The
One illustration of this dual interest has been the school’s involvement in the CETL4HealthNE ‘people with experience’ workstream (and in particular with the development of an audio visual ‘narrative archive’. Based on earlier work in the school the archive aims to develop a teaching resource which will contain an audio visual data base of narrative interviews recording peoples experience’s of the health care system.
http://www.cetl4healthne.ac.uk/view)
The aim is to work collaboratively with community based groups in order to mutually develop skills in creating and developing narrative resources based directly on the lived experience of the participants. One session in the conference will demonstrate this developing resource and invite participants to consider the usefulness of this approach to their own areas of practice.
Conference Abstracts
Professor Arthur W. Frank.
Professor of Sociology,
The Telling of Truth and the Truth of Telling. Issues and openings in listening to service users stories.
Service-users stories about their lives not only provide information in excess of usual template documentation, these stories are also the medium of relationships that are crucial to the efficacy of service delivery. In most service-professional training, listening is taught as a pillar of practice. A different question is whether institutions that provide services encourage taking the time to listen to stories. To convince institutions of the value of service-users’ stories, greater clarity is needed about what kind of truth service users can express: What do their stories tell professionals, and how can those stories lead to improved service? The lecture helps to sort out the values of storytelling for service users and of listening for professionals. Storytelling can be a good use of clinical time, depending on what one listens for--the sense of what is most valuable in the telling.
Dr. Maggie O’Neill
Senior Lecturer Department of Social Sciences,
Beyond Binaries: abjection, narrative and sex work.
The recent turn to art in the Social Sciences (that follows the linguistic and cultural turns) provides fertile ground to explore the intersections between narrative research and arts based practice. This paper explores the space or hyphen between arts based work and ethnographic research and reflects upon the importance of using performative methodologies (visual, poetic, dramatic) to interpret the issue of sex work through narrative biographical research and participatory arts. The paper will explore: key themes, discourses and interventions in the policy and practice of sex work; move us beyond binaries that lead to divisions and paralysis and ultimately help to reinforce the Othering of women and men who sell sex ; and argue for a politics of inclusion – that makes use of participatory, biographical and visual methods and also - whilst creating spaces for the voices of sex workers and dialogue on the one hand can also lead to knowledge transfer and interventions in the governance of sex work on the other.
Dr. Ann McNulty.
Health and Racial Equality Forum,
“They need to know where we come from and not just point the finger”: Personal stories and professional practice.
This comment comes from a woman with experience of having a baby under the age of twenty, who grew up, went to school, and still lives in one of the least affluent parts of
In this presentation she will describe how she and other women designed and delivered, over the past 6 years, a Public Health workshop for medical students, putting their own stories at the heart of the sessions. Evaluation data show how much students valued the women’s stories..
Ann McNulty, who worked with the women in these Public Health workshops, will discuss the potential of using a biographical-narrative interview approach:
· to research people’s experiences in relation to health and well-being
· to contribute to debates about the concepts of ‘social inclusion’, ‘social exclusion’ and ‘social capital’
In her doctoral research into teenage pregnancy, funded jointly by Northumberland Care Trust and the ESRC this approach produced data that highlighted the complex circumstances and relationships behind ‘simple statistics’.
WORKSHOP Tuesday June 16th 2009
Venue: City Campus East,
“Narrative Analysis Beyond Grounded Theory:
Questions of Storytelling Practice.”
Researchers acknowledge the value of people’s stories, yet research is often stuck in grounded theory’s emphasis on coding in order to discover a number of themes from a collection of stories told in interviews. A key critique of this research is its separation of the stories’ content from the scene and circumstances of the storytelling.
The workshop presents five analytic questions that can orient research that takes seriously the performative nature of stories. Stories can report past events, but more significantly stories enact what storytellers hope will become the truth of those events. Research can study storytelling as enactment, beginning with these questions. The questions also bridge research interests in stories and storytelling with clinical interests.
The workshop will begin with the question of what distinguishes stories from other kind of narratives and a discussion of narrative interviewing, although interviews are only one source of people’s stories. Participants are encouraged to bring stories for discussion, either research stories or clinical stories (for which appropriate consent has been obtained).
The workshop will be of interest to post graduate students or service professionals interested in the development of skills related to narrative research and practice.
Professor Arthur Frank is a prominent writer on narrative theory and method. He is the author of a number of well known books including:
The Wounded Storyteller: Body Illness and Ethics (1995)
At the Will of the Body (2002)
The Renewal of Generosity: Illness Medicine and How to Live (2004)
Dr. Maggie O’Neill was co-editor of Sociology the Journal of the British Sociological Association from 1999-2002 and has written a number of books including;
Adorno, Culture and Feminism (1999)
Prostitution and Feminism: towards a politics of feeling (2001)
Prostitution: sex work, policy and politics co-authored with Teela Sanders and Jane Pitcher (2009)
Dr. Ann McNulty was awarded her doctorate from
‘Great Expectations: teenage pregnancy and intergenerational transmission’
She is currently seconded from HAREF for one year as a research associate on an ESRC funded study into Organisational Change, Resistance and Democracy: LGBT Equalities Initiatives in Local Government