Narrative Methods

“Sharing in Their Spiritual Blessings? The Story of Israel in Galatians and Romans,” in Bruce W. Longenecker (ed.), Narrative Dynamics in Paul: A Critical Assessment (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 58-84

by Bruce Longenecker

“The Narrative Approach to Paul: An Early Retrospective,” Currents in Biblical Research 1 (2002): 88-111. Reprinted in Paul Foster, ed., New Testament Studies: Benchmarks in Religious Studies (London: Sage Publications, 2010).

by Bruce Longenecker

An interest in 'narrative' has progressively been incorporated into recent scholarship on Paul and his letters. In... more An interest in 'narrative' has progressively been incorporated into recent scholarship on Paul and his letters. In this enterprise, scholars interest themselves not only in the 'surface level' of a Pauline letter but also in what lies 'beneath the surface'—imagining Paul's letters to be both animated and constrained by a narrative theology that comes to expression in Paul's theological discourse. Interest in the narrative dimension of Paul's thought has arisen in relation to several contributing influences within the theologi cal disciplines—influences both within and beyond the discipline of Pauline studies itself. This article outlines some ways in which 'narrative' is becom ing a key tool in studies of Paul's theology and letters, and suggests four factors behind the rise in this interesting enterprise.

Post-Narrative: An Appeal

by Angela Woods

Narrative Inquiry (2011) Volume 21(2) Pages 399-406

As the narrative turn enters its fourth decade, the task of identifying the limits of narrative and of exploring... more As the narrative turn enters its fourth decade, the task of identifying the limits of narrative and of exploring alternative approaches to interpreting the self and social world is growing in urgency. This article calls for scholars in the medical humanities to undertake this project through critically (re)engaging the work of Galen Strawson, Paul Atkinson and Crispin Sartwell.

The Limits of Narrative: Provocations for the Medical Humanities

by Angela Woods

Medical Humanities Journal (2011) Volume 37 Pages 73-78

This paper aims to (re)ignite debate about the role of narrative in the medical humanities. It begins with a critical... more This paper aims to (re)ignite debate about the role of narrative in the medical humanities. It begins with a critical review of the ways in which narrative has been mobilised by humanities and social science scholars to understand the experience of health and illness. I highlight seven dangers or blind spots in the dominant medical humanities approach to narrative, including the frequently unexamined assumption that all human beings are ‘naturally narrative’. I then explore this assumption further through an analysis of philosopher Galen Strawson's influential article ‘Against Narrativity’. Strawson rejects the descriptive claim that “human beings typically see or live or experience their lives as a narrative” and the normative claim that “a richly Narrative outlook is essential to a well-lived life, to true or full personhood”. His work has been taken up across a range of disciplines, but its implications in the context of health and illness have not yet been sufficiently discussed. This article argues that ‘Against Narrativity’ can and should stimulate robust debate within the medical humanities regarding the limits of narrative, and concludes by discussing a range of possibilities for venturing ‘beyond narrative’.

Life History, Biographical and Narrative Approaches in Education: Significant Bibliographical References in the English-speaking Field of Education

by Michel Alhadeff-Jones

Alhadeff-Jones, M. & Le Grand, J.-L. (2008) Life History, Biographical and Narrative Approaches in Education: Significant Bibliographical References in the English-speaking Field of Education. (Version 3; May 12th 2008). Available at: http://columbia.academia.edu/MichelAlhadeffJones.

This bibliography has been composed based on the consultation of the ERIC database (1966-2007) and the Milbank Library... more This bibliography has been composed based on the consultation of the ERIC database (1966-2007) and the Milbank Library catalogue (Teachers College, Columbia University). Since 2002, many references have been added, based on additional research on the Internet (including commercial websites), in books, or through personal contacts. The third version of this bibliography has been organized by themes and by types of sources (chapters, books and documents; papers, journals and conference proceedings). Despite the fact that this bibliography brings together approximately 450 references it is not an exhaustive one. Instead, its purpose is to introduce a broad field of study illustrating its diversity, as it can be observed in the English-speaking field of education and mainly in the American, Canadian and British field of education. From an international perspective, this bibliography can also be a complement to non English-speaking bibliographies already existing.

