Counter-story,resistance and reconciliation in online narratives of women in recovery from problem gambling

Based on discourse analysis of website postings to an online gender-specific support group over a 30-month period, this study examines the context and narrative forms through which women tell the stories of their experience of problem gambling and recovery. In response to the hegemony of men-dominated groups and dominant ideologies, women seeking support for their recovery create both online and offline symbolic communities for gendered expression of experience. The oral tradition of Gamblers Anonymous is referenced and reflected in the website postings, providing a coherent narrative structure that is valued in western culture. The online forum references a pragmatic approach that places women's solutions in the public domain, rendering these experiences visible, significant and transformative. A hypothetical model is proposed in which creation of symbolic community and learning to tell a coherent narrative mediate progress from chaos to social and moral reconciliation.     

The Aggregation of Political Rhetoric in Zeitoun

While the initial literary and cultural response to 9/11 consisted mostly of domestic narratives of trauma and mourning that avoided explicit political discourse, narrative representations of Hurricane Katrina, from the beginning, have been highly political. This is a profound, if simplistic, inversion: an act of political violence is de-politicized by its cultural response, while a natural disaster is overtly politicized. While the politicization of Hurricane Katrina is clearly, in part, down to the many accusations of negligence and racism that were immediately leveled at the American government after the post-Katrina flooding of New Orleans, this article argues that a major politicizing factor is and was the de-politicization of 9/11. Many narratives of Hurricane Katrina, therefore, are loaded with an aggregation of dissent and political discourse that relates not just to Katrina but also to 9/11 and the War on Terror. This article focuses specifically on Dave Eggers’s narrative non-fiction account of Katrina, Zeitoun (2009) and the way it responds to the domestication of 9/11 in these early instances of 9/11 fiction, and, in particular Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). It argues that Zeitoun responds to The Road’s conservative, messianic allegory, its retrograde formulation of frontier masculinity and unlikely recourse to the domestic. Eggers’s narrative non-fiction account of Katrina is also a migrant story and it is able to both dramatize the social realities of the War on Terror and build a surprising and affecting narrative of community and pluralism in the wake of disaster. Ultimately, this comparative analysis illuminates a wider and revealing departure from the cultural representation of 9/11 in the cultural response to Hurricane Katrina where texts like Zeitoun, are overtly political and loaded with the weight of two catastrophes.     

Responding to a Traumatic Event: Restoring Shared Pasts Within a Small Community

This paper describes reactions by regular patrons of a family restaurant to an armed robbery that occurred within its premises. One of the victims, the restaurant's co-manager, and these regulars participated in the construction of a narrative in order to restore their normal involvement within the community and to incorporate the profound disturbance of a robbery into the patrons' and manager's shared pasts. We discuss two different types of regulars who view this particular restaurant as a sacred place. In this context, we discuss particular discourse, appearance, and touch codes that support perceptions of the restaurant as sacred. To conclude, we discuss how regulars and management resolved this profound disturbance to establish shared histories in regard to the robbery and to restore communal relations within this restaurant.     

‘A mockery of equality’: an exploratory investigation into disabled activists’ views of the Paralympic Games

This article offers an exploratory analysis of the opinions of disabled activists towards the Paralympic Games. With the use of a qualitative online survey, the work focuses on the perceptions of disabled individuals (n = 32) who are not Paralympic athletes but are affiliated to the disability rights group, the United Kingdom Disabled People’s Council. Working on the premise that the views of disabled activists have been excluded from Paralympic sports discourse to date, the results illustrate a nuanced yet negative view of the Games to contrast with an existing, yet overly positive, academic narrative. Participants were particularly cynical of the portrayal and production of the Games and its Paralympic athletes as they perceived that the wider population of disabled people is misrepresented. The overwhelming perception in this preliminary analysis suggests that the Paralympic Games can be counterproductive to disability rights beyond sport.     

