The Democratic Potential of Narrative, Poetry, and Performance

Narrative

The narrative method involves “a collaborative method of telling stories, reflecting on stories, and (re)writing stories” (Leavy, 2009, p. 27; see also Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007; Pinnegar & Daynes, 2007). The process of constructing narrative involves an attempt to “access participants’ life experiences and engage in a process of storying and restorying in order to reveal multidimensional meanings and present an authentic and compelling rendering of the data” (Leavy, 2009, p. 27). The more evocative and aesthetically compelling a constructed narrative is, the more its readers will be able to empathize with the narrative’s protagonist(s).

This approach has clear relevance to the goal of producing and sharing the knowledge held by community stakeholders. Narratives may serve as a way to capture local knowledge in a complex, nuanced, evocative, and personally resonant manner, thus deepening the understanding between researchers, readers, and community stakeholders. Because a compelling narrative has the potential to transform one’s outlook on the world and on the lives of others (Jones, 2003; Kim, 2006), it is logical to conjecture that life histories and lived experiences – when presented through a compelling and evocative narrative – will be more impactful than by merely providing researchers and practitioners with facts, demographics, and interview transcripts.

Indeed, narrative researchers are interested not only (or even primarily) in facts, but, rather, are concerned with the meanings that are captured and conveyed through narrative. Furthermore, these meanings are presented in rich, contextual detail (i.e., through moments of lived experience), and, thus, narrative inquiry is not focused on producing decontextualized knowledge that is generalizable. In this way, narrative inquiry allows researchers to capture the contextualized, authentic essence of dynamic human experience (Bailey & Tilley, 2002; Hardy, Gregory, & Ramjeet, 2009).

The epistemology of narrative inquiry is, in part, rooted in a particular philosophy of how human beings experience the world. As the philosopher John Dewey (1938) argued, human beings experience the world through a continuous flow of experience (rather than through discrete, disconnected moments). Relatedly, Dewey argued that human beings do not experience the world as a series of encounters with abstract forms or abstract ideas; rather, human beings encounter the world through singular moments that are contextualized in concrete detail in the real world. Abstract ideas may be helpful tools that human beings can use to understand the world upon reflection; however, our encounter with the world occurs within specific moments of lived experience (moments that cannot necessarily be reduced to abstract and generalizable principles). For this reason, a rich description of narrative experience (i.e., a description of the flow of experience as it occurs in real time and in context) may be one of the most valid and reliable ways to capture and represent knowledge about the human experience.

It is worth noting that Dewey’s philosophy is recognizable in the methodological frameworks developed by narrative researchers. For example, Clandinin and Connelly (2000) have developed an approach to narrative inquiry that encourages researchers to attend to elements of personal and social interaction, of the continuity of time (past, present, and future), and of place and situation. That is to say, when researching lived experience, narrative researchers must pay particularly close attention to the manner in which human experience unfolds (i.e., through interactions with others, in time, and in particular places and situations). This approach is noticeably different than other approaches to social science (e.g., building statistical models with large scale data sets) which may seek to smooth away any particulars present in the data that is collected. Many social science methods (both quantitative and qualitative) rely on the process of categorization; narrative inquiry (and, arts-based methods, more generally) tend to eschew categorization and generalization in favor of a focus on particulars, uniqueness, and singularity.