Abstract This study uses a form of narrative analysis to examine a sample of sexual abuse survivors’ impact statements (n = 117) given in court at the sentencing of the former USA Gymnastics Olympic team doctor, Larry Nassar. Narrative analysis allows for prioritization of the victim’s perspective. Statements are analyzed using themes of agency and communion ( McAdams et al., 1996 ) and ineffectiveness

Abstract My contribution traces the evolving notion of tellability in the study of narrative over the last thirty-odd years: Tellability was initially seen as an objective property of textual content, but research on narrative in real contexts of talk has increasingly recognized the various ways interactional factors can override content as grounds for relating a story. I advance a set of research

Abstract This paper presents the findings from a study introducing nursing students to narrative production. The aim was to use Story Theory to inspire students to intentionally collaborate with older people and produce a mini-biography of those individuals. Narrative theory was utilised in four ways: designing an educational intervention; collecting and developing older peoples’ life stories; framing

Abstract Treating narrative as a social practice has enabled examination of the identity work accomplished through interactive story construction within various communities, including teacher preparation programs. Largely unaddressed in this literature is the presence of desire – the sense of longing conveyed through expressed wants, wishes, and hopes – and how it works in and through narrative practice

Museums offer rich material environments for studying narration as jointly accomplished by institutions and audiences. Following the narrative and participatory turns museums have taken, the research explores the narrative actions audiences’ texts perform vis-à-vis museums’ narrations. It examines audience participation in two history museums, as elicited by response vehicles – onsite media that serve

Abstract We present a case study of a small talk sequence in a Belgian workplace between two female colleagues with a migration background, in which they share stories with each other on racial micro-aggressions they personally experienced. We draw on the social practice approach and focus on the narrators’ identity work in this interaction. We found that the narrators construct stories in which powerless

Abstract Narrative identity is most often assessed via prompts for key autobiographical scenes (e.g., turning points). Here, self-presentation strategies were examined in relation to the content and structure of key scenes. Participants (N = 396) provided narratives of life high points, low points, and turning points from within one of four assessment contexts and completed measures of self-deception

Abstract Goffman’s concepts of face and face work, and his assertion that talk in face-to-face interaction is cooperative, are undertheorized and often critiqued. In an attempt to expand on these concepts, excerpts are analyzed from a single-teller narrative which evolves into a 13-minute conversational story about the relationship troubles of an absent third party. Analyzed for the verbal and nonverbal

Abstract This article investigates the flow of information in conversational narrative performance in light of research on the epistemics of talk in interaction and epistemic vigilance on the part of story recipients. Based on examples from a range of corpora, it reassesses the relationship between storytellers and recipients consistent with recipient design, and investigates cases of too little and

Abstract Many people live in circumstances of environmental suffering: exposure to contaminated natural resources and toxic chemicals due to a history of accident or misuse. Environmental suffering is disproportionately experienced by politically, ethnically, and economically disadvantaged group members. An analysis rooted in the concept of false consciousness (Gabel, 1975) suggests that environmental

Abstract This paper explores the pragmatic effects of Tense Shift in an Urdu narrative. A linguistic analysis of the semantic and pragmatic effects of Tense Shift is proposed. A key claim of this analysis is that the mechanisms of Tense Shift exist in sentence-level grammar in Urdu. The analysis seeks to provide an explanation for some of the properties of Tense Shift that have been pointed out in

This paper looks at two highly prevalent actions in naturally-occurring talk: stance-taking and storytelling. Stance-taking and storytelling have been shown to co-occur often (e.g. Siromaa, 2012), and this is especially the case in reading group talk, a discursive environment in which speakers are engaged in the joint enterprise of assessing the meaning and quality of a shared object: a written narrative

Abstract Sex work is often interpreted through master narratives that see women as victimized and subjected to stigmas and negative attitudes. This paper offers an insight into narratives that challenge or can be seen as an alternative to these narratives. Data are from a sample of 15 interviews with women who show an interest in sex work, conducted in a netnographic context. While widespread master

Researchers need to be cautious and reflective about the boundaries between narrative research and narrative intervention. Pursuing the ethics of care and the responsive and responsible practice of narrative inquiry obliges qualitative researchers to remain sensitive about the implications of engaging participants in narrative inquiry. This is accentuated with narrative inquiry into the life experiences

Abstract This article examines characteristics of stories in self-improvement books and the values they promote. The analysis of 36 stories from four self-improvement books shows that they are used to illustrate advice. By focusing on grammatical features (e.g., personal pronoun you, interrogative clauses) in the story components (e.g., evaluation, coda), my study shows that these stories promote the

