Citation:

Addison, Joanne. “Narrative As Method and Methodology in Socially Progressive Research.” Practicing Research in Writing Studies: Reflexive and Ethically Responsible Research, edited by Katrina Powell and Pamela Takayoshi, Hampton Press Inc., 2012, 373-383

Summary:

Author Joanne Addison creates an interesting article by weaving together her personal story of fostering a severely abused child and her interest in narrative inquiry as both a tool of teaching as well as social progress. She takes us through the experiences of her fostered child in bite-sized pieces, mixing in first a definition of the narrative process, in particular the building of personal narratives as opposed to literary ones, and then focusing on that step just before the narrative begins: the decision to tell the tale. Every story, she tells us, must first be judged worth telling, and then find an interested audience. Only recently, for example, has domestic violence become a story anyone will tell or listen to.

There are many kinds of narrative, and Addison is not after a comprehensive overview here. Instead, she is interested in the building of personal narratives like identity narratives and what they do for us as developing humans. She tries to differentiate further the fields of narrative inquiry and narrative analysis. She wants to view personal narratives as a genre for study, not as individual pieces for analysis. For this kind of study, she says we can look at narratives alongside case-studies, situating them in the context of other data like archived records, newspaper articles, medical records, and all the other documents and evidence that accumulate around our lives. Putting the narratives in context, she claims, widens the avenues for socially progressive research.

Addison also calls us to acknowledge our place, our biases and opinions and facts of our own lives as researchers. She calls this stance of consciously placing oneself inside the realm of the research as one of “strong objectivity.” From out of this strong objectivity, we can more accurately and usefully notice cultural norms and assumptions and avoid, or at least call attention to, the inevitable presence of confirmation bias.

Addison ends her article with a brief glance towards Deborah Brandt and her style of case-study research firmly rooted in economic reality. Addison’s final claim is that these kinds of narrative inquiries represent sort of social friction, showing us the rough edges of where we rub not only against each other but against those pervasive systems of education, politics, and economy.

Quote Bank:

“It might be argued that narrative inquiry as practiced in the social sciences arose from a need for the very types of socially progressive research methods that can provide systematic and rigorous challenges to destructive cultural assumptions” (375)

“It is a rather recent phenomenon that domestic violence constitutes a reportable event. And, what of those who are unable to report, due to lack of access, disability, or… status as a preverbal being? Here, the entailment requires some other to determine that an event is reportable” (375)

“At the heart of identity narratives is not a process of description or even drama per se. Rather, these narratives are rooted in a recursive process of becoming” (376)

“In order for narrative inquiry to be useful we must be able to explain the ways in which it fosters systematic and rigorous analysis that can lead to social change” (378)

“Harding and others call for objective accounts of the world that acknowledge conceptual biases and apply research methods that not only reveal the various standpoints we inhabit but also show how these standpoints bear on our research” (379)

“Case-based narrative inquiry can lead to socially progressive research not only because it can lead us to newly reportable events but because it can also lead to different evaluations of existing complications within a narrative especially when prevailing evaluations are rooted in cultural norms and assumptions, not facts” (380)

“Perhaps what is socially progressive about narrative inquiry is not only that it results in friction but that is calls for us to stop and determine the degree and source of the friction” (382)

Reflection:

There were a lot of really interesting and great points in this article. I like how the author wove in her own (or her foster son’s) narrative. At first, it was unclear what was happening, but then the story began to take shape and, reflexively, the article as a whole. It was a pleasing experience.

Unfortunately, the writing itself made it hard for me to sustain my attention. This was a short piece, and yet it felt much longer than its page count. For example, let’s look at a quote I pulled for my quote bank: “these narratives are rooted in a recursive process of becoming.” Not a terrible or difficult sentence. A little dry perhaps, but nothing to complain about. But that’s not the whole sentence. Here’s the whole thing: “Rather, these narratives are rooted in a recursive process of becoming, where the orientation and complication may change while the evaluation increases the complexity and resolution may, or may not, differ through time.” I can’t really figure out what’s going on there. “The resolution may or may not differ through time?” Why write something like that? Or consider this thorny little knot of a sentence: “Narrative inquiry is an important contextual method insofar as it insists that the context in which any given phenomenon occurs is equal to the phenomenon itself at the point of evaluation” (378). I had to read that four or five times to come out with the tentative translation that context may carry equal weight to content.

My point here is not to cast aspersions on the capable author. Merely to note where and why I found myself struggling with a text I agreed with and wanted to like. Hard reading is not always bad reading, but the accessibility of this article is not very high. Even as I read and reread, I found myself struggling with just what she was trying to say.

I also went into this article hoping for more practical ideas or applications. Her advocacy for case-based broad research is useful and progressive. I hope someone does it (is doing it). But it’s not anything I can use for my own classroom. By it’s very nature, this kind of research calls for a larger scope. I have trouble thinking of how I can fit her thoughts into something I could add or adjust in the curriculum. Certainly, there is the usefulness of focusing on personal narrative (we do), and the importance of recognizing the biases of our place and time (we try). But I can’t say that I got anything practical out of this reading. I can draw links here to some of the expressivist pedagogy as laid out by Christopher Burnham, with the focus on recognizing our place in time and how we influence the outcomes of our research. I see an important conversation here about how to create environments where progress becomes possible without forcing the issue or becoming another form of norming. This is a conversation that I want to have as I consider how to add in some of the slow reading concepts I’m learning. It’s useful as well to have my focus shifted out to the larger context of narrative inquiry as a progressive tool on a societal scale. It’s just that at this point in my career (the very beginning), I’m a lot more interested in narrative analysis, and maybe not quite ready for this wider vision. Or, I guess I’m unsure of exactly how to relate to it, or what I might practically do with it.