Self-reflexive Narrative Research Articles

What Am I Doing Here? Self-Reflexivity in Cross-Border Journalism Research

In journalism research conducted in the Global South, power relationships between the researcher and the researched mirror the uneven power structures between the Western journalists and their news subjects or their non-Western colleagues working alongside them. But so far, the figure of the journalism researcher in such contexts has not been problematized to any great extent in journalism scholarship. Moreover, the journalism researcher working in such contexts borrows heavily from the methodological toolkit of ethnography. But while the cultural anthropologists who created and refined ethnographic methodology have long been interrogating the colonial and neocolonial logics that inform ethnographic methods, journalism scholars have yet to significantly engage in such a self-critical project. We take ourselves as the starting points of the self-reflexive critical debate we believe journalism researchers interested in decolonizing journalism studies must have with themselves when it comes to conducting research in spaces of asymmetric power relations within global journalism. Laid out in three first person self-reflexive narratives, our critical questions are prompted by our own geopolitical and embodied presence in Lebanon, Afghanistan, and North Korea. We then discuss the commonalities among the questions that arose from our respective positionalities. Through this grounded, self-reflexive exploration, we aim to position global journalism researchers at the center of critical inquiry.

Introduction: Why study celebrity and crisis?

The series The Kominsky Method (Netflix 2018–20) stars Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin as two ageing members of today’s Hollywood milieu. Sandy Kominsky (Douglas) is an acting coach. His effort of self-preservation and perpetuation of the star's charisma clashes with corporal decay and financial collapse. Norman Newlander (Arkin) is Sandy's agent and caustic friend. He has peculiar death thoughts and constantly makes humorous reference to both men's physical, psychological and social disparities. What does Kominsky tell us about contemporary celebrity culture as regards ageing and the crisis of public appearance thereto related? The show reveals film and television industry’s leading position in setting desirable or disputable models of old age through a renovated alliance with fashion. Arkin and Douglas’s looks express the shame of old age but also glamorize it. A self-reflexive narrative testifies Hollywood’s search for innovative strategies of self-representation that includes old-age, showcasing the transformation of celebrated bodies and underlying the value of personal flexibility. Amid the decline of their image and influence, Douglas and Arkin develop a new adaptability, demonstrated variously in terms of masculine aesthetics, through clothing, living spaces, gestures and dialogue. This article investigates the implied social meaning attached to the dressed old body in the public sphere when the predicaments concern privilege and influence. The main character’s costumes draw on fashion trends such as Dandyism, hipster style and Vintage. Arkin’s, on the other hand, stick to the classic, although not in a strict formal way. Their juxtaposition reveals how fashion trends come to the aid of celebrities’ effort to overcome crisis, a means to manage as well as spectacularize confused and ambivalent attitudes to ageing.

The Kominsky Method, Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin: Fashionable impairments of an ageing Hollywood

The series The Kominsky Method (Netflix, 2018–20) stars Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin as two ageing members of today’s Hollywood milieu. Sandy Kominsky (Douglas) is an acting coach. His effort of self-preservation and perpetuation of the star’s charisma clashes with corporeal decay and financial collapse. Norman Newlander (Arkin) is Sandy’s agent and caustic friend. He has peculiar death thoughts and constantly makes humorous reference to both men’s physical, psychological and social disparities. What does Kominsky tell us about contemporary celebrity culture as regards ageing and the crisis of public appearance thereto related? The show reveals film and television industry’s leading position in setting desirable or disputable models of old age through a renovated alliance with fashion. Arkin and Douglas’s looks express the shame of old age but also glamorize it. A self-reflexive narrative testifies Hollywood’s search for innovative strategies of self-representation that includes old age, showcasing the transformation of celebrated bodies and underlying the value of personal flexibility. Amid the decline of their image and influence, Douglas and Arkin develop a new adaptability, demonstrated variously in terms of masculine aesthetics, through clothing, living spaces, gestures and dialogue. This article investigates the implied social meaning attached to the dressed old body in the public sphere when the predicaments concern privilege and influence. The main character’s costumes draw on fashion trends such as dandyism, hipster style and vintage. Arkin’s, on the other hand, stick to the classic, although not in a strict formal way. Their juxtaposition reveals how fashion trends come to the aid of celebrities’ effort to overcome crisis, a means to manage as well as spectacularize confused and ambivalent attitudes to ageing.