Abstract The period of emerging adulthood is seen as a period of transition from adolescence to adulthood and is associated with increased alcohol consumption. The aim of the study is to understand the meaning of alcohol for emerging adults through stories about alcohol intoxication. Eighty-two drinking stories written by emerging adults were analysed using the narrative oriented inquiry (NOI) method

Abstract This article investigates an interactional phenomenon in which oral history interview participants deal with temporal structure in extended storytelling. It is based on the observation that while narrating a life story, participants routinely use its temporal structure as an organizing principle of the interview. Drawing inspiration from Sacks’ notion of tying devices and Genette’s distinction

Abstract This study investigates how immigrant workers construct their identities and social relations by telling stories in multilingual work environments. My main interest lies in naturally occurring and interactionally achieved stories, from the participants’ day-to-day interaction at a workplace. Data were collected from the informal interaction among employees at a nursing home in Honolulu. Positioning

Abstract Alexithymia encompasses difficulties in identifying and expressing feelings along with an externally oriented cognitive style. While previous studies found that higher alexithymia scores were related to an impaired memory for emotional content, no study so far investigated how alexithymia affects autobiographical narratives. Narrating personal events, however, is impaired in emotionally disturbed

Abstract Narrating personal experiences helps people make sense of them and contributes to improved well-being. However, little is known about how people recount stressful experiences that are interpersonal in nature. In this study, middle-aged North American women (N = 36), with lifetime histories of victimization, provided accounts of a recent stressful interpersonal event. High Point Analysis was

Abstract This project investigates narratives of survivors of sex trafficking posted on YouTube and focuses specifically on moments when the survivor started a transition from being trafficked to becoming free. Narrative analysis is used to explore recurrent narrative features and we find that the description of life or death circumstances is one common context for the decision to escape being trafficked

Abstract We examined narratives of romantic breakups (i.e., breakup accounts) in relation to romantic attachment tendencies. In Study 1, participants provided accounts of difficult breakups and indicated who in the relationship initiated its dissolution. In Study 2, participants provided breakup accounts from the perspective of the initiator and the non-initiator. Breakup accounts were coded for levels

Abstract Educational publishers often make their expository texts more vivid, by making them emotionally interesting, concrete and imagery-provoking, and proximate in a sensory, temporal, or spatial way. Previous studies have found mixed results regarding the effects of vividness on the attractiveness, comprehensibility, and memorability of educational texts. In order to be able to account for these

Abstract This paper examines Tara Rai’s Chhapamar Yuwatiko Diary [‘A Diary of a Young Guerrilla Girl’] (2010) – a memoir which describes a 15-year-old girl’s experience of first armed encounter, subsequent detainment, and release from the custody towards the end of the Maoist war in Nepal. We analyze the author’s narrative of adversity and distress, using thematic analysis. Three themes, namely, (1)

Abstract This paper joins the discussions on imaginal dialogue with references to the relational turn in psychoanalysis. It explores imaginal dialogue as a creative, relational endeavour in evoking the unconscious materials. By describing my own imaginal dialogue with Virginia Woolf, it exemplifies the potentiality of reading as an embodied, co-constructed interplay between the reader and the text

Abstract The present study aims to provide a conceptualization of how narratives function in TED talks. It uses Bamberg’s positioning theory as a theoretical framework to build a communicative model of TED Talk narratives. TED narratives are “small stories” that are told, indeed performed, in the presence of an audience and designed to accomplish particular rhetorical aims. The model specifically investigates

Abstract Victim/survivors of domestic violence are asked to tell their stories many times, in different contexts, and for different audiences. These stories are contextualized for the new context and audience at the same time that they become texts – entextualization – in that context. This article argues that narrative is produced via the co-processes of entextualization and contextualization ( Silverstein

Abstract While sociolinguistic studies of politeness and identities present many disciplinary parallels, their paths have seldom intersected (Garces-Conejos Blitvich & Sifianou, 2017, p. 227). It is within this context that this paper uses “small stories” research (Bamberg, 2006; Georgakopoulou, 2006, 2007) and identities analysis to study politeness-in-interaction (Georgakopoulou, 2013b). It particularly

This paper explores discursive narratives as inextricably linked to the construction of identity, place and history by a number of interviewed individuals. From an interactional sociolinguistics (cf. De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2012) perspective, the study explores the context of the East African diaspora (Georgiou, 2006; Manger & Assal, 2006 among many others) as the interviewed participants are all

