Skip to main content

B3 W5: Gender and Social Inclusion - Doing narrative research

Andrews, M., Squire, C., & Tamboukou, M. (2013). Doing narrative research. Sage. "Narrating Sensitive Topics" Margareta Hydén 121-136

"I will make the claim that what is a sensitive topic and what is not is due mainly to relational circumstances, that is, the relationship between the teller and the listener." p.122

"My ideal interviewer - and also my ideal narrative researcher - is a person equipped with the essential skills to assist the interviewee in his or her efforts to narrate." p.123

"Without having experienced the cognitive process of 'having been through' an experience and rendering it some meaning so you 'know about it', it is difficult to discuss the experience." p.125

As a social worker, she felt the power imbalance denied her cooperation with some of the clients.
As a researcher of domestic violence, she felt she was the less powerful one, and therefore "I was the one who asked them for something that was valuable to me, i/e/ their experiences." p.127
But in actuality, there was a different power relation that still left her on top - before it was that she was a representative of the state and could give money and counselling. As a researcher, she held a culturally highly valued position, whereas the battered women were unloved and therefore in a culturally low position. p.127

"if interviews that include sensitive topics deal principally with 'damned old trash' they are potentially harmful, and a basic feature of the sensitive topic of being the victim of domestic violence, for example, strategies of resistance, is left out." p.128

"Narratives are always open to reinterpretation. By passing them on to new audiences, we pave the way for possible new meanings - and as they are passed on, they make entrance into new power relations." p.129

Making space - offering a physical space allows for individuals to voice concerns but also to reform their life history p.130
Offering discursive space allows for topics that individuals wish to discuss but may have been interpreted wrongly, to bring to light p.131
Offering discursive space by challenging the narrative performance - the interviewer challenges the interviewee on the validity of their story which creates the possibility for other narratives to be told. p.132
Offering discursive space by empowering the narrator - interrupting the interview to prevent too much emotional pain and trauma, empowering the interviewee by offering kinship, even in an imagined form

"Different physical spaces offer different discursive spaces." p.135

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

B2 W5: Theory and Critical Research - Queerness as Horizon

José Esteban Muñoz (2009). “Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Pragmatism” in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York/London: New York University Press, 19-32. Do not dismiss the "we" of utopian visions and demands as "merely identitarian logic", but rather "The "we" speaks to a "we" that is "not yet conscious," the future society that is being invoked and addressed at the same moment." p.20 Links to Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands and the way she addressed the queer future - where people of all races and sexualities are able to relate to each other equally - it is not naive, it is optimistic. "The particularities... are not things in and of themselves that format this "we"; indeed the statement's "we" is "regardless" of these markers, which is not to say that is beyond such distinctions or due to these differences, but, instead, that...
Post a Comment
Read more

Thesis reading: Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy

Pateman, Carole "Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy" in  The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory . Stanford University Press: California. 1989 118-133 "Benn and Gaus’s account assumes that the reality of our social life is more or less adequately captured in liberal conceptions. They do not recognize that ‘liberalism’ is patriarchal-liberalism and that the separation and opposition of the public and private spheres is an unequal opposition between women and men." p.120 "One reason why the exclusion [of women] goes unnoticed is that the separation of the private and public is presented in liberal theory as if it applied to all individuals in the same way. It is often claimed - by anti-feminists today, but by feminists in the nineteenth century, most of whom accepted the doctrine of ‘separate spheres’- that the two spheres are separate, but equally important and valuable. The way in which women and men are differentiall...
Post a Comment
Read more

B2 W3: Somatechnics - Imagined futures

Alison Kafer: “Introduction: Imagined Futures”, in: Feminist, Queer, Crip, Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013, pp. 1-24. Upon seeing Alison Kafer uses a wheelchair and has been physically scarred by a fire, people imagine a bleak future of isolation and sadness for her. However other disabled people imagine a future for her where ableism, not disability, is the obstacle she must overcome. "What these two representations of the future share, however, is a strong link to the present." p.2 "If disability is conceptualized as a terrible unending tragedy, then any future that includes disability can only be a future to avoid. A better future, in other words, is one that excludes disability and disabled bodies; indeed it is the very absence of disability that signals this better future." p.2 "the value of a future that includes disabled people goes unrecognized, while the value of a disability-free future is seen as self-evident" p.3...
Post a Comment
Read more