Narrative Scripts Research Articles

Reimaging ‘the Self’ in Criminology: Transcendence, Unconscious States and the Limits of Narrative Criminology

Notions of ‘the self’ in criminology are rarely explored or defined, which is surprising given how pervasively the term is used. According to narrative criminology, the self is generated and moulded by the stories we tell; our identity emerges through narrative scripts and these stories motivate future action. But this understanding of selfhood is quite narrow. This article attempts to widen it by separating selfhood into three categories: ‘the reflexive self’ (the person we think we are); ‘the unconscious self’ (things we do not know that shape us); and ‘the experiencing self’ (the in-the-moment, living and breathing feeling of being alive). The article begins with a critical engagement with the field of narrative criminology which tends to address ‘the reflexive self’ somewhat in isolation. Then a number of findings in criminology, psychology and theology are presented which reveal alternative notions of selfhood. This includes engaging with theological accounts that can be described as transcendent or transpersonal. Second, psychoanalytic research notes how our behaviour is often motivated by unconscious processes that are hard to reconcile with traditional notions of selfhood. There is a call to bring these different ‘selves’ into dialogue and to draw cleaner distinctions between them. Increasing our understanding of selfhood helps us to think more clearly about key criminological debates, such as the causal mechanisms undergirding adaptation and desistance from crime.

Healing Despondency with Biblical Narrative in John Chrysostom’s Letters to Olympias

This article demonstrates how Chrysostom’s retelling of certain biblical narratives works to heal the powerful emotion of despondency (ἀθυμία) in the Letters to Olympias. Chrysostom brings together a number of biblical narratives to form a narrative deep structure which is reflective of God’s characteristic way of intervening in the suffering of the saints: namely, God allows the saint’s suffering to reach fever pitch before immediately and radically reversing the fortunes of the saint, so demonstrating his own wisdom and power. Through repeated recitation of the scriptural narratives that form this deep structure (those of Joseph, Job, the Three Confessors, and Lazarus and the Rich Man, especially)—and through Chrysostom’s re-narrations of the same—this narrative structure and associated judgments are appropriated into Olympias’s life, such that her despondency is healed. The distinctive contribution of this article is the relationship elucidated between scriptural narrative and Chrysostom’s psychagogical project.

Birth Narratives, Babies, and the Catholic Moral Imagination: Informing Influences on the Pope's Address.

This commentary considers two informing influences on Pope Francis's support of perinatal hospice care for families facing diagnoses of serious fetal anomalies. Reflecting on the morally formative scriptural narrative of Mary's pregnancy and Jesus's birth and drawing upon an often-repeated idea of Pope Francis's papacy that "time is greater than space," this commentary suggests that Francis's perspective is deeply shaped by an understanding of life as a gift given by God, destined to return to God, and shaped by the invitation to participate in the fullness of our nature through acts of loving accompaniment in the face of grave suffering and loss.

Well-trodden highways and roads less traveled: Entrepreneurial-oriented behavior and identity construction in international entrepreneurship narratives

We investigated the sense-making and contextual identity constructions of founder-CEOs of early and rapidly internationalized new ventures, seeking to gain new insights into individual-level international entrepreneurship and international entrepreneurial behavior. Via a constructivist study of 19 founder-CEOs’ life narratives, we explored how the formation of mental constructions—the narrative scripts—of the “self” as an actor derived from the founders’ episodic autobiographical memories, and formed the basis for their international entrepreneurial behavior. We arrived at five scripts of international entrepreneurial behavior, i.e., a Pioneer, Native, Diplomat, Gambler, and an Eclectic. Our findings show (a) how meaning-loaded narratives emerge from the individual-level sense-making of temporal and contextual experiences and (b) how narratives feed into identity construction. They also show that individuals within IE have very different background scripts in the progression to where they are now.

Self-defining Memories in Normal Aging.

Background: Self-defining memories refer to events that are vivid, effectively intense, and include enduring concerns about oneself.Objective: We investigated the relationship between the production of these memories in normal aging and the ability to integrate new information into existing knowledge in memory (i.e., updating).Method: Older participants were asked to perform an updating task as well as to retrieve autobiographical memories that were later analyzed for their self-defining relevance.Results: Analyses showed significant positive correlations between updating and the production of self-defining memories.Conclusion: Updating our life story is an important psychological process,which enables us to refine and enrich our life story with new experiences, roles and/or challenges, and this ability seems to be related to the capacity to produce memories that draw on the pursuit of long-term goals, meaning making, emotional regulation, and/or activation of self-images (i.e., self-defining memories). These findings suggest that updating one’s identity throughout life, at least in normal aging, may be related to the shaping and retrieval of self-defining memories, memories that lead to the creation of narrative scripts, which themselves serve as the ingredients for “chapters” across the lifespan.

