Sounding Off: Voice, Expression, and Intent in Narrative Forms of Research

• In Event: Thoughts Awaiting Narrative Researchers: Narrative Inquiry as "Public Scholarship" in the Age of Postqualitative Research

Abstract

This paper concerns three aspects central to the boundaries and potential of any research that might be called “narrative”: voice, expression, and intent. A story, even those one never tells, have something that might be considered a voice, the sounding of that narrative (e.g., Ashby, 2014; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990; Myfanwy & Edwards, 2010). There is indeed something powerful in giving voice to others and the sharing of others’ stories. Yet, why is it so often the case that narratives-as-scholarship tend to follow well-established research patterns for stories, storytelling that is in some fashion linear and sequential, even when it loops back on itself? How is it the case that there is still cache in the telling of others’ stories without the narrator sharing an authorial byline in publications? It is certainly the case that participants should be protected according to ethical agreements with researchers and that such protection, particularly of traditionally marginalized populations, should be given all the care and safety available. However, why are there not more pseudonyms as co-authors? Why is it still common practice to gain notoriety on the backs of other peoples’ stories?
Then there are the questions about the expression of stories. There remains in narrative scholarship of all stripes, and much of qualitative research in general, a fetishization of the textual (e.g., Author, 2011; Howes, 2003; Stoller, 1997). It often seems as though the story cannot be scholarship unless it is flattened on a (virtual) page. What of the stories literally woven into cloth or sung by one’s elders? What of stories that have no words but are nonetheless sounded? How is it that over 100 years of audio recording, scholarship in narrative inquiry has yet to catch up? Children tell stories, youth tell stories, elders tell stories. Why not let their stories speak without intervention and, returning to the previous point, with their own voices and receiving credit for the story told (e.g., Author, 2013)?
Finally, there is intent (e.g., Author, 2008; Ortner, 2006). There are many kinds of stories told for many purposes (e.g., . One does not need to know the language of a story to be moved to tears and some stories are told just for the telling. What kinds of stories should “count” as research? In addition, does not all research, qualitative and quantitative alike, in some fashion “tell a story”? If so, then what use is a story if everything can be construed as one?
The questions raised above are considered both theoretically and in practical examples in this multisensual “paper.” As such it is a performative answer to questions about storytelling and narrative that simultaneously reaffirm and critique what narrative is and how it might function as research. To these ends, the paper is divided into two overarching parts, one texted and the other sounded, in which the thorny theoretical questions raised here are examined textually and are practically articulated in and through sound.

Author

• Walter S. Gershon, Kent State University