Narrative and voice relational methodology: an emancipatory approach

1
Narrative and voice relational methodology an
emancipatory approach ?

• Rebecca Lawthom, Division of Psychology and
  Social Change, MMU, Research Institute for Health
  and Social Change

2
Colleens story (co-constructed by Colleen and
Rebecca)

• Structure of talk
• Introducing narrative
• Methodological persuasions
• Doing of life story research
• Claiming epistemological locations

3
Approaching methodology in life story research

• An emancipatory interview approach
• An emancipatory framework
• Emancipation and voice
• . As Larson (1997) notes,
• When researchers share their ways of seeing,
  understanding and interpreting life events with
  story-givers, they surface the fissures between
  their own life worlds and those of the people
  they portray. (p.459)

4
How is story co-constructed

• Dialogue interpretation
• Audience design actual storytelling
• Och and Kapps narrative dimensions tellership
• Ochs and Jacoby role of the teller is distinct
  from that of the author

5
Guiding epistemological points

• Whilst the writer has the final authority
  regarding the story, the process is guided and
  shaped by Colleen.
• Both the story giver and the author of the story
  are women, friends and feminists in orientation.
• The writers political and theoretical
  orientation have steered or shaped the course of
  the research (even if only unconsciously).
• Only data gathered for the purposes of the life
  story exercise are used in the weaving of the
  story and the final product.
• The relationship history outside of the story
  however, must have played a role in the selection
  of the story giver and the latters presentation
  of the narrative.
• An emancipatory framework is used in a processual
  way rather than presuming analysis can enlighten
  the story-giver or substantially change ones
  life..

6
Doing/eliciting a life story

• Colleens life story
• Narrative activity becomes a tool for
  collaboratively reflecting upon specific
  situations and their place in the general scheme
  of life. ..the content and direction that
  narrative framings take are contingent upon the
  narrative input of other interlocutors, who
  provide, elicit, criticise, refute and draw
  inferences from facets of the unfolding account.
  In these exchanges, narrative becomes an
  interactional achievement and interlocutors
  become co-authors. (Ochs and Kapps, 2001, p2-3)

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Informing epistemology in life story research

• Idiographic not nomothetic interested in the
  private, individual and subjective nature of life
  rather than the public, general, objective
• Hermeneutic not positivist preoccupied with
  capturing the meanings of a culture/ person
  rather than measuring the observable aspects of a
  culture/ person
• Qualitative not quantitative focused on the
  wordy nature of the world rather than its
  numerical representation
• Specificity not generalisation amenable to the
  specific description and explanation of a few
  people rather than the representative
  generalities of a wider population
• Authenticity not validity engaged with the
  authentic meanings of a story and its narrator
  rather than devising measures that measure what
  they purport to measure
• Language as creative not descriptive recognises
  the constructive effects of language rather than
  language as a transparent medium for describing
  the world

8
Feminist standpoint approach to life story
research

• Feminist narratives
• Lapsley, Nikora and Black (2002)
• Hunt (1998)
• Mauthner (2002)
• Zhang (1999)

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Colleens a feminist tale?

• Colleens narrative is fundamentally a feminist
  tale. In form, it gives voices to one woman and
  her story in process, the research was
  undertaken in an emancipatory framework and in
  context, the story tells of a womans realisation
  that patriarchy is present, both at a macro and
  personal level.
• Whether this will ever change, whether ever
  anyone will ever think it is a really wonderful
  job that women do, I dont know.(Colleen)

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Voice Relational Approaches

• . Brown and Gilligan (1992, p22) point out that,
  Recasting psychology as a relational practice,
  we attend to the relational dimensions of our
  listening, speaking, taking in, interpreting, and
  writing about the words and the silences, the
  stories and the narratives of other people.
• Feminists have challenged monological practices
  in inquiry
• We rethink traditional monological practices in
  narrative inquiry and use dialogical processes
  that assist story givers in untangling the
  complex meanings of their own lived
  experience.(Larson, 1997, p.456)

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Doing voice relational methods

• Reading One Reading for plot and our response to
  the narrative
• Reading Two Reading for the voice of I
• Reading Three Reading for relationships
• Reading four Placing people within cultural
  contexts and social structures

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Is analysis necessary ?

