Racism,class ethos and place: the value of context in narratives about asylum‐seekers

The British public view asylum‐seekers in generally negative terms. Yet whilst there are an abundance of reports and opinion polls that measure levels of hostility in order to fuel political ‘debate’ very little is known about how asylum seekers are spoken about in more quotidian contexts. Based on an ethnographic study of racism in Southend‐on‐Sea, Essex this paper identifies two kinds of narrative (abstract truths and context‐dependent stories) commonly used by established members of the community to speak about asylum‐seekers. The paper then seeks to explain why more affluent, suburban residents of the town tend to draw upon the abstract narrative while less wealthy, centrally located residents are more likely to regale context‐dependent stories about asylum seekers. An explanation for this socio‐spatial phenomenon is constructed around a Bourdieusian theory of practice that unravels local class relations and maps out a field for local symbolic prestige. Finally this microanalysis is used as a springboard to consider the wider relationship between racist narratives and social and cultural reproduction.     

THE STUDY OF IDENTITY AS CULTURAL, INSTITUTIONAL, ORGANIZATIONAL, AND PERSONAL NARRATIVES: Theoretical and Empirical Integrations

I argue that the study of narrative identity would benefit from more sustained and explicit attention to relationships among cultural, institutional, organizational, and personal narratives of identity. I review what is known about these different types of narrative identity and argue that these narratives are created for different purposes, do different types of work, and are evaluated by different criteria. After exploring the inherently reflexive relationships between and among these various narratives of identity, I conclude with demonstrating how examining these relationships would allow a more complete understanding of the mutual relevance of social problem construction and culture, of the work of social service organizations attempting to change clients' personal narratives, and the possibilities of social change. Exploring relationships between and among different types of narrative identity would yield a better understanding of how narratives work and the work narratives do.     

The Influence of Child Sexual Abuse on the Self from Adult Narrative Perspectives

The impact of child sexual abuse on the adult self is not yet clearly understood. We explored adult perspectives through the use of narrative interviews (N = 30). Three key themes or views of self were identified in all narratives to varying degrees: the worthless self, the self as unknown, and the potential/developing self. Ambivalence and tension were present in all narratives. Individuals were challenged to integrate the sexual abuse experience in a constructive way and develop a more coherent perception of the self. The narrative method highlighted the dynamic nature of peoples’ experiences at the same time recognizing that the narratives themselves are in progress. Reactions to disclosure, social support, and interpersonal connections are crucial at every turn.     

Cry Wolf!: Narratives of Wolf Recovery in France and Norway*

Abstract Due to strict protection through the last decades, wolves have returned to many areas from which they have been absent for a long time. This is a conservation success story, but the wolves also cause conflicts wherever they arrive. We have studied the situation in southeastern Norway and in the French Alps, where the conflict patterns are similar. Diverging interpretations of the situation are supported by narratives, and two varieties have become increasingly significant in both countries. Rumors about the secret reintroduction of wolves are common among wolf adversaries. Another narrative, important to the pro‐wolf camp, is based on the notion that particular sheep husbandry practices (unattended rough grazing) are unique to either Norway or France—whereas there are in fact more similarities than differences. Yet, while the reintroduction‐conspiracy rumors are ridiculed, the notion of unique national conflict patterns has achieved a status almost of official truth. Furthermore, the story about natural wolf recovery is itself a value‐laden narrative, and not only “scientific fact.” The different status of these narratives tell us something about power relations: Given their different social basis, it seems relevant to consider the national uniqueness image and the natural recovery theory as tightly interwoven with symbolic power and the reintroduction conspiracy rumors as similarly interwoven with patterns of cultural resistance.     

From Non-Believer to Believer: What Leads People to Change Their Climate Views

Studies have highlighted the political, economic, and psychological factors in the debate over anthropogenic climate change—a hegemony approach—but have rarely focused on the stories and possibilities of people's transitions from climate change non-believer to climate change believer. Based on publicly accessible narratives, this study examines the stories of those who have switched from non-believer to believer—a narrative approach—and the dilemmas involved in those switches. Our investigation illuminates that a transition to climate change believer is a cultural and moral matter based on changing social relations of knowledge and what people regard as ignorable. We find that narratives of transition commonly describe interrelated shifts in three social relational factors: the narrator's notions of self, material reality, and justice. We term this contextualized transformative experience a relational rupture. Our narrative approach thus contextualizes climate change denialism within a person's web of social relations, not the hegemony of climate change communication alone. Moreover, we suggest that, since public debate and polarization on scientific topics such as climate change, vaccination, and COVID-19 are socially situated, they may potentially be socially bridged.     