A structural and functional analysis of dream narratives

by Laura Cariola

Dreaming, 18 (1), pp.16-26.
MA thesis

This article demonstrates that elicited dream narratives use a differing narrative structural and functional... more This article demonstrates that elicited dream narratives use a differing narrative structural and functional framework, as proposed by Labov and Waletzky's (1967) narrative framework on elicited personal narratives. A quantitative structural and functional analysis of five male and female collected samples showed that dream narratives follow a homogenous structure of (1) Topic introduction, (2) Orientation, (3) Complication, (4) Evaluation, and (5) Coda, consequently reflecting the omission of Labov and Waletzky's (1967) proposed resolution unit, which confirms Labov's (1997) suggestion of the difficulty to distinguish between resolution and coda. Moreover, this article devotes attention to specific structural particularities, proposing that analepses and prolepses might indicate, firstly, the simultaneous processing of new spatial information and new protagonists, and secondly, reflecting indirectly the experience of dream bizarreness.

New Myths for a Very New World: The Mythic Journey as a Basis for Learning About Entrepreneurial Start-Ups

by Peter Mellalieu

Mellalieu, P. J. (2001). New Myths for a Very New World: The Mythic Journey as a Basis for Learning About Entrepreneurial Start-Ups. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Thinking. Presented at the Breakthroughs: The 9th International Conference on Thinking, Auckland, NZ. Retrieved from http://tinyurl.com/heropll

Also presented at:
Mellalieu, P. J. (2003). 7th International Conference on African Entrepreneurship and Small Business Development (ICAESB), Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Mellalieu, P. J. (2004). Enterprise in Distant Lands: Studies of South Pacific Business Development, The University of Auckland Business School.

How does a young, “peripheral” country develop the cultural infrastructure - the myths and stories - it needs to... more How does a young, “peripheral” country develop the cultural infrastructure - the myths and stories - it needs to inspire creation of the heroic forces for creating successful enterprises in a hypercompetitive, globalising world? The article presents the ‘first act’ of the true story of the establishment and early challenges faced by an ambitious new venture, New Zealand-based Pacific Lithium Limited (PLL), and its founding entrepreneur, Robin Johannink. Somewhat untypical for a formal business case report, the structure of the story presented here is strongly informed by Vogler’s (1998) “mythic structure of the heroic journey” and inspired by de Jong’s (1999) application of the mythic structure to what he notes as the heroic task of establishing a new business enterprise. The second part of the article presents observations drawn from the Pacific Lithium story, and outlines our approaches for extending the learning one can make from contemporary heroic tales of enterprise such as the one presented here. The author concludes that de Jong appears quite correct when he suggests that “as a scalable, replicable piece of social code, [the mythic structure of the heroic journey] could be as profound as the biological code Watson and Crick found in DNA” (de Jong, p. 159)

A narrative community

by Chaim Noy

Narratives and Counter-Narratives: Contesting a Tourist Site in Jerusalem

by Chaim Noy

In Jacqueline Tivers and Tijana Rakić (eds.), Narratives of Travel and Tourism. Aldershot, VT: Ashgate. Pp. 135-150. (2012)

