Skip to main content

To Narrate Or Not To Narrate

Quintus Horatius Flaccus, (Venosa, December 8, 65 BC - Rome, November 27, 8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus. Horace said that literature should at once teach and delight. Narratives, as part of literature should do the same. Narratives "capture [an] incredible tangle of necessity and freedom in human life, and plot enacts it in the selection and ordering of events and in the quasi-casula implications of its telling" (Chambers and Montgomery, 2002, p.77).

They argue the necessity of choice in our moral lives, but that our predispositions and options are always conditioned by our past and history. Russian formalists distinguish 'story' from 'plot', defining the first as actual set of events and the latter as the teller's viewpoints. Chambers and Montgomery further argue that there can never a story without a plot, and plots vary from situation to situation and thus also influences the story that is being told. This change in plots based on situations and individuals leads to different understanding of meaning to different people.

An easy example of this could be the story of a student. Adam is a graduate student at a good university in the mid-west. During his first semester of school, he got into a departmental conflict scenario involving a professor who said Adam threatened her about something. This scenario escalated that few other professors got involved in this scenario. When Adam's advisor found out about this, he almost skinned Adam alive without even clarifying what Adam even had to say about the so-called threat.

Now, when Adam shared that story with is colleagues, how did he share it? Did his version portray him to be the innocent one being victimized? When the involved professors shred their narratives of this incident, did they portray themselves as following the rules? And when Adam's advisor narrated his story with someone else (let's say his wife), how did he share it? Weren't they all sharing the same story? How did the narratives reflect on the incident that actually took place?

So narratives are just tools of looking at things. Each narrative is like one small mirror of a disco ball, where the entire ball perhaps reflects on the phenomenon being discussed.

Interestingly, narratives are a qualitative researcher's good friend at understanding the essence of things. But it seems like each narrative can add a new version of the essence of the phenomenon being studied.

Popular posts from this blog

Zionist hate mongering, the race/terror trope, and the Free Speech Union: Part 1

March 15, 2019. It was a day of terror. Unleashed by a white supremacist far-right terrorist. Driven by hate for brown people. Driven by Islamophobic hate. Earlier in the day, I had come across a hate-based hit piece targeting me, alongside other academics, the University of Auckland academic Professor Nicholas Rowe , Professor Richard Jackson at Otago University, Professor Kevin P Clements at Otago University, Dr. Rose Martin from University of Auckland and Dr. Nigel Parsons at Massey University.  Titled, "More extremists in New Zealand Universities," the article threw in the labels "terror sympathisers" and "extremist views." Written by one David Cumin and hosted on the website of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, the article sought to create outrage that academics critical of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid are actually employed by universities in New Zealand. Figure 1: The web post written by David Cumin on the site of Israel Institute

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit

Tova O’Brien and pedagogy of whiteness

So Tova O’Brien was looking for a click-bait opportunity to draw in listeners to her podcast and she found the migrant activist and Green Party politician Dr. Sapna Samant to pick on. In a gotcha moment, Tova shared with the Green Party co-leader James Shaw a series of posts made by Dr. Samant on whiteness, Hindutva, and multiculturalism, asking him if the tweets were OK. We don’t understand from listening to O’Brien’s podcast if her research team actively researched Dr. Sapna Samant’s social media posts, or whether these selective screen captures of Dr. Samant’s tweets were sent to her by someone wanting to target Samant. The thoroughly unresearched piece is poor journalism, reflective of the mediocrity that is perpetuated by whiteness , the hegemonic values of the dominant white culture in settler colonies. If indeed her research team had discovered the tweets, it’s worth interrogating why the social media posts of a migrant woman activist on whiteness are of interest to O’Brien’s po