Narratives of Crime and Criminals: How Places Socially Construct the Crime Problem1

A common narrative about crime in the contemporary United States is that offenders are primarily young black men living in poor urban neighborhoods committing violent and drug‐related crimes. There is also a local context to community, crime, and fear that influences this narrative. In this article, I address how narratives of crime and criminals play out differently within particular places. The article is based on participant observation and interviews conducted in two high‐crime Boston‐area communities. Although both communities are concerned with stereotypical offenders, there are differential community constructions of crime, formed through interactions between crime narratives and place identities. In one, crime is a community problem, in which both offenders and victims are community members. In the other, outsiders commit crime against community members. Media portrayals of crime and community, community race and class identities, and concerns over neighborhood change all contribute to place‐specific framing of “the crime problem.” These frames, in turn, shape both intergroup dynamics and support for criminal justice policy.     

Moving Fragments

This article examines three films as they wrestle with the problem of madness through the construction of narrative: Grizzly Man (Director, Werner Herzog, 2005), Capturing the Friedmans (Director, Andrew Jarecki, 2003), and Tarnation (Director, Jonathan Caouette, 2003). There is progression in the narrative capacities depicted and enacted in each film: from the representation of a boundary with the unsymbolizable, through the failed figuration of sexuality, to the realization of a self-reflexive and thus transformational narrative. Working at the intersection of the personal and the social, the article postulates that films can serve as social containers for the elaboration of narratives that allow subjective cultural intelligibility. We are transformed through viewership. Specifically, the relatively new use of videography as a means of recording and shaping life experience creates novel forms of personal narrative that function as social containers. Narratives of personal madness are seen to constitute the true residence of sanity.     

The Quest for Family and The Mobility of Modernity in Narratives of Postwar British Emigration

In this article I focus on ways in which the postwar generation of British migrants to Canada and Australia construct their stories as epic struggles with family themes of both loss and triumph at the centre. While, during the postwar years, there is among some migrants evidence of the emergence of a more adaptable, sojourning ‘mobility of modernity’, most life stories told by the migrants suggest a more traditional pattern in which family themes dominate. In these narratives postwar migrants structure their accounts along traditional ‘epic story’ lines reminiscent of Oscar Handlin's long superseded thesis about dislocation in the old country, alienation in the new and ultimate triumph over material and cultural obstacles. But the ‘epic’ quality of these stories is deeply attached to family themes; the disruption of family networks and attempts to rescue the old or create new ones are central to the way the migration experience determines the structuring of life memories. The very act of migration focuses attention on its impact on kinship. The predominantly urban, nuclear family form of postwar British migration does contrast sharply with more traditional rural patterns based on extended family movements and ‘chain migration’. But British migrants' emphasis on the ‘quest for family’ and the refashioning of migrant identity in their narratives underlines the coexistence of traditional themes within countervailing trends towards the mobility of modernity.     

Understanding cultural omnivores: social and political attitudes

In this paper, I use data from the British Household Panel Survey and Understanding Society to investigate the social and political attitudes of cultural omnivores. I report a threefold typology of cultural consumption in the domains of music and visual arts that is consistent with previous research. Then by linking data across the two panel surveys, I show that cultural omnivores have quite a distinctive profile of social attitudes. Specifically, omnivores are more trusting and risk‐taking. They hold more favourable views about the European Union, and they tend to eschew subnational identities. Omnivores are politically more engaged. But they are not more ‘class conscious’, nor are they particularly left‐wing or right‐wing on distributional issues. When asked what is important to the sense of who they are, the two most important status‐conferring attributes, that is, profession and education, are not more salient to omnivores than to others. But omnivores are more extravert and open to new experiences. Taken together, these results suggest that omnivorousness is an expression of cosmopolitan postmaterialism rather than a new form of distinction.     

Understanding Intergenerational Relationships in India

ABSTRACT

This paper makes an attempt to describe the status and role of elderly within the family and community institutions as a source of wisdom and knowledge, particularly to have an understanding of the intergenerational relationships in the Indian context. As the countries and areas of Asia develop economically and become more heavily urban, the familial support of the elderly has eroded. There are a number of reasons to think that traditional systems of familial care for the elderly in Asia have started to reflect this changing scenario in terms of increasing problems for the elderly. The Indian subcontinent too has experienced these transitional changes. But despite the changes in the structures and functions of Indian societies, families do preserve the norms of social hierarchy (of which the elderly are an important part), cultural styles and mode of living. At the same time elderly who are regarded as the sources of wisdom and knowledge are given due respect and place in the society within the ambit of the family and community contexts.     

Reviving Hayek’s Dream

This short piece suggests that the roots of the successful Brexit vote can be found in the free market purity that was implicit within the ideals behind Thatcherism. Whilst the rhetoric of populist and British (or in many parts English) nationalism were utilised in order to win support, the ideological driving force implicit within many Brexit figureheads rested in the belief that the EU watered down their visions of a harder neoliberal reality. Yet, by stimulating right-wing reactionary forces, they may have created more than they bargained for. I concur with Karl Polanyi that free market liberalism tends to generate the forces of its own demise.     

