Death, Remembrance, and the Oceanic: Creating Narrative Pedagogies of Resistance

• In Event: 46.025 - Creative and Critical Justice: New Approaches to Methodological Border-Crossing

Abstract

Objectives or Purposes
This paper describes one section of a narrative inquiry into two individuals’ negotiations with and performances of critical dispositions amid otherwise stifling normativity. Over the course of the four-month study, two participants – Jeanie, a prison abolitionist working in the US Southwest, and myself, an early-career academic committed to social justice – both came to understand elements of their activism as tied to prior experiences of trauma. During the course of data analysis and story writing, a third section emerged as part of my narrative structure. Comprised of stories that are neither entirely Jeanie’s nor entirely mine, these pieces describe four deaths that affected multiple individuals within the overall narrative. I re-storied these sections as prose poems as a way to call attention to the kinds of “oceanic” (Silverman, 2009) relationships that intertwine and intersect the stories in the overall piece. Accordingly, the purpose of this presentation is to illustrate how the altogether personal trauma of death pedagogically engendered life-long critical dispositions to social injustices.

Theoretical Framework
My theoretical architecture is derived from Lacanian scholar Kaja Silverman’s (2009, 1996) meditations on analogy, finitude, and relationality. Within these texts, she describes “the oceanic” as a return to a sort of analogic thinking, as opposed to the radical forms of differentiation that mark Western subjectivity as well as many critical multicultural projects. In her work, she locates death – both as a symbolic and material event – as something that must be brought into consciousness in order to engage in ethical, analogic relations. In contrast, she states that the inability to place ourselves in relation to finitude constitutes an ignorance of history and of the material effects of our current ways of living.

Mode of Inquiry and Data Sources
As noted, this piece was part of a larger narrative project, specifically falling under the sub-genre of narrative construction (Barone, 2000, via Polkinghorne, 1995), in which data are collected as stories and then re-storied within the analysis and writing process. Data collected from participant observation, interviews, official statements from the Arizona Department of Corrections, court transcripts, blog posts, personal narratives, and prior writings were utilized to compose a series of thematically interbraided prose poems. These poems were written to highlight intersecting thematic elements and motifs that recurred throughout the research, the most prominent being the metaphoric and actual desert within which the participants and researcher resided – a space that linked all of the bodies at play in the research.

Conclusions and Scholarly Significance
Conclusions within narrative inquiry most frequently seek to pose, rather than answer, questions (Barone, 2001). Thus, the findings are the poems themselves, intended to be read as ambiguous texts. Both psychoanalysis and aesthetic theory suggest that certainty and definitiveness might be antithetical to practices that seek transgressive ends. Agreeing with Silverman (2009), my work suggests that attention to sameness – such as the traumatic, but shared inevitability of finitude – can potentially foster critical dispositions against intolerance, inequity, and dehumanization, particularly for individuals who have never experienced the devastation of injustice.

Author

• Jake Burdick, Purdue University