This study used qualitative analyses to investigate similarities and differences in narrative production across two task conditions for four first grade Spanish-English emergent bilingual children. Task conditions were spontaneous story generation and retelling using the same story. Spanish stories from two children were compared on the basis of similarity in vocabulary, while English stories from

Abstract When it comes to autobiographical narratives, the most spontaneous and natural manner is preferable. But neither individually told narratives nor those grounded in the communicative repertoire of a social group are easily comparable. A clearly identifiable tertium comparationis is mandatory. We present the results of an experimental ‘Narrative Priming’ setting with French students. A potentially

Abstract The aim of the present study is to reformulate a descriptive typology previously developed with grounded theory as a result of the qualitative analysis of a good outcome case study. We developed a transtheoretical and easily usable coding system. We describe the developing process of this new coding system, which is focused on the use of language by the psychotherapist. Four researchers were

Abstract The paper purports to present a method that allows to obtain and analyze letters written by older adults to their real or imaginary grandchildren. This enables an insight into their individual life experience. The study used a narrative paradigm. Letter texts were obtained from 128 older adults from Poland, both male and female. Data was analyzed with mixed methods combining qualitative content

Abstract We refer to the concept of the hidden story as a story about one’s own life, internalized in the mind and knowable “indirectly”, through a monologue and inference, using linguistic and literary theory tools. The aim of the study was to determine whether the hidden story thus reconstructed would be stable in time. A twenty-one-year-old woman was asked to deliver a ten-minute monologue on her

Abstract This paper extends Pentland and Feldman’s (2007) narrative network method and uses it to more clearly understand how new technology affordances and digital spaces impact storytelling and enactment during and immediately after a crisis. To do this, I (a) examine the meaningful roles human motivation and feelings play in online storytelling and enactment, and (b) analyze how context impacts

Abstract The present study aimed to explore the personal narrative skills of Urdu speaking preschoolers, aged between 4 and 5 years. The study also aimed to investigate the gender differences in narrative skills, and relationship and the predictive association between macro- and microstructure skills. A total of 80 preschoolers were recruited using two-stage sampling (convenience and purposive). After

Abstract This study explores how 16 individuals who grew up during the four-year long military siege of the city employ language to make sense of their everyday experiences in Sarajevo following the conclusion of the Bosnian War. Narrative inquiry is employed in this work to study sense-making, a psychological process based in language and situated in interaction with extant social and physical landscapes

Abstract This paper focuses on the performance of small stories from two Cambodian men interviewed by the researcher about the relationships they form with men from the Global North. The analysis attends to the empirical significance of these performances by focusing on the mobilization of affect as an interactional linguistic and narrative resource that foregrounds social action in this context. In

Abstract In this article we present findings from two separate narrative phenomenological studies interested in the narrative representations of experiences. While meeting original research aims, unexpected accounts of the meaningful experience derived from participation in the studies emerged. The shared methodological approach is introduced, followed by explorations of time, space, actors, and scenes

Police use of social media has increased in the United Kingdom since 2008 (Crump, 2011), yet there has been little qualitative exploration of how police-owned Facebook sites work to shape the identity of forces. This study explores the action orientation of small stories on the Facebook site of a UK metropolitan police force. The research considers the collaborative ways in which stories are positioned

Abstract Negation in narrative has been described primarily as a resource for expressing evaluation, and secondarily in its role in establishing orientation, but this article investigates a range of ways negated statements can contribute directly to complicating action. Negation works through presupposition in the rhetorical figure of paralipsis with phrases like “to say nothing of.” Reporting “I don’t

Abstract While overlap represents one of the major mainstays of conversation-analytic research, the phenomenon of overlap involving backchannels in TCU-initial position has largely gone unnoticed. This study addresses this gap focusing on backchannels occurring in overlap in storytelling interaction. The investigation combines both quantitative and qualitative methods and is based on small but representative

Abstract In this paper, I analyse women’s interview narratives from the United States and Japan about their child rearing experiences to examine how stance-taking towards their experiences and their family members manifest itself differently. Paying attention to the narratives regarding their husbands’ role in child rearing, I examine how stance-taking may be perceived through overt and implied references

Abstract This study examines the evaluation of place in orientation sequences of narratives of internal migration to the Southern United States. Unlike other narratives of displacement, narratives of internal migration foreground talk about the here and now in which tellers evaluate place as an important aspect of narrative meaning-making. The current study draws on five narratives of internal migration

