Situated Narratives Research Articles

Racialized scripts of silence: how whiteness organizes silence as a response to social protest about racism in the United States

ABSTRACT Communication research often sidelines and ignores racial dynamics in organizational practices and processes, even when considering social movements and protests over racism. The current interview-based project uses a critical lens to examine how a U.S. university employed a racialized script of silence in response to social protest about racism. We analyze how organizations maintain and promote whiteness through racialized discourses of bureaucracy, professionalism, and legality that coalesce into a seemingly neutral script of silence. We suggest attending to how racialized scripts are always already created and diffused through mechanisms that engage historically situated narratives and argue that organizational silence is best understood not as an absence but as a continuous presence of existing structures that limit and quiet dissent. The analysis has implications for connections among organizational silence, whiteness, and discourses, as well as research on organizational scripts and practices for organizational members.

Trajectories towards affirmation: Gender identity in mental health services after the ICD-11

Depathologisation of gender diversity in the ICD-11 marks a shift in psychological services for transgender and gender nonconforming people. Even though the stipulated changes are only practically applicable ever since early 2022, a general move towards affirmative psychotherapeutic and counselling practice has been noticed ever since 2018. The present paper covers three main models of mental health care for gender minorities, namely the conversion therapy model, the transsexual gatekeeping model, and the affirmative model, in order to view them under a novel lens. Drawing on Science, Technology and Society Studies, the universalist presumptions and rigid gender roles of the traditional models are brought under scrutiny. Moreover, the itinerary reveals the need for situated narratives that encourage self-determination and renovate the therapeutic relationship as a means of self-exploration instead of an institutional control mechanism. Concluding, it is remarked that intersectional knowledge is crucial in compensating for micro-aggressive practices and dynamics historically promoted by psychologists and other mental health providers.

Towards situated histories of heterogenous infrastructures: Oral history as method and meaning

Building on interviews with elderly people living in a low-income and auto-constructed settlement in Kampala, Uganda, this paper explores the notion of heterogenous infrastructure in its local spatial and temporal setting. Our aim is twofold. First, by intently listening to and weaving together situated narratives of how people over time have acquired infrastructural services, such as water, energy, waste, and sanitation, we reveal deeper insights of the socio-political, but also material structures and interactions at play between the State, the disenfranchised, and their intermediaries. Second, we start uncovering the so far largely unexplored potential of oral history as a method to meaningfully interpret the “infrastructural past” of postcolonial and Southern cities where most of ordinary people’s experience was never put on record. Our findings point to the usefulness of oral history methods to widen the lens of who and what contributed to the production of fundamental resources for urban life—and its politics.

LivingTestimonios: How Latinx Graduate Students Persist and Enact Social Justice Within Higher Education

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">About the case:</b> First-generation Latinx students in technical and professional communication (TPC) and other graduate programs represent a growing percentage of students, yet stories of their experiences within higher education remain muted. We analyzed 10 Latinx <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">testimonios</i> (culturally situated narratives) wherein they voice their experiences as first-generation students in US graduate programs. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Testimonialistas</i> expressed how they navigate the complexities of being first-generation students and described how they persist and enact social justice. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Situating the case:</b> TPC programs may examine the relationship between social injustices and student retention and recruitment efforts, yet there is a dearth of literature regarding specific obstacles that Latinx students face. We examined how they build success through coalitional action and culturally informed tactical decision-making. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methods:</b> We recruited participants who self-identified as first-generation Latinx students in TPC and other graduate programs. We conducted and recorded semistructured interview sessions based in <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">testimonio</i> and intersectional feminist methodologies. We used qualitative data coding and MAXQDA coding software to assemble and map social justice themes at work across the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">testimonios</i> . <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results:</b> Analysis suggests that first-generation Latinx graduate students draw on complex informal and formal networks to aid their success, desire more effective culturally responsive mentorship, and develop tactical decision-making skills to circumvent oppressive behaviors. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusions:</b> We suggest that directors, mentors, administrators, faculty, and Latinx students begin with a social justice framework to better listen to, understand, and address first-generation Latinx college experiences and build cohort-based support mechanisms into programmatic objectives and professional development sessions.

Hospital Social Workers’ Boundary Work in Paediatric Acute Wards—Competitive or Collaborative?

