Researchers assert that narratives do political work. Yet, in this article, we trouble the nature of this political work to account for narrative inquiry’s smoothing over of polyvocality for univocal coherence. Our posthumanist unsmoothing builds an analytical example around three successive Latourian tasks to bring to the fore competing voices and truths often obscured in conventional narrative. Drawing from ethnographic data of one low-income rural family, we seek to complicate the human-centered deficit perspective. In teasing out various voices and sociotechnical systems, this posthuman analytic exposes the hidden ways in which human lives are conditioned by political forces, which order the human conscious. As ethical beings, we take responsibility for promoting analytical tools as a means of addressing advocacy as well as social justice concerns. Ultimately, we expose implications for a narrative unsmoothing that rethinks democracy and political efforts to reclaim the voice of the marginalized, such that it can dismantle deficit perspectives, inform greater sociopolitical understandings, and mobilize more just democracies. Our task as critical scholars is to carve provocative methodological spaces for new lines of inquiry that expand our horizon of hope.

中文翻译：

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后人文主义的叙事平滑化

研究人员断言叙事是在做政治工作。然而，在本文中，我们对这种政治工作的性质感到困惑，无法解释叙事性探究为实现单一连贯性而对复音的平滑。我们的后人道主义主义者的不懈努力围绕三个接连的拉图尔式任务建立了一个分析实例，以突显传统叙事中经常被模糊的竞争声音和真理。从一个低收入农村家庭的人种学数据中，我们试图使以人为中心的赤字观点变得复杂。在嘲弄各种声音和社会技术系统时，这种后人类的分析揭示了政治力量对人类生活的隐蔽方式，这些力量对人类的意识进行了排序。作为有道德的人，我们有责任推广分析工具，以此来解决倡导和社会正义问题。最终，我们揭露了叙事不顺畅的涵义，它重新考虑了民主和政治努力，以重新获得边缘化群体的声音，从而可以消除赤字观点，增进对社会政治的了解，并动员更多公正的民主国家。作为批判学者，我们的任务是为新的探究方法开拓启发性的方法论空间，以扩大我们的希望范围。