Abstract Previous research has argued that narrative is an evolutionary adaptation, offering advantages in terms of survival and reproductive successes. It is yet unclear, however, how narratives may promote our fitness to survive. Integrating developments in narrative theory, evolutionary psychology, communication science, and cognitive neuroscience, this article presents a Mental Simulation Model

Abstract To explore individual identity narratives of accommodation and resistance in relationship to dominant American social, political and cultural constructs, this paper uses the Listening Guide Method of Qualitative Inquiry (Gilligan et al., 2006) to investigate the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, gender and American identity during and post college among four second-generation, college

Abstract The learning journey of adult learners of Irish in post-conflict Northern Ireland can contain contentious elements, particularly related to (perceived) politicisation of the language during and following the conflict. Coates and Thornborrow (2005) suggest that stories involve striking a balance between deviation from norms and presenting oneself as “culture confirming”, so an apt way to explore

Abstract This paper examines personal narratives and how they change according to the context in which they are narrated. In particular, it argues that personal narratives change as they are mediated by various discourses, genres and modes, as well as by the peculiarities that emerge when speaking and writing in different languages and when undertaking translation. It uses a case-study approach to

Abstract This study examines a participant’s narrative in a focus group interview dealing with the evaluation of criminal justice policy – the impact of community policing training. However, rather than look at the narrative solely in the speech of the interviewee, I analyze the integration of speech and embodied conduct like gesture, gaze, and posture in the production and negotiation of professional

Abstract This article examines the concept of experientiality in conversational storytelling from an ethnomethodological perspective, introducing a case in which the narrative mediation of experience fails. The recipient misses the experiential point of the story in the flow of interaction, which stems from other reasons than a failure in sense-making or cognitive comprehension. I discuss my findings

Abstract The aim of this study is to unveil English learners’ beliefs and emotions regarding the English language education received in Catalan schools. For that purpose, data from 5 focus groups with 31 university students have been analysed through a combination of MCA and small stories analysis. The findings reveal that the participants are dissatisfied with the English language education provided

Abstract Developed in the context of a larger research study on healing from sexual abuse, the present article analyzes written narratives (letters) produced by nine adolescents who have been victims of sexual assault and who successfully completed a specialized psychotherapy. Letters, directed to another child or adolescent starting their therapy in the same center, were analyzed using three integrated

Abstract In this study I examine a corpus of former refugee narratives published by the nonprofit Refugee Council of Australia (RCOA) on their website in 2011. In order to investigate the relationship between the constituent parts and the narrative as a whole, I use critical discourse analysis to examine the strategic use of person, quantified temporal phrases, broader thematic elements, and the constitution

The paper presents findings from narrative analyses of interviews with 16 Gujarati women caring for a child with an intellectual disability in a midsized city in India. Participants’ mothering narratives articulate the multiple selves (or identities) they have constructed in the context of their child’s disability. In efforts to align with the cultural discourse on good mothering, women in this study

When stories (re)appear in YouTube videos, they are recontextualized not only by their titling and editing, but especially by chains of online comments. This article explores how a Northern Italian politician’s racialized story, which was first recontextualized by a TV news reporter on a YouTube video, is further recontextualized for different ends by commenters on that video. I show how these commenters

The study focuses on how preadolescent girls in instances of adult-children talk within the institutional setting of a girl group discussion forum construct joint stories that challenge a master narrative of school bullying. The unfolding of one such multi-party storytelling event on the topic of victimization is analyzed; primarily highlighting the participants’ interactional management of diverse

New parodic genres have emerged across diverse forms of digital media. Sometimes these parodies take the form of mock “narratives of personal experience,” with authors drawing on a range of discursive resources to perform particular identities and in doing so, to create texts written from imagined perspectives. In this article, I focus on parodies of user-generated product reviews on Amazon. For over

In Denmark, the Adult Education Centres have a “sweeper” function for young adults who need to recommence education. This study explores two L2 (Danish as Second Language) students and how their educational narratives confirm or counter the master narratives of adult education. Students at the centres are commonly identified as adults with social and personal challenges, but their educational narratives

This article combines the study of online narratives as social practices and the linguistic anthropological study of imagined communities, to examine a set of non-canonical narrative practices in a Facebook group for the Portuguese diaspora in France. Instead of reports of individual members’ past experiences, these narratives function as invitations to other group members to co-tell typical , shared

This paper presents the analysis of a series of workshops conducted in Italian multicultural classrooms, involving children aged 9–12. The workshops were based on the collection of photos representing the children’s memory and were designed to enhance dialogic facilitation of narratives in the classroom. Starting from the collected photos, a facilitator promoted the interactional production of narratives