Abstract Recent research suggests that the notion of boundary work can improve our understanding of interprofessional tension and collaboration in health care, yet hospital social workers (HSWs) have not received sufficient attention in this area. Using boundary work as a theoretical framework, this article investigates HSWs’ boundary work in interactions with other health care professionals in paediatric acute wards. The data were based on in-depth interviews with nineteen HSWs at hospitals in Norway about their experiences with interprofessional collaboration. Based on their situated narratives, abductive analysis was performed, using the conceptually distinct but inter-related forms of competitive and collaborative boundary work that are grounded in Abbott’s framework of jurisdiction. The findings demonstrate how HSWs construct, defend and extend boundaries to create distinctions between themselves and others, and how they sometimes adapt and downplay boundaries in order to achieve common goals and perform their work. As a facilitator of this process, the HSW might be viewed as a boundary subject. This, in turn, can result in optional and intentional ways for HSWs to carry out boundary work. There is reason to believe that, the less specific educational requirements and role guidelines, the more important these mechanisms become.

Leaky bodies: masculinity and risk in the practice of cyanide fishing in Indonesia

Dive fishing with cyanide is known as a risky fishing practice, as it pushes or lures divers to the limits of what their bodies can take. Its association with physical danger is linked to a culture of machismo and a coming-of-age process in which young men prove their bravery and become part of a shared manhood. What often remains implicit in the understanding of risk-seeking activities is the notion of body and masculinity that such practices entail and produce. Understanding risk and how it relates to masculinity in native terms requires conceptual tools to think beyond the self-contained body that navigates an external environment. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Indonesia, this article explores cyanide dive fishing in the context of risky practice in relation to the body as contingent, permeable and leaky. Drawing from situated narratives and post-human phenomenology, the article makes room for masculinities beyond the self-contained man by describing dive fishing as a transformative process of becoming fluid to a submerged world of currents and spirits. By showing how this process brings bodies to or beyond their threshold of endurance, the article sheds light on the situated vulnerabilities of dive fishers in an environment of exploitation.

Incompleteness: landscapes, cartographies, citizenships

ABSTRACT Landscapes as dynamic relations between people and worlds are always incomplete. They are partial understandings, evolving knowledges, edited images and unfinished stories of our designed and undesigned environments. Gaps within and between landscapes can reveal histories omitted and individuals silenced, but this open-endedness of landscapes can also provide opportunities to contribute and participate. In this paper I explore how landscapes are always under construction and I argue that their incompleteness offers potential for new practices. I question, how traditions of mapping can reflect dynamic realities of landscapes; how design and representational practices that attempt to fix time and complete space can work with incompleteness; and how designers and researchers can embrace such landscapes as open-ended, collective endeavours. In this paper, I discuss a mapping project called ‘Incomplete Cartographies’—an experiment with in-progress cartographies, incrementally informed by situated narratives, and producing new forms of belonging.

Identity and Masculinity in Two Cases of Early-Onset Disability Autobiography

This article examines the construction of identity and masculinity in two cases of disability autobiography. Retrospectively written autobiographical accounts of early-onset disability were analyzed abductively by using the model of narrative circulation (MNC), with a thematic content analysis being used to organize the data. Both narrators constructed their adult identity as men in relation to the available disability narratives and living conditions. Three intertwined dimensions regarding the construction of identity could be observed: external expectations, internal intentions, and locally situated narratives of work. The narratives may be considered to represent an alternative way to bypass, overcome, and refresh the culturally dominant stock of stories.

Global Women’s Rights and African Realities: Examining Discourses of Gender Justice in South Africa

abstract The Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing provided a space where women worldwide sought to formulate a common plan of action for the advancement of women. While ‘Beijing’s’ establishment of women’s human rights was a pivotal moment in the fight for gender justice, it also delineated the scope of feminist activism both globally and nationally. Within development studies, there is too little attention on how community-based arrangements and experiences can alter, and even disrupt, global agendas. This article endeavours to grasp situated narratives of gender justice and feminist praxis in various spaces in South Africa. To do so, I draw on qualitative research conducted within four civil society organisations to highlight the realities of organisations and activists on the ground. Analysing these oral stories in light of current gender discourses and practices in South Africa, I seek to contribute to a multi-level analysis of African feminist praxis in the contemporary global women’s rights context. As we celebrate the 25 years since the Women’s Conference in Beijing, this article presents an opportunity to (re)assess and (re)frame the struggles, demands, and priorities of Black women and men in South Africa. It also complicates transnational feminist activism by examining young African feminists’ discourses on gender justice and demands to “Africanise” feminism.

Narrative as a resource for inclusive governance: a UK–Brazil comparison of public responses to nanotechnology

ABSTRACT In this article we examine the role of narrative as a resource for developing inclusive governance frameworks, principally through an examination of two public deliberation experiments, conducted concurrently in the UK and Brazil, that took place prior to the rise of interest in responsible innovation. While in the UK we witness a (partial) rhetorical move in science governance, from a top-down technocratic model to a more deliberative model in which public engagement assumes a central role, in Brazil the political contestations over particular technologies failed to gain political traction. A contrast is drawn between the narratives that publics draw upon in responding to nanotechnology between UK and Brazilian publics. We draw on these differences to argue that situated narratives of epistemic inclusion need to be addressed at the outset of adapting any responsible innovation framework to best align its goals and practices with the context of implementation.