Narrating Adoption: Resisting Adoption as “Second Best” in Online Stories of Domestic Adoption Told by Adoptive Parents

Framed in narrative theory and relational dialectics theory, one hundred online stories of domestic adoption told by adoptive parents were qualitatively analyzed, revealing four primary discourses of adoption that challenge the idea that adoption is a second-best way to parent. Narrative beginnings were dominated by a discourse of adoption as a valuable alternative to pregnancy. Narrative middles-and-ends featured two discourses of how the adoption process unfolds: adoption as a worthwhile struggle guided by destiny and adoption as a smooth and predictable process. Intertwined with these process-oriented constructions of adoption was a discourse of adoption as communal kinning, which emphasized a hybrid family form comprised of both biological and nonbiological ties.     

From intertext to outcome: an archeology of classic video game narrative

In modern digital games, open worlds, multiple character selection and abilities, and an ever-changing cast of online characters present limitless possibilities for story generation. Classic games from the Golden Age of video games (1977–1984) offer far fewer possibilities—most often a singular character, and a singular, inevitable outcome. The player loses after expending multiple lives to linearly conquer levels and achieve a high score. This is the in-game narrative, driven by the economic necessity of maximizing returns from arcade machines; console games in the same period were not bound by the same design goals and constraints. Classic games have rich, contextual narrative connections, including intertextual relations, transmedia storytelling, and transfictional expansions. The immersive engagement (twitch) of the player in the arcade game is both immediate and performative, as is the discourse of play, and it produces an outcome narrative, focused on level achievements, duration, and/or score, as well as key gameplay events. This is complemented by the individual situational narrative (including business and technical aspects) regarding the circumstances of play. Both formal narrative analysis (for contextual and in-game narratives) and anecdotal interviewing (for individual situational and outcome narratives) are used to construct a narratological archeology analysis model with examples.     

Case Studies as Narrative Accounts of Public Relations Practice

This article offers a narrative analysis of competition case studies, a genre of public relations discourse. The aim is to examine the representation of public relations expertise produced by practitioners in cooperation with a professional association. Using narrative concepts such as character, narrative function, plot, point of view, and time, the analysis identifies ways in which the actual experience of practice is narratively transformed, and reflects on the reasons behind this transformation. Findings are presented under 3 main headings: professional work, narrative transformations, and professional legitimacy; and they highlight the interplay of individual experience and professional group aims.     

Museums,scholarly enterprise and global assemblages: a response to ‘Artifacts and allegiances: how museums put the nation and the world on display’

This discussion of ‘Artifacts and Allegiances: how museums put the nation and the world on display’ by Peggy Levitt shows the efficacy of the cosmopolitan–national continuum as an analysis of the conditions of museums in a globalized world. It suggests that nationalism and cosmopolitanism, whilst posed as alternatives, are not seriously in tension within the liberal global museum. It finds that the book is useful in proposing the museum as a complex cultural assemblage, but that the lack of theoretical integration into the body of the narrative limits the scope for examination of what is entailed. The review suggests that a new progressive discourse of the museum of the 21st century would need to consider and include the participation and engagement of the museum’s audiences, both present and online.     

Workers’ rights defence on China's internet: an analysis of actors

The discourse of ‘rights defence’ (weiquan), referring to the grassroots’ struggle for legal redress after their lawful interests are encroached upon, has gained increasing popularity in China in the last two decades. Given the ubiquity of the Internet nowadays, rights defence activities also take place online; in a small number of cases, they develop into a form of online activism. But what determines or contributes to the online visibility of some rights defence cases and the invisibility of others? In this paper, we investigate this by examining three highly visible workers’ rights defence campaigns in comparison with three similar cases that received almost no attention. Analysing the various actors involved, we argue that online rights defence tends to become visible and develop into online activism when one key actor, the state, which ought to be an impartial source of justice, is perceived to be collusive or to be playing an active role in the encroachment of people's rights and interests.     

Power and Authority in Clinical Practice: A Discourse Analysis Approach to Narrative Process

Issues of power and authority in the treatment relationship are explored using concepts from discourse analysis. Negotiative and heuristic processes of narrative co-construction are described. These concepts, which highlight issues of power and vulnerability in narrative co-construction in ordinary conversation, are then applied to a clinical case. Implications for clinical social work treatment are developed based on an expanded understanding of, and sensitivity to, the sharing of narrative power in the treatment relationship.     

