Friday, June 01, 2007

More on the main concepts — narrative

Following up on this post, a clarification of what I mean by 'narrative'.

Narrative is really a multi-threaded concept. It's both something that we make or tell, as an artifact of some kind (a story, the weaving together of maps, etc.), and something we live in (more of a psychosocial construct). It's always multiple -- that is, we might only be consciously engaged in making a particular narrative artifact, but we are living in many at once.

As Chuck P. said in response to the earlier post, narrative as something we make also has aesthetics and ethics. But it is the other sense, of the narrative(s) that we live in, that is kind of a different animal. The work a PHC practitioner does is both the crafting of narratives (in their creation / manipulation of maps), and as a 'character' in other people's narratives (their sense of what is going on with their projects, organizations, lives, why things happen the way they happen) as well as in their own.

It's this latter sense that I am more interested in from a research perspective. What narrative(s) are going on in a situation, what kinds of "breaches" occur in them, how do the actions of the practitioner(s) repair the breaches.

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