Culture inside: Scale, intimacy, and chronotopic stance in situated narratives

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on what we define asscalar intimacyin the stories people tell about their embodied experience as sociohistorical beings. Our analysis, based on ethnographic studies in Northern Italy (Perrino) and Beijing, China (Pritzker), examines the ways in which speech participants draw upon various discursive strategies to ‘zoom in’ and ‘pan out’ of both time and space, placing themselves and their activities in relation to various people, ideologies, and practices. Scalar intimacy, we argue, provides a novel framework for understanding the multiple ways in which people use language to scale their embodied experience in relation to culturally situated ideas and forms. Scalar intimacy thus extends the study of scales and fractal recursivity in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics. It also contributes to scholarship focusing on how culturally situated meanings are reproduced and challenged over time through specific interactions. (China, chronotope, identity, intimacy, narrative, Northern Italy, scales)*

How to Capture Motivation in Pictures? Visual Methods in Research on Young People’s School Life and Motivation

Voicing and exploring young pupils’ motivation for learning is a central ambition within the field of education research, which can be strengthened through the use of visual methods. Based on a specific research project on motivation for learning and participation in and outside of school, this article explores both analytical opportunities and challenges concerning the use of visual material, such as everyday-life snapshots, as starting points for individual qualitative interviews focusing on perspectives, experiences, and everyday practices of secondary school pupils. The article shows that visual methods (participant-directed photo elicitation) in educational studies can provide access to situated narratives about both motivation and motives for (non)participation that can supplement methodological approaches such as observations and traditional qualitative interviews.

Resilience and Community-Based Tourism: Mapuche Experiences in Pre-Cordilleran Areas (Puyehue and Panguipulli) of Southern Chile

Local responses to global problems: this is the premise used in this work to approach the studies of community-based tourism (CBT) in Latin America. Resilience is a fertile concept to analytically delve into the emergency conditions of this form of tourism organization. The socio-ecological and situated narratives of resilience are enriched and used in this work to examine experiences of CBT in mapuche communities in the south of Chile. This was done through the systematization of relevant data available from the execution of participatory action research projects developed since 2013 in the communes of Panguipulli and Puyehue. This data was categorized and processed according to the variables identified for the proposed analyzes. It was found that the socio-ecological narrative is useful, but insufficient. The relevance of the situated narrative seems to be more effective to engage in dialogues and joint work with mapuche communities.

Writing life narratives through art practice

ABSTRACTThis article shares some of my doctoral experiences in a practice-based PhD research in arts developed at the Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London. It locates art practice within the academic research realm and contributes to researchers working on autobiographical studies and practice-based research methods. By offering an overview on my research topic focusing on the relationship between language and place in the life of Brazilian women living in London, I reflect on the relevance of “not-knowing” as a fruitful space for researching autobiographical and situated life narratives through art practice. The article concludes that qualitative methods are relevant for building passages from the individual to the collective sphere of an art practice developed within geographical displacement and in the context of academic research.

The influence of subliminal crosstalk in dementia narratives.

Ethnographic audio-visual research data recorded in a busy dementia care environment were initially considered to be ‘contaminated’ by unwanted background noise. This included a variety of elements: ambient sound, mechanical noise, non-narrative vocalisation and narrative fragments from parallel conversation. Using the methodological lens of conversation analysis, we present an exploration of the striking temporal and sequential resonances between the narrative of one man with dementia and a group of care staff holding a separate conversation some distance away. We suggest that in this and similar settings, where random and intrusive background sounds and conversation form a ubiquitous backdrop, the presence of such ‘noise’ can have a detectable influence on the content and direction of situated narratives. We argue that rather than attempting to filter out these apparently intrusive sounds from micro-interactional data, interference elements can usefully be incorporated into the analysis of interactions.

Investigating Gender on the Frontier: 19th-Century Crooked Creek Cemetery

This qualitative case study highlights the work of university students who participated in a service learning component of a sociological research methods course. Their complete documentation and analysis of all 477 gravestones in the abandoned Crooked Creek cemetery provide a cultural snapshot of life in the Western frontier in the 1800s. In contrast to existing literature on the analysis of gender indicators on gravestones, this study finds significant evidence that gender was related to social identity and that indicators of master status exist for both women and men. Furthermore, the significant role of women in the development of a pioneer village is represented in the epitaphs chosen by a woman’s surviving family members. The findings attempt to dispel assumptions that the use of terms such as “wife” and “mother” on gravestones of the period exemplified the lower status of women in relation to men. Implications for genealogical research include rethinking the way researchers consider the role of wife and mother to write more historically situated narratives of family and community histories.

