Narrative Construction as a Postqualitative Project: A Retrospective Analysis

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

Abstract

Objectives or purpose:
Narrative construction (Barone, 2007) has gained some credibility within qualitative research, though the place of a theoretical exposition within such research is still contested. Many questions remain. How does the reader know that the story is “true”? How is the data collected similar to that of more traditional qualitative inquiry, and how does one analyze the data? How can the reader know if the research “report” really represents the experience of the participants (or the data that was collected and interpreted)? How can the ethical and relational obligations of the researcher toward her participants be ensured (Clandinin & Murphy, 2009)? Like qualitative research, narrative research and in particular narrative construction has been obligated to defend its credibility as research. Further, the potential of narrative construction as research has been warped by the continual need to fit it into a positivist-based norm.
In the meantime, the post-qualitative turn ushers in new empiricisms that provide narrative construction some space to stretch out into its ontological possibilities. The purpose of this paper is to explore such possibilities by retrospectively analyzing a narrative constructed from a post-humanist, post-qualitative frame.
Perspective(s) or theoretical framework:
MacClure (2013), drawing from Deleuze’s (2004) Logic of Sense, imagines research that grapples with the materiality of language such that it is no longer representative—through the reductionist aspects of language—but “mutually implicated” with matter: “Language is deposed from its god-like centrality in the construction and regulation of worldly affairs, to become one element in a manifold of forces and intensities that are moving, connecting, and diverging...Words collide and connect with things on the same ontological level, and therefore language cannot achieve the distance and externality that would allow it to represent—i.e. to stand over, stand for and stand in for—the world” (p. 660.)
This paper explores the possibilities of narrative constructions to be evocative beyond language, to create ontological sense-events (Deleuze, 2004; MacClure, 2013) that exist within assemblages (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004) that entangle (Barad, 2007) the reader, the narrator, the place, the writer, and the participants temporally, spatially, and sensually within a flattened event (MacClure, 2013).
Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry:
The original narrative construction draws from a collaborative partnership between a university and an Alaska Native village in which language revitalization efforts are sought through various school-based projects including a teacher-training program, creation of subsistence-based native language curriculum, and other projects. It seeks to understand ways in which the researcher found herself personally and professionally transformed through engaging in collaborative, anti-colonial projects. The current paper seeks to explore the possibilities within the original narrative as a post-qualitative, ontological project.
Scholarly Significance:
Putting to work concepts from post-qualitative methodologies, this paper will explore ways in which the original narrative construction was able/not able to reflect a post-qualitative frame as research. As qualitative inquiry moves into this “post” stage, such explorations become paramount in creating new possibilities within narrative research.

Author

• Cathy A. Coulter, The University of Alaska - Anchorage