Four Narratives and a Baby: An Adoption Reunion Story

In 1992, a 19-year-old single mother of one made the decision to place her second child, a newborn, for adoption. This qualitative exploration of adoption issues is written, in part, in first person by the authors: the birthmother, the daughter she raised, the daughter she placed, and the adoptive mother. The article explores adoption reunion, adoption literature, and a scriptural adoption narrative for themes and for recommendations. The authors address negative stereotypes around adoption, the common theme of loss in all parties, and the potential for healing in reunion through life stage changes, including marriage and the next generation. This is a unique opportunity to hear the multiple voices of adoption in one narrative.

Brain activation during disorder-related script-driven imagery in panic disorder: a pilot study

Despite considerable effort, the neural correlates of altered threat-related processing in panic disorder (PD) remain inconclusive. Mental imagery of disorder-specific situations proved to be a powerful tool to investigate dysfunctional threat processing in anxiety disorders. The current functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study aimed at investigating brain activation in PD patients during disorder-related script-driven imagery. Seventeen PD patients and seventeen healthy controls (HC) were exposed to newly developed disorder-related and neutral narrative scripts while brain activation was measured with fMRI. Participants were encouraged to imagine the narrative scripts as vividly as possible and they rated their script-induced emotional states after the scanning session. PD patients rated disorder-related scripts as more arousing, unpleasant and anxiety-inducing as compared to HC. Patients relative to HC showed elevated activity in the right amygdala and the brainstem as well as decreased activity in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, and the medial and lateral prefrontal cortex to disorder-related vs. neutral scripts. The results suggest altered amygdala/ brainstem and prefrontal cortex engagement and point towards the recruitment of brain networks with opposed activation patterns in PD patients during script-driven imagery.

Adrian's Introduction to the Divine Scriptures: An Antiochene Handbook for Scriptural Interpretation by Peter W. Martens

[...]a similar dynamic is at work in Martens's translation of the word ὑπeρβολικῶς. Though Adrian is aware of other tasks that must be ventured in the interpretation of scripture (277–79), the overall impression made by the Introduction is that their chief purpose is the handling of peculiarities. Without making explicit what the governing narrative of scripture is, and especially scripture's account of the divine being, the Introduction remains at best incomplete.

Abortion Trauma in the Context of Chinese Culture

Abortion in the family has a profound and traumatic impact on individual psychological state. In China, the number of abortion operations remains high, which has attracted the attention and research of many scholars. However, there is a lack of discussion on the trauma of abortion in these studies. Abortion trauma is not only affected by individual psychological factors, but also by social and cultural factors. In order to analyze the characteristics of abortion trauma under the background of Chinese culture, explore the correlation between abortion trauma and sacrifice prototype, and strengthen the clinical intervention research on abortion trauma, this paper analyzed the questionnaire survey (296 valid questionnaires) conducted by 306 subjects. The results showed that: (1) under the background of Chinese culture, abortion trauma can occur in both an abortionist and her partner (including spouse). In a family with an abortion, the offspring will have abortion trauma; (2) the concept of sacrifice appears in the cognition of the abortionists and of the offspring of the abortionists' families. In future researches, the relationship between abortion trauma and sacrificial archetype under the background of Chinese culture can be discussed in depth, so as to explore the narrative script of abortion trauma in the collective unconscious of contemporary Chinese people, so that psychologists can better create a set of psychological intervention methods to help people get rid of abortion trauma.

Judicial Narrative and Rape Myths: The Farooqui Case

A criminal trial is constructed around various narratives put forward by the prosecution and by the defence, which then crystallize in the narrative established by the judgment. All these narratives rely on background narrative scripts and cultural assumptions that provide stock character roles and interpretations. This paper examines the High Court's and the Supreme Court's treatment of the high-profile Mahmood Farooqui rape case, as an illustration of how prevalent rape myths inform judicial discourse in rape cases and colour the judicial narrative reconstruction of events. Both appellate Courts operate in the discursive register typically used by the defence in rape trials, where the facts of the case are presented in a manner that portrays the complainant as active and the accused as passive, while also evoking tropes of male rationality and female irrationality in the performance of consent, communication, and desire. These grammatical and rhetorical techniques are employed with respect to the prior interaction between complainant and accused, and to the complainant' post facto conduct. Together, these elements operate to reproduce the mythical constructs of 'real' rape and of the 'bad' rape victim.