Ageing in Unsuitable Places

Much of the focus of ageing in place policy is concerned with the provision of support to enable older people to age in the community in residences adapted to their needs. There has been little examination of why older people make choices to age in particular places in later life. In this paper, we drew on 143 interviews with older people in New Zealand to examine the narratives older people use to describe their housing preferences in later life. Older people drew upon personal and public narratives to story housing in later life, and construct four identifiable identities: ‘practical planner’, ‘rugged pioneer’, ‘where I belong’ and ‘rooted in place’. This analysis demonstrates that some older people do narrate decisions to age in ‘sensible’ places with good access to services and have clear plans for change as their physical health declines. Other older people live proudly in unsuitable places and do not wish for support to move or accommodations made to their housing. These older people draw upon narratives of place as foundational to their identity, of relationships with people both living and dead as social relationships that bolster their identity and of housing as part of situated lifelong narratives. Both the situation of their home and the condition of the home provide the backdrop to alternative narrative identities that require them to remain in housing because of, or irrespective of, its unsuitability. To understand the limitations and the possibilities of ageing in place, we need to identify the multiple narratives that structure the lives of older people. By doing so, we can support ageing in place processes that do not disrupt the strong identities that have been developed in and through housing.

‘Seeing Through’

In the late 1950s, Portuguese artist Lourdes Castro migrated to Paris, where she lived until the early 1980s. This article examines the role of migration and transnational encounters in the construction of Castro’s artistic trajectory, with a particular focus on the 1960s and 1970s. More specifically, it explores the triangulation between the artist’s cosmopolitanism, the way space is materialised in her work of the 1960s and early 1970s – especially through the mobilisation of transparency – and processes of making and unmaking ‘home’ in contexts of dislocation. By analysing the interconnectedness of home and migration in the work of Castro, this article aims to contribute to the shaping of historically situated narratives of cross-cultural encounters within and beyond artistic communities whose mobility, temporal configurations and network articulations challenge any fixed and clear-cut division – or impermeability – between ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ in late modernity.

Entrepreneurship and mutuality: social capital in processes and practices

Social capital, which offers the broader theoretical construct to which networks and networking relate, is now recognized as an important influence in entrepreneurship. Broadly understood as resources embedded in networks and accessed through social connections, research has mainly focused on measuring structural, relational and cognitive dimensions of the concept. While useful, these measurements tell us little about how social capital, as a relational artefact and connecting mechanism, actually works in practice. As a social phenomenon which exists between individuals and contextualized through social networks and groups, we draw upon established social theory to offer an enhanced practical understanding of social capital – what it does and how it operates. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Robert Putnam, we contribute to understanding entrepreneurship as a socially situated and influenced practice. From this perspective, our unit of analysis is the context within which entrepreneurs are embedded. We explored the situated narratives and practices of a group of 15 entrepreneurs from ‘Inisgrianan’, a small town in the northwest of Ireland. We adopted a qualitative approach, utilizing an interpretive naturalistic philosophy. Findings show how social capital can enable, and how the mutuality of shared interests allows, encourages and engages entrepreneurs in sharing entrepreneurial expertise.

For ‘emotional fieldwork’ in critical geopolitical research on violence and terrorism

In recent years, there have been exhortations for scholars working in the area of critical geopolitics to be more committed in initiating ‘primary fieldwork’. These appeals are predicated on the belief that the subdiscipline's apparent over-reliance on secondary (re)sources neglect the ways in which political processes and dynamics ‘play out’ on the ground. Not denying the validity of such observations, I further argue that critical geopolitics needs to take into account the fieldwork process which can arguably shape the progression and outcomes of research. Drawing on my ‘field’ research on violence and terrorism in the Philippines, I propose that thinking critically about how emotions are intertwined in the conduct of fieldwork can provide a pathway to appreciate the unpredictable nature of the research process and the wider contexts/agencies that shape research outcomes and knowledges produced. Crucially, the witnessing of violence/terror is emotionally demanding, often bequeathing the researcher with fully embodied experiences of the ‘real’ situation on the ground. It opens up the researcher to different emotional engagements and connections with his/her respondents, which in turn allows for critical reassessments of issues pertaining to danger, ethics and responsibility. In this sense, ‘emotional fieldwork’, as I term it, has much to offer to critical geopolitics if incorporated as part of the subdiscipline's methodological consciousness. It not only provides researchers with useful navigational guidelines to traverse the tricky research terrains of working in ‘dangerous’, conflict-plagued regions but it also provides the basis for weaving more accurate and situated narratives that complements and advances deconstructivist critiques of dominant geopolitical discourses in and around certain locales.