trying to (re-)tell coherent narratives in order to arouse sympathy from the adjudicating body. Even judges recall or recount stories in order to legitimize decisions to the parties of the hearing. But the framework within which legal storytelling occurs demands that the parties abide by an additional set of norms elaborated by members of the legal profession over extended periods of time. These norms are codified, so they are most well known to the initiated (members of the legal profession); they also reflect, to varying degrees, the norms of the society within which the law is practiced, which means that they generally favor members of the ruling or dominant classes of society. Despite the growing popularity of law-literature research and studies, the telling of stories in legal and literary settings has received relatively little attention. I have argued2 in the course of studies on refugee hearings, notably with reference to the work of Marc Angenot, Pierre Bourdieu, Mikhail Bakhtin, Erving Goffman and Teun Van Dijk, that one important relation between literature and law from the storytelling perspective is the process of narrative construction. This process has several components, but for the purposes of this paper two facets will be explored. First, there is the transformation of inner experience into narrative through relations with the other, a process Bakhtin describes as trying to find out precisely how to accomplish the task of translating myself from inner language into the language of outward expressedness and of weaving all of myself totally into the unitary and pictorial fabric of life as a human being among other

Beyond the word in psychoanalysis the unspoken dialogue

The practice of psychoanalysis, traditionally, has privileged verbal communication. In relational theory the therapeutic significance of unconscious, semantically unformulated, but nonverbally encoded communications has been recognized. While patients are understood to generate significant nonverbal material for use in the treatment process, similar nonverbal productions from analysts rarely have been acknowledged as useful for treatment. In this paper, I demonstrate a way to recognize and use the nonverbal productions of analysts as well as of analysands within the analytic process. A brief review is offered of contemporary authors who have conceptualized the importance of the nonverbal realm for psychoanalytic treatment. An approach is then described that builds on process conceptualizations derived from the infant research literature. The model, illustrated with two clinical examples, provides a way of conceptualizing “process contours”; on a nonverbal level of exchange between analyst and analysand that becomes the medium for catalyzing the transition from presymbolic interactions to symbolic language. Working on this level, analyst and analysand coconstruct scenes from both the dreaded past and the hoped‐for present/future, which, when reflected on in a joint process of narrative construction, provide a new context for accessing previously dissociated affective experience.