Exploring the Brand Experience of Recoletos Education

This interpretative phenomenological analysis explores the brand experience of Recoletos Education in the Philippines. Two levels of interpretation are generated: those of the participants who make sense of their brand experience as lived experience and those of the researcher who makes sense of the participants’ interpretations. The four participants chosen via life history homogeneous purposeful sampling have at least 25 years of connection with a Recoletos school. Validated transcripts from in-depth interviews reveal the participants’ convergent and divergent interpretations of their brand experience. Inspired by scriptural narratives, themes insinuate the evangelizing dimension of Recoletos Education as a Catholic school brand. Finally, they also bring about correspondence with brand attributes, synergy and strategy, brand experience dimensions, and brand challenges, respectively, as they also, at the same time, comprise and reveal the single overarching theme: the key elements in the brand landscape of Recoletos Education.

Shadow Puppets and Neglected Diseases: Evaluating a Health Promotion Performance in Rural Indonesia.

‘Rama and the Worm’ is a shadow puppet production targeting neglected diseases in Central Java. It is an entertainment-based intervention study to promote health by reducing the impact of parasitic diseases such as soil-transmitted helminths (STH). The study uses traditional Javanese shadow puppetry (wayang kulit) as a vehicle in village communities to disseminate health messages and promote behaviour change to prevent diseases caused, primarily, by inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene. The health education messages contained in the play, although using traditional characters and themes, required the creation of a completely new narrative script, using characters and plot lines familiar to the wayang kulit repertoire, but placing them in new situations that relate specifically to health promotion objectives. The intervention was piloted in a village in Central Java, Indonesia using a pre/post design with both qualitative and quantitative analysis. A total of 96 male and female villagers, aged between 7 and 87 years, provided both baseline and follow up data. Participant knowledge and behaviours related to gastrointestinal and helminth-related disease were assessed before and after the intervention through a questionnaire administered by interview. Results revealed statistically significant improvements in both knowledge (48.6% pre-intervention score vs. 62.8% post-intervention score, p < 0.001) and behaviour (77.4% vs. 80.6%, p = 0.004) related to gastrointestinal and helminth disease. Findings of the study indicate the wayang kulit performance is an effective health education tool. The results provide proof of concept with scaling up the next step forward. The wayang kulit production provides a significant additional component for an integrated, comprehensive approach to reduction and elimination of STH infection.

Scriptural illustration applied in the homo faber-religious-ludens spiritual model of leisure

ABSTRACT The intention of this article is to convey the ternary relationship of humanity models specific to leisure studies. Thus with a view to bridge the gaps between the three humanity models, namely – the homo faber – persons at work, – the homo ludens – persons at play, and – the homo religious – persons primarily religious/spiritual, this article uses hermeneutics to explore these models’ contributions in the current context by presenting an illustration: the scriptural narrative of Lord Jesus as homo religious within the gospel story Jesus Visits Martha and Mary in which Martha represents homo faber and Mary of Bethany homo ludens. Homo faber-religious-ludens is a spiritual model of leisure characterized by the dynamic relationships between the three humanity models that are pertinent to the social world and the communities of the post-secular era.

Cities of the Dead: Performing Life in the Caribbean

Life and death defined the historical and temporal dimensions of the plantation. Many of these material, affective and ritualistic views on life and death haunt contemporary Caribbean cities. This essay will analyze the narrative script of Juan de los muertos (Juan of the Dead) and Eduardo Lalo’s documentary La ciudad perdida (2005) along with the funeral rites performed by Funeraria Marín in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, whose ‘performative funerals’ or collages, have circulated in journals and the Internet, creating what appear to be ‘living tableaus’ or original wakes since 2010. I believe that zombies, the living dead, and the performative dead – are all part of the same process, as they reflect sites of melancholia where social action – be it individual or collective, is required. I will be cautious to read these actions merely as forms of agency against the state or neoliberal economies. These necropolitics to use Achille Mbembe’s term are more than forms of agency. They ‘frame’ forms of precarious subjectivity, survival, and existence in contemporary Caribbean societies where melancholia, is pretty much related to the present.

