Story Constellations: Contextualizing Peer Review Through Multiple, Connected Stories

• In Event: 66.076 - (Re)Imagining Narrative Inquiry: Dis(s)/Trust in the Peer-Review Process

Abstract

Objectives
In this paper, we utilize story constellations (Craig, 2007) to contextualize experiences of peer review in academia and invite participants to expand these constellations. Drawing upon field texts collected during a writing team’s manuscript revision, this work seeks to understand the ways peer review shapes academics’ writing lives through the multiple stories they tell and the potentials of story constellations in narrative inquiry.

Theoretical framework
This paper works from a narrative view of the phenomenon of experience (Dewey, 1938). Story constellations enable a fluid approach to narrative inquiry drawing upon multiple stories that allows for “permissive eclecticism” (Schwab, 1961/1978, p. 248), fluctuating within the temporal context of experience and research interest.

Methods
These individual narratives existed within a story constellation (see Figure 3), a series of experiences like a “nest of boxes” (Crites, 1975). Making and remaking meaning of stories within this constellation relied on three analytical tasks:
● Broadening (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990): analysis to understand the general context of peer review in academia.
● Burrowing (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990): analysis turns to individual stories told, working to understand how stories build upon one another.
● Restorying (Craig, 2007): analysis turns to what new knowledge, what new “changing connections and differing orderings at differing times” (Schwab, 1969, p. 10) emerge as stories come into contact with one another within constellations.


Data sources
This constellation story draws upon several field texts collected as a writing team of five responded to a peer review of a manuscript for major revisions. Field texts include Reviewer 1’s feedback; text messages sent between members of the writing team; written stories of the revision process, and field notes and noticings (snapshots of story).

Results
Figure 4 highlights the story constellations of peer review. Drawing upon the three analytical processes created a core constellation of stories centering on Reviewer 1: stories of resonance, of the hypothetical lives of Reviewer 1, of their characteristics. Adjacent to this story were stories centered on ineffectual peer reviews, how we learned or didn’t learn how to construct a peer review in our enculturation as graduate students (Prior, 1998), and of efforts to be better reviewers.

Furthermore, from a methods perspective, the process of creating these story constellations was rife with tension, as the research team collectively sought to understand the ways stories built upon one another and how that work was best depicted in a visual.

Scholarly Significance
Peer review is an integral part of academia, yet is also one of the most de-personalized. Through the analysis of story constellations about peer review, we are able to more fully understand the lived experiences of peer review and, perhaps, project more humanized futures for the process. Additionally, this project utilizes a novel analysis scheme, the story constellation, and the ways in which this scheme was adapted and enacted within this research project will be of interest those interested in narrative inquiry methodology.

Authors

• Nicholas E Husbye, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

• Julie Rust, Millsaps College

• Christy Wessel Powell