On the narrative vs non-narrative functions of reported speech: A socio-pragmatic study

Reported utterances have often been analyzed with regard to their narrative function. While it is true that this narrative function applies to a large group of cases, we have observed that reported speech can fulfil other functions, which are incompatible with the properties of a narrative utterance. This study, based on spontaneous discourse, will focus on the non-narrative functions of reported speech, that is, the appreciative, the support and the authority functions. We will first define the semantico-pragmatic properties of these functions of reported speech, on the basis of examples that are univocal in their contexts. Next, we will turn to examples more complex, in which there seems to be a conflict between functions considered to be incompatible. Finally, we will present the results of a distributional analysis, relating the functions of reported speech to linguistic and extralinguistic factors. The results will lead us to propose hypotheses concerning the strategic diversification of discourse behaviours by speakers.     

The narrative self in autobiographical accounts of illness

The paper analyzes autobiographical acounts of the experience of chronic illness and its treatment to develop a sociological theory of the self. It is suggested that ‘self’ is not a biologistic or psycologistic thing. Rather self is autobiographical narrative – hence the narrative self. It is argued that four elements constitute such narrative selves in autobiographical discourse: evaluative relationships between events in time; cosmology; power relationships; and conceptualisation of self as object.     

Instrumentalism,knowledge and gender in social work

Abstract

The new public sector managerialism of the 1990s has introduced a profound cultural change within social work organisations. It involves a substitution of knowledge which is primarily instrumental in character for the discursive, interpretive and reflexive knowledge on which social workers have traditionally relied in client-centred practice. This paper draws on perspectives from critical theory and psychoanalysis and argues that, despite the apparent neutrality of managerialist discourse, it is both ideological and gendered. It encourages the construction of rigid socially structured defence systems within welfare organisations and is inimical to the kind of thought which can engage with interwoven emotional and material needs to develop reparative practice. Furthermore it is in danger of undermining precisely those forms of supervision that can sustain professionals in the face of the emotional impact of relationships with distressed and damaged people.     

The Family Interaction Test A Preliminary Study of a Method for Interpreting Narratives about the Family

The Family Interaction Test is a narrative projective method designed to elicit children's perceptions of family life and patterns of interaction by way of stories around particular themes and events. Drawing on a post-modern interpretive approach, the paper proposes that traditional psychometric research methodologies underpinned by the logico-empirical paradigm are inappropriate in the study of narrative meaning. It is argued that practitioners, rather than seeing themselves as separate from the story teller and thus objectifying the ‘true’ meaning of the narratives, can instead enter into a discourse with the story teller as a way of testing hypotheses and thus establish the verisimilitude of story meanings. The results of a preliminary clinical study using this methodology with the Family Interaction Test are presented and discussed.     

Ecological Modernization as a Basis for Environmental Policy: Current Environmental Discourse and Policy and the Implications on Environmental Supply Chain Management

Sustainable development and ecological modernization are the two theoretical frameworks that underlie environmental policy making in industrialized countries. It is especially the theory of ecological modernization that describes recent changes in environmental policy making and assumes a positive-sum game between the economy and the environment. The article critically reflects upon ecological modernization as a basis for current environmental policy and discourse. It uses experiences of a project on environmental supply chain management to explore the implications of ecological modernization on practical environmental policy outcomes. We conclude that sustainable development and ecological modernization must be viewed as ideological and political concepts, at least as much as they are about the relationship between the economy and environment. Therefore, further analyses of environmental policy making must include issues of power and influence.     

What do lesbians do in the daytime? Recover

This paper examines a narrative taken from an ethnographic interview, for the speaker's conversational construction of lesbian and other identities along with ideologized personal history. To tell her story, Marge shifts to the discourse style used in the meetings of addiction recovery groups. She prioritizes the recovery (twelve-step) program's coherence system, structuring her life story in conformity with its terms while narrating a complexly queered identity. Four analyses are given, beginning with a Labovian formal examination and proceeding with a consideration of three types of discourse echoing: interdiscursivity, intratextuality, and manifest intertextuality. This study demonstrates the analytical linking of nonpublic linguistic discourse to social discourses; individual identity construction to social construction (and its coherence systems); and personal history to historical eras. The paper adds the concept of a metalevel complicating action to narrative theory and develops a means of examining intratextuality for critical discourse analysis. It presents a revised view of essentialism for the sociolinguistic study of gender and sexuality.