This chapter examines the ideological role that narratives serve in tourism, arguing that tourism should be construed... more This chapter examines the ideological role that narratives serve in tourism, arguing that tourism should be construed as a highly ideological social sphere where political narratives are constantly at a struggle. The case study concerns a tourist site located in Jerusalem (Israel). The case shows how competing stories told of tourist sites and places are actually ideological narratives that serve effectively as part of larger ideological orders – in this case national ideology. I examine the hegemonic narrative (I borrow the term from Antonio Gramsci’s 1971 famous conceptualization) that is institutionally told of the site, and a counter-narrative that has been recently voiced by a group of artists/social activists. It is only through giving room to the latter narrative, that the hegemonic meanings imbued in the common story are revealed. In this sense we encounter counter-narratives in tourism, which are resistive and subversive stories that interrupt and undermine the industry’s powerful political commitments. Interestingly, from the perspective of tourism research, the counter-narrative voiced by local artists/activists is also produced within the semiotic realm of tourism, and also seeks to shape tourists’ consciousness and political convictions.
Thus narratives of tourism sites emerge as constitutive in terms of the meanings with which they charge the sites, and in terms of promoting hegemonic sets of meanings while reducing and silencing other meanings. Examining these narratives illuminates the awesome worldmaking power of tourism, which builds on the facts that, a. high ideological involvement can be achieved in and through tourism without it being explicitly marked as “ideology,” and b. that the nature of tourist behavior - which concerns embodied practices where travelers not only contemplate places but also consume them in an embodied and committed/mobilized sense.

Review of: Gary Yamasaki, Watching a Biblical Narrative: Point of View in Biblical Exegesis

by Juan Carlos Ossandón

Published in 'Annales Theologici' 22 (2008) 485-486

Persuasive brand management: How managers can influence brand meaning when they are losing control over it

by Oriol Iglesias

Iglesias, O. and Bonet, E. (2012) Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 25 Issue 2, pp. 251 165

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to build a conceptual framework that enables an improved comprehension... more
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to build a conceptual framework that enables an improved comprehension of how brand meaning is constructed.

Design/methodology/approach – Conceptual implications are drawn from an analysis and discussion of the literature in the fields of brand management, meanings, rhetoric, and narratives.

Findings – Brand managers are progressively losing control over the multiple sources of brand meaning. Brand meaning is co-created during the consumer-brand relationship and the customer-perceived brand meaning is re-interpreted at each touchpoint that a consumer has with a managerially determined brand interface, a brand employee, or an external stakeholder.

Originality/value – “Persuasive brand management” is presented as a new approach to brand management. It considers that the main activities of managers regarding brand strategy decisions involve processes of interpreting and creating meanings; as well as persuading a wide diversity of internal and external stakeholders.

"Strategic Empathizing: Techniques of Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Narrative Empathy"

by Suzanne Keen

Attending to the disembodied character in research on professional narratives: How the performance analysis of physically disabled professionals' personal stories provides insight into the role of the body in narratives of professional identity

by Julie-Ann Scott

Published in Narrative Inquiry

This essay provides a rationale of how Performance Analysis and Narrative Positioning within research on Physically... more This essay provides a rationale of how Performance Analysis and Narrative Positioning within research on Physically Disabled Professionals' Personal Narratives can provide insight into the role of the body in the analysis of professional narratives. Through analyzing the participants' open-ended narratives as performances in which the narrators draw upon performativities to reconcile the absurdity associated with their deemed `unprofessional' bodies legitimately occupying a professional space, the author traces the emergence of embodied professional heroes in four variations: the Super Hero, Warrior Hero, Tragic Hero, and Rogue Hero, each which illuminates the importance of the body in the construction of personal narratives of professionalism. In conclusion, the author calls for attention to the potential performance of the Anti Hero across personal narratives that emerge in unmarked bodies in order to attend the underlying performativities and discourses of power within all narratives of professionalism.

The narrative collage as research method

by Monika Kostera

Published in: (2006) STORYTELLING, SELF, SOCIETY 2/2, P. 5-27.