• Analysis works against storytelling
• Role of analysis is crucial particularly in
  postmodern times
• Goodley (2000) notes
• The emic view of the narrator and the analytical
  and reportorial skills of the researcher are
  combined to draw out broader socio-structural,
  cultural, political and theoretical points
• relevance of a few accounts to many similar
  others.

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Critical reflections on voice relational analyses

• The many voices of voice relational analysis
• Yet, as Ochs and Kapps (2002) point out (using
  Bakhtin) that,
• the influence of others ideas on the shape of
  the narrative is invisible. Taking the logic of
  revoicing to the extreme, every word, expression,
  and genre, we employ in a narrative has been
  co-authored in the sense that they have been
  developed and used by others before us (p.25).
• Easy analyses? Or collaborative analyses
• , the knowing is constructed by the researched
  and the researcher (Lave and Wenger, 1991 )

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The dominance of some voice(s)

• . Working within an emancipatory framework, and
  involving storytellers in the analysis allows
  full inclusion in the research process and the
  possibility for emancipatory understanding.
• Working closely with co-researchers and upon
  the text, allows positive storytelling and/or
  alternative narratives ( as in narrative
  therapy).
• Storytellers can be shown the significance of
  their tales and their emancipatory stance.
• The fourth reading of the VRM allows storytellers
  to see the structural (often determined) nature
  of agency, within which to contextualise their
  own story.

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Research production as an individualised identity
project

• Inclusivity
• Interesting stories ?
• Ethical considerations
• Larson (1997) notes that when working with
  narrative, conversation is important,
• This monological method of storytelling and
  taping felt far more akin to poor therapy than to
  a collaborative effort to make meaning of life
  experience. (p.457)

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Ordinary stories, extra-ordinary insights

• VRM allows a gaze on the emotional world
  (relatedness) and material world.
• Working with informants in this way can be
  political and inclusive.
• The relationship between the researcher and the
  researched is key to the process.
• The researcher should share their theoretical
  stance and position this as a relativist position
  (i.e. it is purely one position and not THE
  position).

17
Reconceptualising participants, reconceptualising
the audience

• A liberated academic psychology must position
  itself in solidarity with those who are
  marginalized and have hitherto been without a
  voice in the discipline, or indeed in society
  (Kagan, 2002, p.10)
• Indeed, Rapaport and Stewart (1997, p.313, cited
  in Kagan, 2002) ask us to,
• consider how differently we would speak, what
  different priorities we might have, and how
  differently we might relate to our own (and
  mainstream psychologys ) rhetoric if we spoke
  with the people and oppressed communities
  rather than to ourselves and other psychologists
  . We might begin to see that our own practices
  and promises are often naïve, elitist, romantic,
  reifying and/or obfuscating..our struggle for
  legitimacy and impact would be different if
  instead of being aimed at journal editors,
  departmental heads, and colleagues, it were
  directed at those people and communities we
  profess to champion.

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Co-collected/authored/analysed narratives present
possibilities

• Audience on levels
• Spectatorship so it could be like that
• Co-researchers as legitimate peripheral
  participants in COPs
• Stories as islands of meaning which allow
  sculpting (Zerubavel) cognitive geography
• La Rossa (1995 notes that stories are,
• narratives crafted by people to favourably
  situate themselves in the topography of social
  life (p.553)

19
Transformative research, transforming audiences

• The wider feminist community is a sector of the
  audience
• Colleens narrative the storying of
  emancipation, so it could be like that?.
• Coming out story
• Research and learning as coparticipative and
  distributed

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Conclusions

• Empowering a process or state ?
• Research as individual or collective projects
• Academic ownership
• Fits into a critical, political vision of
  psychology if dissemination seen as social
• Storytelling is what we do