Book Review: Isaiah and the Restoration of Divine Presence in 1 Peter: Patrick T. Egan, Ecclesiology and the Scriptural Narrative of 1 Peter

Book Review: Isaiah and the Restoration of Divine Presence in 1 Peter: Patrick T. Egan, <i>Ecclesiology and the Scriptural Narrative of 1 Peter</i>

Major Prophets

Major Prophets Christopher T. Begg, Rory K. Pitstick, Paul R. Redditt, Isaac M. Alderman, and Fred W. Guyette 1913. [Prophets/Prophetic Literature] Esther Fuchs, “Women as Prophets/Women in Prophets: Gender, Nation and Discourse,” Feminist Theory and the Bible, 95–113 [see #2022]. An intertextual reading of women as prophets and women in the prophets in the Hebrew Bible reveals that privileged speech is gendered. While narrative texts tend to inscribe and erase women’s prophecies, prophetic literature tends to erase them completely. To the extent that women prophets are inscribed in the narrative text, they are interpolated as subjects in a national saga of military confrontations with various collective enemies. Female prophetic roles are indistinguishable from their political roles in the continuous struggle against the foreign others. The violent language of national demarcation and differentiation is ascribed to women prophets, who thus are made to legitimize and sanction it. These speaking bodies reproduce the nation, culturally and discursively. As the cultural reproducers of the nation women prophets embody one category of idealized feminine identity. As prophets then Israelite women inscribed in the pedagogic narrative are part of a gendered as well as a national script. As poetic figures in prophetic literature women’s bodies are constructed as signifying representations of the nation as such. The signifying body appears as the sexual object of male violence, or as the victimized body of mother/daughter Zion. The metaphoric representation of the nation is a performative elaboration of the narrative script. The performative script which focuses on the nation’s failures and errors is no less “nationalistic” in the sense of its effort to identify a plurality and diversity of subjects as a unitary coherent collective. This imaginary community is repeatedly signified through a seriality of collective subjects among which the female body is only one. [End Page 666] The violence directed at the nation rather than by the nation captures the pivotal moment of political demise, even as the female body signifies the nation at the point of disintegration and defeat. By attributing to the signifying body a series of synonymous deviations from the pedagogic script, prophetic discourse reinterprets, reconstructs, re-encodes, and further elaborates the narration of the nation in poetic terms. The symbolic, recursive, and repetitive poetry of performative discourse envisions the nation’s future, while evaluating, criticizing, and condemning its past. The performative discourse thus affirms national continuity by reinventing and recasting the nation in a new proliferation of shifting subjects and predicates, all pointing to the idea of a shared past and a shared future. Feminist criticism has correctly pointed to the breakdown of the marital and sexual metaphor, and its questionable effectiveness as a representation of a sanctioned relationship. What I have tried to do here is to extend this analysis even further by adding a postcolonial dimension to what has already been written. The postcolonial perspective bridges the divide between those feminists who focus on the signifier, namely, the metaphor of sexual violence, and those who focus on the signified, namely, the nation. Postcolonial theory suggests that the signified is also a signifier, namely, that the nation as well is a metaphor of collective identity, a discursive phenomenon that moves between narration and poetic representation, pedagogy and performance. As such the nation should be as much the object of feminist inquiry as the sexual and marital metaphor which generated so much debate and continues to generate a considerable body of scholarship and historical as well as literary interpretation. (author’s conclusion, adapted, pp. 111–12)—C.T.B. 1914. [Prophetic Literature] Donatella Scaiola, “Abramo nella tradizione profetica,” RSB 26 (2014) 75–87. Prophetic texts rarely make reference to Abraham, but the references that do exist are largely in harmony with the Genesis portrait, except for their focusing primarily on Abraham’s positive characteristics and at the same time emphasizing much more than Genesis does the fidelity of God rather than the faith of Abraham. In the biblical tradition, Abraham was evidently a symbol continually recast as a key for the development and expression of Israel’s understanding of its own identity and vocation.—R.K.P. 1915. [Prophetic Literature] Massimilliano...

The Value of Digital Storytelling as an L2 Narrative Practice

The purpose of this study was to investigate the value of introducing digital storytelling (DST) into second language (L2) narrative practice, by examining the characteristics of L2 learners’ narrative when multimodality is added. To this end, the present study examined pairs of personal narrative scripts produced by 50 undergraduate L2 learners in DST, along with their self-created videos for DST presentation, as well as their narrative scripts developed in traditional (exclusively linguistic) modes. The participants’ narrative scripts and videos were analyzed based on the ‘good story’ framework, which consists of important dimensions to consider in the narrative genre. The findings demonstrate that L2 students’ narratives become better stories when they are practiced in DST, particularly in terms of expressing one’s feeling, showing awareness of the audience, and adding more details to the story. Also, the availability of multiple modes of expression was found to expand their narrative topics and elicit their stories and visions more powerfully. The authors conclude that an understanding of the unique features of DST enables teachers to use this new approach for enhancing L2 narrative skills in their learners.