Evolving Narratives About Childhood Sexual Abuse: Challenging the Dominance of the Victim and Survivor Paradigm

This research project explored the ongoing process of constructing a narrative, following childhood sexual abuse. Twenty‐two men and women aged 25–70 were interviewed about their childhood sexual experiences with adults using narrative inquiry methodology. These experiences occurred in different social and historical contexts, when the theoretical understandings and treatment of the issue of child sexual abuse were significantly different from the present. Many factors made disclosure even more difficult then than it is now including: respect for authority; rigid gender roles; the taboo surrounding sexual issues; lack of supportive adults; and lack of language to describe what was happening. Participants told four differing narratives about their experiences: narratives of silence; narratives of ongoing suffering; narratives of transformation; and narratives of transcendence. These narratives were examined in relation to the changing social and historical context and the current dominance of the victim and survivor paradigm in the child sexual abuse literature.     

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.     

Young people looking forward: Imagined future and normative tensions in urban Norway

We explore the meaning-making practices of ‘little personal stories’ and ‘big societal stories’ in the imagined futures of 12- and 13-year-olds within Norway, known for its egalitarian ideals and welfare society. Using the concept ‘prospective narratives’, we explore these practices through the students' narrative world-making. The narratives connect the imagined future with gender and class variations related to larger social norms in the arenas of work and family. They demonstrate embodied and positioned cultural knowledge of the present, reflecting tensions between dominant social norms—‘big stories’—in terms of child-centred parenting, active work-life and egalitarian ideals across gender and class.     

Living in the city: school friendships,diversity and the middle classes

Much of the literature on the urban middle classes describes processes of both affiliation (often to the localities) and disaffiliation (often from some of the non‐middle‐class residents). In this paper, we consider this situation from a different position, drawing on research exploring whether and how children and adults living in diverse localities develop friendships with those different to themselves in terms of social class and ethnicity. This paper focuses on the interviews with the ethnically diverse, but predominantly white British, middle‐class parent participants, considering their attitudes towards social and cultural difference. We emphasize the importance of highlighting inequalities that arise from social class and its intersection with ethnicity in analyses of complex urban populations. The paper's contribution is, first, to examine processes of clustering amongst the white British middle‐class parents, particularly in relation to social class. Second, we contrast this process, and its moments of reflection and unease, with the more deliberate and purposeful efforts of one middle‐class, Bangladeshi‐origin mother who engages in active labour to facilitate relationships across social and ethnic difference.     

Assembling life history narratives from quantitative longitudinal panel data: What’s the story for families using social work?

Abstract

Embedded within quantitative longitudinal panel or cohort studies is narrative potential that is arguably untapped but might enrich our understanding of individual and social lives across time. This paper discusses a methodology to assemble the life history narratives of families using social work by drawing on quantitative data from the British Household Panel Survey. It explores whether this person-centred approach helps us to understand the counter-intuitive results of a parallel multivariate analyses, which suggest that families using social work fare worse than similar others over time. Our findings are tentative, due to the experimental use of this narrative method and the limits of social work information in the data-set. Nonetheless, the life histories presented bring to light complexities, diversity and the non-linear pathways between families’ needs, support and outcomes that the aggregates obscure. We conclude that reconstructing families’ lives in this way, especially in the absence of complementary longitudinal qualitative data, affords the wider opportunity to interrogate and better understand the findings of quantitative longitudinal studies.     

Narratives of Leisure: recreating the self

Utilising insights from narrative theory this paper explores the role of narrative in the everyday leisure experiences of people with a mild intellectual disability. Drawing on our experiences with an Australian leisure service Live it UP! we develop the connection between leisure and storytelling in order to open up an innovative approach to working with individuals. The stories of people's capabilities that we draw on run counter to a dominant cultural story of lack associated with disability. Through a post-structuralist analysis we argue that narratives of leisure are a powerful social medium with the potential to produce change in an individual's life and immediate social relationships. Such an understanding is crucial for the development of alternative leisure support services which identify the person's needs, challenging the social positioning of people with an intellectual disability.     

Modernity and Fertility Preference in Taiwan*

Data from interviews with 973 Taiwan women between the ages of 15 and 44 having at least one child and living with husbands are used to study the effects of modernity and social status on fertility preferences. The modernity attitude contributes significantly to the explanation of fertility preferences independent of social status variables. Social status variables also contribute directly to the explanation of fertility preferences. But there is little evidence to support theories that modernity acts as an intervening variable between social status and fertility preference.     

Brexit,uncertainty, and migration decisions

We leverage the British Brexit referendum decision to leave the European Union, to demonstrate how changes in uncertainty about a country's future socio-political condition can impact migratory behaviour. Using official bilateral migration statistics, we report an excess increase in migration from the UK to the EU of approximately 16% post-referendum, compared to movements between the remaining EU countries over the same period. In addition, we analyse in-depth interviews conducted with UK migrants in Germany to show that uncertainty about future bilateral relations, a negative economic outlook, and perceptions of negative social consequences in the UK have been by far the most dominant drivers of migration in the post-referendum period. We further corroborate the effect of changes in uncertainty on migration-related behaviour with exceptional spikes in naturalisations, indicating that UK citizens living in other EU member states are actively taking decisions to mitigate the negative impact that Brexit is having on their livelihoods.