Intercultural communication during pandemic: new ways to build intercultural dialogue and relationships

ABSTRACT The article explores how intercultural relations can be fostered at the level of an undergraduate university degree during the pandemic. It offers one specific intervention within intercultural education to provide new ways of thinking about how intercultural relations can and do happen. By drawing on the self-reflexive narratives of the article’s authors – a university lecturer and three students – we consider the ways in which intercultural education can enable people from diverse cultures to build a learning community. On the basis of a thematic analysis, we explore the role of reflection and action in the creation of intercultural knowledge that can lead towards developing meaningful relations and can assist in further supporting students in their well-being. We first map some key issues in intercultural education at the university level and provide a short literature review. Secondly, we briefly describe our intercultural initiative. We put our narratives into conversation in order to facilitate deeper understanding of how to build meaningful intercultural relationships, while learning, and collaborating together. Our goal is to reflect on perceptions of the quality of intercultural relationship experiences at the level of a university degree and to show how complex relational work fostered intercultural collaboration during the pandemic. On the basis of our inductive research, we offer an original approach to fostering intercultural education based on four stages: constructing and fostering an initial encounter; promoting group participation; emphasising reciprocity; and constructing activities to promote trust and care. Our experience demonstrated how forming intercultural relationships can meaningfully help students with their expectations, aspirations, and ultimately, careers.

Crear entre mundos: Nuevas tendencias en la metaficción española ed. by Iana Konstantinova and Sabrina S. Laroussi

Crear entre mundos: Nuevas tendencias en la metaficción española ed. by Iana Konstantinova and Sabrina S. Laroussi Olga Bezhanova Konstantinova, Iana, and Sabrina S. Laroussi, editors. Crear entre mundos: Nuevas tendencias en la metaficción española. Albatros, 2021. Pp. 283. ISBN 978-84-7274-386-2. Studies of Spanish metafiction tend to concentrate on the novel, and the value of the collection of essays Crear entre mundos: Nuevas tendencias en la metaficción española edited by Iana Konstantinova and Sabrina Laroussi resides, to a large degree, in the meticulous attention that it pays to a variety of genres that use metafictional techniques. To reflect its openness to different kinds of metanarrative, the volume is divided into two parts. The first analyzes audiovisual narrative and contains three articles dedicated to film and one each to television and photography. The second part addresses literary narrative and includes two chapters on short story, four articles dedicated to the novel, and two that address metafictional elements in contemporary Spanish theater. Between the two parts, the editors placed a section titled “Interludio: Entre mundos” that echoes the title of the volume and invites us, through the two chapters that compose it, to explore works of art that bring together the literary and the audiovisual. The first chapter is authored by Samuel Amago, the author of two foundational volumes on metafiction in Spanish literature, and film and is titled “Estéticas reflexivas en el cine español contemporáneo.” Amago’s exceptionally well-structured and densely packed essay points to a variety of potentially fruitful veins of analysis of self-reflexive cinema in Spain. One of the most intriguing [End Page 142] suggestions that Amago makes relates to a contrast between, on the one hand, movies created by Spanish film-makers to explore the complexities of the country’s historical legacy and current socio-political troubles and, on the other, American movies filmed in Spain that tend to advance the intellectually and historically hollow vision of ‘Spain as a brand,’ a marketing concept that has been particularly useful to justify the neoliberal austerity measures after the crisis of 2008–09. Critical studies of metafiction often suffer from an excessive degree of self-referentiality, concentrating on whether a specific work of art can be considered an example of metafiction. Of particular interest among the chapters of Crear entre mundos are those that step outside the confines of the debate about the definition of metafiction and, instead, explore the ways in which self-reflective art invites us to consider crucial political and social questions of the day. Joanne Britland’s “El Selfie de la España poscrisis: Una autorreflexión a través del mockumentary,” for instance, argues that self-reflexive narratives are of great value at a time when Spaniards need to reflect on how to process the consequences of the economic crisis of 2008-9. Vilma Navarro-Daniels’ exceptionally well-argued chapter, “‘Sobreviviremos como dos robinsones’: La pérdida de referentes sociopolíticos como disolución del sujeto en ‘La muerte mientras tanto’ de Ignacio Martínez de Pisón” demonstrates that the metafictional elements in a short story by Martínez de Pisón allow the author to refer to and question the political and social consensus of the Spanish Transition. The careful structuring of the volume allows the editors to weave together, in a coherent and meaningful fashion, valuable studies of different forms of artistic expression while maintaining the critical thrust signaled in the introduction. In the part of the volume that is dedicated to the audiovisual arts, a chapter titled “Cinematic Intertextuality and Self-Reflexivity in El Ministerio del Tiempo” by Linda Bartlett discusses a popular Spanish TV series and questions the ways in which Spanish identity is articulated in the globalized world, echoing the considerations articulated by Amago in the first chapter. In the part that explores literary narrative, Mónica Botta closes the volume with an insightful article titled “Indagaciones sobre el acto de lectura en El chico de la última fila de Juan Mayorga” that elegantly brings the readers back to Amago’s observations on the complex and fruitful interplay between metafiction and reality. Several of...