La mise en scène des émotions dans le direct d’une chaîne tout info : le cas des attentats de Paris du 13 novembre 2015

Journalists play a crucial role in the reporting of events, especially in tragic circumstances, such as terrorist attacks. An all-news network must maintain a dramatic tension throughout the events, sometimes for long hours, although the reporters dispatched to the site are not always able to provide new elements. On the basis of the partial information transmitted from various sources, the on-site journalists have to develop a coherent story that captures the audience’s attention. This explains why the staging of the information is not only based on the emotions of the witnesses and on-site reporters, but also on narrative stereotypes or social scripts, leading to a form of fictionalization. Our study, which uses the methods of discourse analysis, takes into account the emotional lexicon and the way in which the interaction between the various protagonists of the journalistic discourse shapes the televisual macronarrative. It is based on a transcribed corpus of two hours of live news broadcast by BFM, a French news channel, during the attacks that took place in Paris on November 13, 2015.

Directed threat imagery in generalized anxiety disorder.

Worrying has been suggested to prevent emotional and elaborative processing of fears. In cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) patients are exposed to their fears during the method of directed threat imagery by inducing emotional reactivity. However, studies investigating neural correlates of directed threat imagery and emotional reactivity in GAD patients are lacking. The present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study aimed at delineating neural correlates of directed threat imagery in GAD patients. Nineteen GAD patients and 19 healthy controls (HC) were exposed to narrative scripts of either disorder-related or neutral content and were encouraged to imagine it as vividly as possible. Rating results showed that GAD patients experienced disorder-related scripts as more anxiety inducing and arousing than HC. These results were also reflected in fMRI data: Disorder-related v. neutral scripts elicited elevated activity in the amygdala, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and the thalamus as well as reduced activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex/subgenual anterior cingulate cortex in GAD patients relative to HC. The present study presents the first behavioral and neural evidence for emotional reactivity during directed threat imagery in GAD. The brain activity pattern suggests an involvement of a fear processing network as a neural correlate of initial exposure during directed imagery in CBT in GAD.

الروايات الإسرائيلية في تفسير المدرسة العقلية الحديثة: دراسة نقدية تحليلية

This paper analyses the methodology adopted by modern exegetes and rationalists in their school of tafsir in their engagements with al-Israiliyyat (Biblical narratives) and assess the impact of their approach in tafsir. The study focuses on some prominent figures of the rationalists school of tafsir in nineteenth-century Egypt such as Muhammad `Abduh, Rashid Rida and Mahmud Mustafa Maraghi. It critically reviews their arguments vis-a-vis their outright rejection of using Biblical narratives in interpreting the Qur’an regardless of their authenticity. In the exegetical context, al-Israiliyyat, refers to Jewish anecdotes and folklore details influenced by the Judeo-Christian milieu. It represents the exegetical views on specific Qur’anic subject matters integrated into tafsir by converts of both the Jewish and the Christian faiths. This exegetical methodology found its way in to tafsir during the era of tabi`in, (the succecsors of the Prophet’s companions) in the second formative phase of tafsir. In those circumstances, tafsir became more or less complex and understanding the Qur’an appeared increasingly difficult because the overall methodology of interpretation was largely influenced by intellectual and philosophical debates as well as sectarianism and theological disputes. This essentially left negative impact on the traditional mode of tafsir and Islamic thought. This study found that the use of al-Israiliyyat to supplement Qur’anic predominant narratives was sometime necessary but misleading on various scales, as not only biblical materials but also extra scriptural narratives were frequently cited in traditional tafasir. As a result, modern scholars sought to combat this intellectual challenge and offer viable alternative by proposing a new methodological framework for tafsir to understand the Qur’an in a manner that corresponds with modern era and align its teaching to all spheres of life. This formed the basis of rationalists school of tafsir. This paper examines the exegetical methodology of modern exegetes and their rationalist approach and evaluates to what extent it breaks with the tradition of mainstream tafsir. The paper concludes that rationalists have gone too far in rejecting al-Israiliyyat outrightly, and their extreme approach in engagement with al-Israiliyyat lacks objectivity and is full of contradictions and inconsistencies. Indeed, this stems from their methodological flaw and seemingly contradictory attempt to mistakenly or deliberately force their rationalist views into the Qur’an.