Notes take directly from `Experience-Centred and Culturally-Oriented Approaches to Narrative’ paper by Corinne Squire. Forthcoming in M. Andrews, C. Squire, M. Tamboukou, Doing Narrative Research, London: Sage.
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1. What are the major differences between event-centred and experience-centred approaches?
- The event-centred approach excludes talk involving ‘narration of self’, representation itself, and co-construction.
- The experience-centred approach therefore assumes that narratives are sequential and meaningful, display transformation or change, re-present experience (reconstituting it as well as expressing it) and are definitively human.
- Unlike event-centred approaches, personal narration includes all sequential and meaningful stories of personal experience. Storytelling is deeply social, and constitute and maintain sociality (Denzin).
- Researchers may look at hard-to-transcribe fragments, contradictions and gaps within narratives, as well as the language used. They may draw on larger discourses or genres for interpretation. Sometimes the approach can be expanded to also include analysis of text and image rather than just oral tellings.
- Event-centred approaches gather corpuses of stories, whereas experience-centred researchers are more likely to constrain themselves to a specific number of participants, usually small.
2. What characterises the Ricoeurian and Brunerian account of narrative?
- Ricoeur presented the experience-centred notion that “time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode,” and that narrative is co-constructed ‘practical wisdom.’ Bruner describes narrative as transgression and restoration of canonic understanding.
- For Ricoeur, top-down and bottom-up interpretive procedures are used to address the hermeneutic circle of interpretation. For many researchers (e.g. Freeman) the hermeneutic circle never closes.
3. What are some of the difficulties faced when applied to social science research?
- Ricoeur’s definition of narrative is an ideal.
- Can we identify a ‘good story’? Chamberlayne, Crossley, Holloway and Jefferson seem to think so, but this prescriptive approach may overly narrow our criteria.
- Do we need our stories to have endings or futures built into them? Freeman, for example, thinks that stories are often tied to possibilities within life.
- There is debate over whether the Ricoeurian approach can be extended to look at the subconscious in relation to psychoanalysis. Some researchers argue that the unsayable stands outside the concerns of narrative research.
- Time is still a focus in the Ricoeurian approach, and this is still restrictive – space and theme may also be powerful organisers of human experience.
- There is a loss of attention to language itself, emphasis is on meaning.
- There is debate over how linked to actual experience stories are. Following Ricoeur, Venn notes that stories form a third space between the real and the imagined.
4. What are the abiding benefits of taking this kind of approach?
- The openness, flexibility, and reflexivity of this approach are some of the most useful features.
5. What culturally centred approaches are there?
- Socially and Culturally-Oriented approaches include those espoused by Plummer and Riessman.
- Plummer thinks that intimate disclosure narratives and the interpretive communities that they build are highly significant personally, socially and politically. Interpretive communities have to exist for stories to be told, and build collective identities.
- Narrative for Riessman is a mode of interpersonal, social and cultural positioning and negotiation. An interview is a co-constructed narrative – and a narrative is the full personal narrative told by the interview. Riessman’s framing brings together the study of event, experience and cultural narratives.
6. What Problems are there with these approaches?
- Culture is not static, and genres are always changing. Genres will be understood differently by different people and cultures.
- The cultural approach has also been commented to neglect individuals’ own stories.
- This approach does not fit well with postmodern approaches to constructed, distributed and multiple subjectivities. It is possible to argue that the ‘social construction of self’ and the ‘expression of self’ that are assumed in both Plummer’s and Riessman’s work rely on different conceptions of self that cannot be reconciled (modern and postmodern respectively).
- Many equally persuasive readings are available for any story (Freeman) and interpretations vary across time and place (Andrews, Riessman).
- The approaches within this banner are wide, diverse and can be conflicting.
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