Richard Powers’s Generosity: An Enhancement (2009): Transhumanism, Metafiction and the Ethics of Increasing Human Happiness Levels through Biotechnology

This paper analyzes Richard Powers’s Generosity: An Enhancement (2009), a self-reflexive novel in which Powers explores some of the possibilities and challenges of increasing human happiness levels through biotechnology. As this work sets out to show, Powers’s greatest success in the novel may be his choice to adopt certain conventions typical of metafiction to provide a fervent critique of this pressing issue. Drawing mainly from Waugh’s seminal work on metafiction, the present work analyzes how the different metafictional techniques Powers uses in Generosity combine with the transhumanist discourse on the possibilities that biotechnology opens up in order to create a happier population. Ultimately, this article argues that through building a self-reflexive narrative the writer calls the reader’s attention to the constructed character of the transhumanist view of happiness as an engineering problem. Accordingly, he presents an alternative view of happiness as a state of mind that can be achieved by being resilient in the face of our problems and by enjoying the here and now.

Self-Reflexivity in Baby Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke: A Phenomenological Approach

Space is man-made socially constructed locations, without which they cannot have a comfortable life. Reflecting on the life experiences of the people who exist in the margins of the society, autobiography appears to be the appropriate genre that reflects the lived experiences of the characters as they live through them. It reflects not only the author's personal experiences but also the people whom they meet in their lifeworld. In other words, it is a narration of both individual and collective lived experiences. Dalit writing in Indian literature has become the most controversial topic in recent times, taking autobiography as its predominant form of writing. This paper attempts to explore Baby Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke as a self-reflexive narrative. The characters experience extreme humiliation in the public and private spheres of their lives. The purpose of the paper is to categorise their absolute humiliation experience using Van Manen’s lifeworld existentialism and self-reflexivity as a theoretical framework.

‘You keep belittling us and we are sick of it!’: Four lessons learned from feminist interventions in Czech art schools

ABSTRACT Joining the many past and present students who are sick of the belittling in Czech art schools such as the feminist collective Čtvrtá vlna, the article identifies four areas that are key to the upholding of heteropatriarchy in Czech tertiary education. Presented in a form of ‘lessons learned’, the aim of the respective analyses is to help make successful the contestations of androcentrism and sexism in Czech art schools and art world more broadly. Deploying autoethnography, the analyses draw from a self-reflexive account of the author’s experience of studying art and art education on the university level in the Czech Republic. Drawing from this self-reflexive narrative and feminist scholarship on art education and postsocialism, the article examines the paradoxical and intricate ways through which heteropatriarchy operates in Czech tertiary art education, with particular focus on how heteropatriarchy entangles with other regimes of colonial (post)modernity, namely Eurocentrism, capitalism and its correlate, the overcome state-socialism.

Grief, Translation, and the “Asian American Woman” in Hong Kong

Abstract This article draws on Judith Butler's theories of violence and grief in order to outline a self-reflexive narrative of teaching and speaking about the Atlanta shootings of March 2021 as a queer and feminist studies scholar of Japanese studies in Hong Kong. The article briefly explains how teaching about this occurrence of anti-Asian violence in East Asia might lead to important discussions of multiple imperialisms within/around Asia, while providing background on the broader potential of Asian American studies for pedagogical contexts within Asia. However, through a description of the author's own coming into being as a racialized, gendered subject in the act of teaching about the Atlanta shootings in Hong Kong, the focus is on a highly particular account of how grief and vulnerability might offer forms of political solidarity that are not defined by roles as distinct subjects belonging to recognizable groups and communities.

Peasants and Partisans, Stranger Selves: Stuart Hood’s Memoir Project and Second World War Life Writing

This essay is the first detailed critical analysis of Pebbles from My Skull/ Carlino (1963/1985), Stuart Hood’s account of the 1943/4 period he spent fighting as part of the Italian Resistance. It situates Hood’s work in relation to the prevailing ‘Colditz Myth’ associated with British Second World War prisoner of war escapees and the conceptions of England and Europe underlying this myth. It also considers Hood’s ‘memoir project – the self-reflexive narrative of self he was compelled to tell, extending across multiple texts, and to which he was reluctant to give final form or finished meaning – in relation to recent theoretical work on life writing and military life writing in particular.

