Narrative Research Methods
We are the stories we tell. If we follow the theoretical assumptions of social constructionism, identity, relationships, institutions, as well as history itself, are created in interactions, over time. These interactions themselves are enactments of meaning frameworks, meaning structures, organized as narratives. Narrative provides the architecture for consciousness and action. In this way, narratives structure the dynamics of conflicts, as well as the dynamics of conflict resolution. Marginalization and violence, memory and trauma, are a function of the narratives that are anchored by experience, and sewn into the culture. “We are the stories we tell” becomes ever more important when the stories become the foundation for legitimizing violence.
For this reason, narrative analysis is critically important to both understanding and transforming conflicts, for making sense of how people make sense is indeed the foundation for any program or process of conflict resolution. Further, the process itself of making sense of how people in conflict make sense of that conflict is an intervention, that is, an analysis of a conflict is a description that has its own implications, as narrative. For this reason, accuracy in conflict analysis is not the standard for narrative analysis, but rather, pragmatics (what are the practical implications of a given analysis) and, indeed, ethics (what are the consequences of an analysis on the processes of marginalization, and who are we as interveners to make such a description).
This course is intended to provide participants with the analytic tools needed to conduct their own research on conflict and conflict resolution, using a narrative perspective. Specifically, this course is designed to enable students to a) review the key narrative research in the field of conflict resolution; c) design a narrative analysis of conflict; and c) conduct a narrative analysis of conflicts. As narrative approaches to conflict analysis are varied and a function of the multiple theoretical traditions that are available for narrative analysis, this course will function as a review of these theoretical traditions. In summary, the course is designed to both make students familiar with the narrative research in the field of conflict resolution, and offers them an opportunity to conduct narrative analysis.
As this is a research course, it can be used toward the requirements in research methods for the doctoral program. However, it does not replace the requirements for CONF 610 at the master’s level.
The narrative research traditions mirror the three dominant traditions in social science---the structural, functional and postructural. The structural tradition of narrative analysis offers a framework for understanding narrative structures, including plots, character roles and themes. Analysis of narrative structures seeks to account for the component parts of narrative; this is particularly pertinent to understanding the features of conflict narratives. Attention to narrative processes begins with an analysis of how narratives function; research studies that attend to the functional analysis of narrative often are focused on the performance of narrative in specific cultural or situational contexts. Finally, the poststructural approach to narrative analysis moves toward a critical functional analysis of how power operates in specific contexts. Often these studies attend to process of how specific identities are contested and marginalized by dominant narratives. Studies of conflicts in this tradition contribute descriptions of how domination functions and suggests approaches to conflict resolution that address access to the politics of narrative processes. But the research in this tradition is also often reflexive---researchers account for their own role in the interpretative process, including themselves in the research process. This course offers a review of the theory and research on narrative, in these three domains, and works to connect these approaches to narrative analysis to research on conflict and conflict resolution.
However at the leading or cutting edge of the poststructural approach research on narrative becomes narrative research. In the former case, narrative is an object of study; in the latter case, while narrative remains a domain for sense making, it is not an object to be separated from the narrative of the inquiry itself. In this case, the reflexive relation between the research and the process of research blurs the boundaries between “science” and “politics” ---doing science is itself a practice, as a sequence of events, in a given context, connected to given characters, and related to values, leading to a “point.” And the “point” refers back to science as practice, in the process of building and remaking community itself. From this perspective, narrative research fits hand and glove with the practice of conflict resolution---the analysis itself is an intervention. And it is the practice of narrative research, not research on narrative, that builds the relational bonds between “subjects” and “researchers,”
This course will offer students an opportunity to conduct research on narrative, exploring analytic frameworks that may fit their research interests, but it will also offer students an opportunity to do narrative research, exploring their role as researchers, in the social contexts where they work to intervene in conflicts.
While it is beyond the scope of this course to fully address narrative practice, we will explore the normative, critical, dimensions of narrative analysis as conflict intervention, addressing, in this process, the ethical dimensions of narrative conflict analysis.
- Students will become familiar with analytic frameworks pertinent to narrative approaches to conflict analysis from within structuralist, functionalist, and poststructuralist’s perspectives.
- Students will be able to write a literature review of narrative research on conflict, as part of designing a narrative method for research of conflict processes.
- Students will be able to conduct a narrative analysis of a conflict from a structuralist, functionalist and poststructuralist perspective, toward the development of a case study.
- Students will learn to do analytic synthesis as well as analytic critics related to both the theory and practice of narrative analysis.
- Students will engage their own research interests, developing those interests through the course.
- Students will explore both the ethical and practical implications of narrative analysis, as a form of narrative intervention.