How Will I Tell You? Narrative Action in Ethnographic Interviews

• In Event: Narratives at the Boundaries: Research Positioned in the Borderland Spaces

Abstract

Situated in over three years of ethnographic research in a new Latino Diaspora community, this paper explores how conversational storytelling in interviews serves to build and direct social relationships between researchers and participants. More broadly, it considers how storytelling in research and other institutional contexts such as parent-teacher conferences, can accomplish considerable social work in spite of communicative barriers including differences not only in language, but also in linguistic and sociocultural knowledge needed to participate effectively in such settings. Drawing on ethnopoetic representation of interview text, the paper examines the referential, indexical and interactional aspects of narrative, features of talk that together constitute narrative action, or work accomplished through storytelling.

Author

• Holly Link, University of Pennsylvania