ПОЭТИКА ЗАГЛАВИЯ ПОВЕСТИ ДЖОНА БЭНВИЛЛА «ПИСЬМО НЬЮТОНА»

The article examines the poetics of the title of John Banville’s novella “The NewtonLetter” (1982). There is a fundamental difference between this text and other novels included in the “scientific trilogy” of the writer, dedicated to the great geniuses of science: elements of a selfreflexive narrative, an introduction of an unreliable narrator-biographer, a departure from the main plot of the biography of the scientist). “The Newton Letter” appears as a postmodernist embodiment of epistemological and ontological doubt, a detailed self-reflection about the crisis of narration and nomination. The very act of writing a letter in its personal dimension emphasizes Banville’s recognition of the incomprehensible complexity of the orders of the universe, the chaotic mundane experience, the strangeness of human relations, and the impenetrability of the consciousness of the Other, as opposed to well-reasoned scientific report. The figures associated with the plot of the creative crisis are the narratorBanville; the narrator-Newton; Newton-Chandos; at different textual levels they all are expressing a deep language skepticism in the form of a letter.

Age, Virility and Vernacularity: Boccaccio’s Portraits of the Artists as Young Men

ABSTRACTThis article explores discourses of youth and maturity in the pseudo-autobiographical frames to Boccaccio’s own works, and in his biographies of Dante and Petrarch. It analyses paradigmatic approaches to authorial age and their movement towards and away from an erotic literary past. These age tropes are contextualised by surveying the chronological limits, characteristics and values ascribed in the Middle Ages to phases of the masculine lifespan. The article then discusses self-reflexive narratives of authorial maturation in several works by the Tre corone that are in dialogue with each other: Boccaccio’s Vita Petracchi and Petrarch’s Ad Posteritatem; Boccaccio’s Trattatello and Dante’s various io-personae; alongside Boccaccio’s own contradictory first-person portraits in different narrative levels of the Decameron, and his parodic Lover-Narrator in the Corbaccio. Ultimately, this study shows how, by different routes, Boccaccio breaks away from Petrarchan exemplarity by pairing vernacularity with mature philogyny, thus forging a separate path for vernacular authorship.

The uncertainty of students from a widening access context undertaking an integrated master’s degree in social studies

ABSTRACT Extending study to a fourth year in Integrated Master’s Degrees (IMD) presents both risks and opportunities. This study explores students’ perceptions of moving from a three-year degree to a Welsh IMD. Students initially appeared ‘risk adverse’ to continuing their studies to a fourth-year with many seeing this as a ‘gamble’. The benefits identified included utilisation of loans for a fourth-year; improved career choices and increased confidence in their academic abilities. Risks identified were delayed entry into employment; suspension of income and increased student-debt. Data were collected through participatory research to ‘share knowledge, power and decision-making roles’. The data challenged the negative assumption that the primary driver for exiting at Level 6 would be extended financial risk. Self-reflexive narratives confirmed the actual ‘gamble’ was whether to ‘cash-out’ with their potentially higher existing grade at Level 6 or extend their studies and exit with a potentially lower classification. Barriers identified include enforced altruism and unknown degree status. A constructivist approach allowed students to challenge ‘moral-authority’; accountability and relevance of an IMD, consider its authenticity and reflect upon potential life-course trajectory and identity constructs.

Samuel Beckett's Use of Color inCompany: Blue

AbstractThis article looks at Samuel Beckett's use of color in his late short prose text Company (1980). In its reference to Beckett's “Olympic” notebook, it demonstrates how Beckett's writing process is not merely visual but is also highly dependent upon color in its creation of atmosphere and setting. Instead of seeing Beckett's later work as simply deracinated and monochromatic, it suggests that his prose evidences a painterly style. By analysing Company from an art historical perspective, the article claims that Beckett's use of blue is linked to his comments on paintings by Poussin and da Messina. Saint Augustine's writings on memory are also invoked to understand Beckett's use of color in connection with childhood recollections. The article argues for a reading of Company that uses color to create a self-reflexive narrative that avoids polarization between light and dark, hope and dejection.

Cultivating Compassion: The Practice Experience of a Medical Assistance in Dying Coordinator in Canada.

