Piecing Together—A Methodological Bricolage (original) (raw)
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Narrative methodologies emphasise the temporal quality of both lived lives and told stories, and enable us to attend to the ways in which the grand narratives of history and socio-political life articulate with individual, personal lives or psychological realities. However, the narrative approach entails three key epistemological and/or political problems: 1) the imposition of a particular conception of a "good" narrative (and by implication, psyche or life) that entails logical flow, integration and coherence; 2) the production and re-inscription of a gap between life and story, particularly stories told in research interviews; and 3) individualising single narrators extracted from their contexts. I argue that combining narrative research methods with visual methodologies within an action research paradigm may assist us to work through and against these limitations. Visual methodologies are relatively commonplace as a means to collect data, particularly helpful when stories are difficult to articulate. I suggest extending the use of visual techniques to facilitate creative representation and productive analysis. Examples of innovative visual representations of data illustrate possibilities for challenging the limits above: 1) Repetitive stress injuries: Non-stories and visual techniques for sense-making; 2) Visual tracking of multiple temporal trajectories; and 3) Re-invoking the relational quality of narrated identity.
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After establishing its roots in basic forms of sensorimotor coupling between an organism and its environment, the new wave in cognitive science known as "enactivism" has turned to higher-level cognition, in an attempt to prove that even socioculturally mediated meaning-making processes can be accounted for in enactivist terms. My article tries to bolster this case by focusing on how the production and interpretation of stories can shape the value landscape of those who engage with them. First, it builds on the idea that narrative plays a key role in expressing the values held by a society, in order to argue that the interpretation of stories cannot be understood in abstraction from the Background of storytelling in which we are always already involved. Second, it presents interpretation as an example of what Di Paolo, Rohde, and De Jaegher (2010) have called in their recent enactivist manifesto a "joint process of sense-making": just like in face-to-face interaction, the recipient of the story collaborates with the authorial point of view, generating meaning. Third, it traces the meaning brought into the world by interpretation to the activation and, potentially, the restructuring of the Background of the recipients of the story.
Journal of Education, 2020
Traditionally, a storyboard has been used in the film-making industry as part of the preparatory process of film production. In this article, we focus on its use as a creative space for analysis in educational research. Specifically, we make visible our learnings, as social science researchers, about storyboarding as an imaginative, tangible, and reflexive space for narrative inquirers to work with the complexity of restorying lived lives in educational research. We draw on Sibonelo's reflections on using the storyboard in his doctoral dissertation and offer our subsequent dialogues on his reflections as the data for this article. Our learnings indicate that storyboarding opens-up researcher subjectivity in the restorying process. In engaging critical friends, it serves as a space for the mediation of multiple perspectives and meanings of participants' lived lives and is an imaginative space in which to filter creatively large amounts of field texts. We thus suggest that storyboarding enhances verisimilitude in the restorying process.