Storytelling & Emplotment as Tools for Combatting White Blindness & Learning to See Participants as Whole, Complex Beings

• In Event: Contemplative practices in K12 and higher educational settings: Indigenous sports, poetry, and storytelling

Proposal

Qualitative researchers are passionate about understanding and communicating the lived experiences of their participants, and qualitative research offers a slew of possible approaches to accomplishing this task (Creswell & Poth, 2018; Mertens, 2020; Merriam & Tisdell, 2015). One of the most common types of qualitative analysis for examining interview data is the thematic analysis, which begins with specific research questions and analyzes collected data by highlighting only those elements of each participants' story which intersect, creating a series of shared themes which answer the research questions (Saldena, 2013). While this approach has an important place in qualitative research, especially among large datasets, one of the drawbacks is that it tends to overlook the richness of individual experience in favor of finding, and articulating, commonalities. This approach gives the researcher license to focus on a certain kind of story--a story which she has set out to tell from the beginning. This becomes especially problematic when researchers with privileged identities are collecting and analyzing the stories of participants with oppressed and/or minoritized identities, where problems such as white blindness, essentialism, and the romanticization of trauma-narratives may prevent the researcher, however subconsciously, from a deep, holistic understanding of what the participants' story really means (Christian, 2019; Mills, 2015; Weiner, 2012).
In contrast to a thematic analysis of the data, there is a subset of narrative researchers who set out to relate each participants' lived experience as a story through the tool of emplotment. Emplotment is built around the understanding of a narrative as a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, where stories themselves are essential to human knowledge and experience (Coulter & Smith, 2009; Petty, Jarvis & Thomas, 2018; Polkinghorne, 1995). Narrative researchers who use emplotment as a tool, focusing on one participants' story at a time, spend significant time considering each individual story. This forces the researcher to consider the participants' story in its own rite, irregardless of the researchers' hypothesized themes or pre-determined research questions. As such, the story the participant wants to tell comes to life on the page, fleshing out the participant as a whole being, and therefore as more than a collection of themes, or his or her interconnected identities. Moreover, highlighting and raising up the full richness of the participants' story guards against essentializing minoritized and oppressed voices into tropes or stereotypes of the oppressed, minoritized figure by keeping the communication of interview data grounded in the participants full, complex experience.
This formal paper presentation is a reflection on the deeper insight and clarity gleaned from conducting a narrative analysis, using the tool of emplotment, in comparison to a thematic analysis. It does this by telling the story of how I, a white, American woman, utilized emplotment and storying to look a second time at my interview data, which had initially be analyzed through a traditional, qualitative coding method. It not only explains how, through this second look, I gained a deeper awareness of my interview data, but how I recognized through this second look that the thematic analysis alone had led me to reduce and essentialize voices in my study in troubling ways. I will demonstrate the lessons learned by introducing the stories of three Participants of Color from a multiple case study project conducted in Taiwan. All three participants had linguistic, national, and racial identities which were oppressed in the study context. While my thematic analysis allowed me to zero in on ways my participants' stories answered my research questions, the narrative analysis allowed me to see them as whole beings, and to recognize the story they were trying to tell, which was often not the story I had been eager to read.
In this formal paper presentation, I will briefly outline the steps I took to conduct the two different types of qualitative analysis: first, a thematic analysis in Nvivo based on qualitative coding methods; and second, a narrative analysis based on my unique approach to emplotment and story-creation. I will then compare the findings from the two methodologies, drawing out ways that narrative analysis helped me to not only gain deeper insight of my interview data, but disrupted the formation of deficit narratives, and refocused my attention to participants as complex, whole beings. While a close narrative analysis is not necessarily appropriate for all studies, it is important to consider its effectiveness in combatting white blindness, and helping researchers who are attempting to raise the voices of oppressed people to remain vigilant in their representation, doing everything they can to resist essentializing those voices in the process.



Creswell, J.W. & Poth, C. N. (2018). Qualitative inquiry & research design: Choosing among five approaches. Sage Publications.
Christian, M. (2019). A global critical race and racism framework: Racial entanglements and deep and malleable whiteness. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 5(2), 169-185.
Coulter, C.A. & Smith, M.L. (2009). Discourse on narrative research, the construction zone: literary elements in narrative research. Educational Researcher. Vol. 38, No. 8, pp. 577–590.
Delgado, R. & J. Stefancic (2017). Critical Race Theory, 3rd edition. University Press.
Merriam, S.B., & Tisdell, E. J. (2016). Qualitative research: A guide to design and implementation [4th ed.]. Jossey-Bass.
Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). From the achievement gap to the education debt: Understanding achievement in U.S. schools. Educational Researcher, 35(7), 3-12.
Mertens, D. M. (2020). Research and evaluation in education and psychology: Integrating diversity with quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods, 5th Edition. Sage.
Mills, C.W. (2007). White ignorance. In, S. Sullivan & N. Tuana (Eds.), Race and epistemologies of ignorance (pp. 11-38). State University of New York Press.
Petty, Jarvis & Thomas (2018). Core story creation: analyzing narratives to construct stories for learning. Nurse Researcher, 24 (4). Pp. 47-51.
Polkinghorne, D.E. (1995). Narrative configuration in qualitative analysis. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 8:1, 5-23.
Saldena, J. (2013). The coding manual for qualitative researchers. Sage Publications.
Weiner, M.F. (2012). Towards a global critical race theory. Sociology Compass, 6(4), 332-350.

Author

• Amanda J Fiore, University of Maryland