This paper is about the narrative collage. It discusses the narrative turn in organization studies and considers the... more This paper is about the narrative collage. It discusses the narrative turn in organization studies and considers the following questions: Why are stories important for interaction and knowledge? What can social scientists learn from storytelling
traditions? What are the different uses of stories in the study of organizations? Further, it focuses on the uses of one specific type of story in organizational research: fictive stories. There are several ways in which fiction can be used in social studies and the narrative collage is presented as a method particularly well suited for studies where imagination plays a central role. The idea of performative definitions, or linguistic statements that define the state of things (Austin, 1973/ 1993), is described as
an epistemological ground for the application of such stories.
The paper ends with a methodological section, where the narrative collage is portrayed among other similar research methods: ethnography and Action Research. Finally, a model of the process of collecting short stories for research purposes as well as in a practice setting.is proposed

Narratives and social experience of migration. Study Notes

by Agnese Vardanega

STUDY NOTES. Workshop - University of Koper, July 5th 2011

Social actors construct their experience in a kind of conversation with their ‘close circles’ (in Simmel’s terms), as... more Social actors construct their experience in a kind of conversation with their ‘close circles’ (in Simmel’s terms), as well as with their broader social environment. This is how they give form to their personal accounts, and to cultural ‘objects’ such as narratives.

When analysing stories of migration, thus, we are interested in finding the shared ‘categories’ transmitted in narratives.

CHANGING LIVES TO TACKLE CLIMATE CHANGE: Why do people adopt and maintain sustainable lifestyles?

by Sarah Hards

Darfur is Dying: A Narrative Analysis

by Adam Knowlton

The purpose of this study was to examine the narratives present within the game “Darfur is Dying,” to determine how... more The purpose of this study was to examine the narratives present within the game “Darfur is Dying,” to determine how the narratives in the game compare to Fisher’s standards for effective narratives, and to argue that narrative simulations like “Darfur is Dying” represent a new form of internet advocacy. The study found that by utilizing Fisher’s requirements of probability and fidelity to create a rational narrative, and providing an immersive, educational, and entertaining environment; narrative simulations present an advocacy platform that can be very successful in creating social action within a target demographic.

"You become really close... you talk about the silly things you did, and we laugh": the role of binge drinking in female secondary students' lives

by Damien Ridge

Sheehan, Margaret and Ridge, Damien T. (2001) "You become really close... you talk about the silly things you did, and we laugh": the role of binge drinking in female secondary students' lives. Substance Use & Misuse, 36 (3). pp. 347-372. ISSN 1082-6084

In Australia, negative attitudes to young women’s drinking have eased, drinking is on the increase, and there are... more In Australia, negative attitudes to young women’s drinking have eased, drinking is on the increase, and there are heightened concerns about heavy or ‘binge’ drinking. In a climate where underage drinking is frequently considered undesirable, campaigns aimed at reducing heavy alcohol use have failed. This paper takes as it’s departure point the notion that alcohol plays a meaningful role in social lives and relationships. It is through the use of narrative that these young women make sense of their drinking, which is still stigmatised. Any harms encountered along the way tend to be filtered through the ‘good story’, brimming with tales of fun, adventure, bonding, sex, gender transgressions and relationships. Nevertheless, these women implemented their own practical harm minimisation strategies, and it is here that professionals can gain a foot hold and assist young people to drink more safely.

Creating Narratives of the Past as Recombinant Histories

by Ruth Tringham

pre-print draft. Submitted in January 2012 to edited volume "Against Objectivized Subjects: Alternative Narratives in Archaeology", edited by Ruth M. Van Dyke and Reinhard Bernbeck, to be published by University Press of Colorado, Denver

In this paper I bring together the ideas of Steve Anderson (Recombinant History), Lev Manovich (Database Narratives),... more In this paper I bring together the ideas of Steve Anderson (Recombinant History), Lev Manovich (Database Narratives), Carlo Ginzburg (Microhistories), and Kathleen Stewart (Ordinary Affects) with my own experience in creating experimental narratives for archaeology using multiple media forms. It explores the fragmentary and non-linear nature of narratives about the past as a legitimate form of presenting the interpretation of archaeological data and the voices of both modern narrators and sentient prehistoric actors, drawing especially on my current research in the challenging world of pre-literate Europe and Anatolia. The paper provides a
demonstration of such a recombinant history on the Web.

[Book Review: The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents Elisabeth Bronfen]

by Dianne Hunter