Accessing medical assistance in dying (MAiD) became legal in Canada in June, 2016. This marks a unique time in our history, as eligible persons can now opt for an assisted death and health care professionals can be involved without criminal repercussion. I used an autoethnographic approach to explore and describe my experience of implementing and coordinating a new MAiD program in a local health authority. Part I is a self-reflexive narrative based on journal entries about my immersion in this practice role over a 6 month period. In Part II, I share five emergent storylines: coming to the role (the calling), embodiment (becoming the face of), immersion in clinical practice, interactions with those seeking MAiD, and self survival (sense making). The created story and storylines shine a light on new ethical practice realities, enhance understanding about MAiD as it continues to unfold, and hopefully inspire human centered, compassionate care.

Collaborative Engagement from within the Academy: A Self-Reflexive Narrative

This essay builds upon the current movement around publicly engaged scholarship, seeking to illuminate its challenges, risks, and rewards through a self-reflexive narrative. The author, as a community engaged scholar midway to tenure within the academy, attempts to situate herself within this larger milieu, uncover the assumptions under which she has operated, explore the impact of the publicly engaged work she has done, and clarify the impact she hopes this work has. The narrative extends recent discussions within the field, narrowing a gap in the service-learning and community engagement scholarship by drawing attention to the impact of collaborative engagement on academic-practitioners. The essay seeks to both increase the intentionality, courage, and humility with which engaged scholars enter and exit the space of others, and encourage the self-care and self-awareness needed for the long haul.

The Elegy of <em>Dom Casmurro</em>

Abstract The objective of this article is to investigate to which extent we can consider Dom Casmurro (1900), by the Brazilian author Machado de Assis (1839–1908), as an elegiac romance (Bruffee, 1983). The elegiac romance appeared first in the early fiction of Joseph Conrad and was subsequently developed by a number of major writers influenced by Conrad, including Nabokov and Fitzgerald. This article will present the main characteristics of the elegiac romance and compare Dom Casmurro to Lord Jim (1900) in order to highlight what makes the relationship between narrator and hero(es) in Dom Casmurro unique. Dom Casmurro can be considered a double elegy: the bitter and mournful laments for the death of Capitu and Escobar are intertwined in the self-reflexive narrative, shedding light on the changing sexual, gender and social relations in the end of the nineteenth century.

BEYOND OUR NUCLEAR ENTANGLEMENT

This essay explores our nuclear entanglement through culture and the environment. It does so through a quilted self-reflexive narrative. The narrator is positioned as a critical human rights activist, and follows the subjective, imaginative and suicidal implications of the nuclear in their life. A key argument is that we are living within the confines of the nuclear algorithm, which has wrought irreversible changes to the psychological, social, and ethical life of Homo sapiens within the Anthropocene. The essay calls attention to the tools of conviviality and love required for co-existence and co-survival beyond our nuclear entanglement.

On representing autism and the altruism of self-reflexive writing

Autoethnographic stories about illness and disability are usually written for, and with, readers in mind, engaging in the ‘reciprocity that is storytelling (whereby) the teller offers herself as a guide to the other’s self-formation’ (Frank 1995: 17–8). While selfreflexive narratives can be immensely healing for the writer, they also invite readers to reflect upon the issues at hand and bring about a shift in their own thinking. As such, self-reflexive writing can be a powerful tool for advocacy and for challenging the status quo. By allowing readers to empathise and connect with the subject matter at a very personal level, it can illuminate nuanced moments of adversity or insight, and capture a depth of understanding that more traditional texts may not always depict. This article draws on interviews with families living with high functioning autism and the exemplar text Far from the tree: Parents, children and the search for identity (Solomon 2014). Following Solomon, the article’s author reflects upon personal experiences and embraces self-reflexivity as a way of better understanding herself, representing her subjects, and helping to illuminate a common theme that difference is a value worth nurturing.

Women Stripped Bare: Rape in the Films of Hong Sang-soo

Abstract: This essay analyzes the subject of rape in the films of South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo, comparing his treatment with the history of representations of sexual assault in both the cinema of South Korea and the international art film. Of particular interest is the issue of how rape reflects and/or contradicts the gender politics of Hong’s films, especially their relationship with feminism, and how his handling of both sexual violence and sexuality as a whole has evolved over the course of his career. The essay focuses on four films, The Day a Pig Fell in the Well (1996), Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000), Woman Is the Future of Man (2004), and Like You Know It All (2009), with a concluding discussion of Hong’s recent, more self-reflexive narratives.