The seminar took place on 8 and 9 July, 2013, at the University of Southampton. It was coordinated by Adriana Patiño-Santos (University of Southampton) and Ana María Relaño Pastor (University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain)). Twenty-two people attended the seminar and 11 presented their papers. Delegates came from the USA, the Netherlands, Brazil, Estonia, Spain and the United Kingdom.
Introduction
The main aim of this seminar was to approach narrative from an interdisciplinary perspective, including areas of sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, discourse studies, psychology and sociology. Narrative analysis has become one of the most salient, consolidated areas of research and methodological analysis in the social sciences, in particular, in researching identity, social practice, cultural experience and beliefs.
Objectives
1. To engage junior and senior scholars in applied linguistics, discourse studies, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and transnational studies, among other disciplines, in dialogue about the understanding of narrative as the object of study in migration contexts
2. To discuss different methodological approaches to narrative in a variety of migration scenarios
3. To put forward a research agenda on narrative and transnationalism, globalization and diaspora.
Over the last decade, particularly within sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and discourse studies, researchers have used narrative analysis as one of the most powerful qualitative perspectives to investigate how people construct and position themselves with respect to different social issues. Narrative enquiry has become relevant in studying transnational migration contexts. It is in such situations that the negotiation of identity, position, stance and knowledge are problematized by participants in their daily lives and at the same time, methodological reflexivity, on the part of the researcher, emerges as central for analytical purposes (De Fina & Georgakopolou Reference De Fina and Georgakopoulou2008, Reference De Fina and Georgakopoulou2012). Despite the importance of narrative as a social practice revealing processes of displacement, settlement and resistance to social exclusion in migratory contexts (Baynham & De Fina Reference Baynham and De Fina2005; De Fina Reference De Fina2003), narrative as epistemology and method in a variety of migration scenarios across the globe is still highly debatable from different perspectives.
The seminar attempted to answer the following questions:
1. How have scholars interested in transnational migration used narrative in their research?
2. How does narrative as epistemology and method shed light on key issues such as identity, positioning, stance and reflexivity in migration contexts?
3. How can researchers with an interest in migration challenge current definitions and methodological approaches to narrative?
Among the topics that emerged from the papers relating to presentations were the following:
• definitions of narrative
• narrative models
• narrative as social practice
• narrative and professional identity
• narrative, migration and the city
Thematic papers
Day one started with the presentation of our invited BAAL Executive member, Dr Martin Edwardes, who provided an introduction to the Association. Papers were delivered in three individually themed sessions. Day one dealt with the topic ‘Narrative, migration and the city’, which consisted of six presentations covering a range of migration locations: Berlin, Barcelona, Southampton, Sheffield, Russia and Sussex. The presentations offered different approaches to the understanding and analysis of narrative. Day two centred on ‘Professional identities in narrative’ and ‘Narrative as method: Challenges and dilemmas’.
The papers on the first day began with Patrick Stevenson (University of Southampton), whose presentation looked at the results from his project on multilingualism and migration in the city of Berlin. He explored the topic through the language biographies of inhabitants of a single apartment block in the German capital. The paper discussed the individuality of language experiences arising from different migration patterns as an important and necessary counterweight to larger scale investigations of language knowledge and language use.
Maria Sabaté i Dalmau (University of Barcelona), spoke about the ways in which multiple socioeconomic and spatial mobility/immobility experiences are inscribed in Ghanaian migrants’ narratives of place, specifically the ways in which they make sense of how they practise, inhabit and embody their local transnational trajectory movements when living in global cities. Similarly to Stevenson’s, her work addressed some of the methodological challenges of ethnography.
Dan Jendrissek (University of Southampton) delivered the third presentation of the day. His research explored the migration strategies of young, well-qualified migrants from Poland and Spain who are living and working in the UK. He gave a comparison of individual autobiographical narratives from people of both nationalities.
On a final note, Isabelle van der Bom (University of Sheffield) examined world-construction in the narrative of a Hong Kong migrant living in Sheffield. She explained how the world-based cognitive model Text World Theory, not previously applied to spoken discourse, could be useful for narrative analysis.
The second session of the day began with a paper by Nina Kresova (University of Tartu) on the discursive construction of the social categorization of Russian blogger-emigrants, particularly mentioning the strategies and devices they use to define and negotiate their in- and out-group relationships in interaction with other bloggers.
Roberta Piazza (University of Sussex) then spoke about the results of interviews she had undertaken for the study of the construction of identity among female travellers belonging to a mobile community in the South of England. She specifically addressed the ways in which both interviewers and interviewees negotiated identity categories as competent members of the culture of travellers.
Participants were encouraged to write points/questions on post-its and pin them to the conference bulletin board. The results of the exercise were as follows:
• Should we only focus on what occurs in the interaction? Can we talk about what occurs outside of this? What about discursive psychology/social psychology?
• What makes a story or anecdote into a narrative? Is it the application of a framework that makes it ‘analysed’or is an unanalysed story also a narrative?
• Transition (translation) from participants’ to analysts’ narratives.
• Please say something more about use of positioning theory and argumentation theory and how they can be operationalized.
The issues raised were addressed by the keynote speakers in the general discussion sessions.
The second day of the seminar consisted of two sessions: one on the theme of professional identities in narrative and the other about the challenges and dilemmas of narrative methodology. Additionally, Marilisa Birello and Núria Sánchez Quintana (University of Barcelona) presented the results of a larger project carried out in collaboration with universities in four European cities: Paris (France), Pécs (Hungary), Trento (Italy) and Barcelona (Spain) concerning biographical narratives of teachers and their beliefs on plurilingualism.
Manuel de la Mata (University of Seville) gave the results of a large study he had undertaken with colleagues Andrés I. Santamaría Santigosa, Mercedes Cubero Pérez, Ma del Mar Prados Gallardo, Samuel Arias Sánchez and Rosario Cubero Pérez regarding the community cultural competence of social services professionals in the city of Seville (Spain). In particular, he focused on the positions and voices in teachers’ narratives and how they related to the construction of professional identity. Then Kevin Haines (University of Groningen) examined narrative as a tool for investigating and co-constructing the learning experiences of language learners, using data obtained from learning histories and learner journals.
The final session of papers presented on day two focused on the dilemmas involved in narrative analysis. Rosa Soriano (University of Granada) addressed the methodological challenges of Grounded Theory for the intersectional analysis of identity. She examined data from her research on Moroccan immigrant women in Andalusia (Spain). Tony Capstick (Lancaster University) explained the methodological challenges of taking a social practices approach to literacy and what this approach can bring to narrative enquiry in transnational migratory contexts. He talked about the literacy practices of a family from Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, and Lancashire, UK, as they moved between physical and social spaces between the two countries.
Discussions by keynote speakers
The seminar included two general discussions by the two conference keynote speakers, Professor Alexandra Georgakopoulou (King's College, London) and Professor Anna De Fina (Georgetown University). Professor Georgakopoulou conducted the first discussion on day one, addressing the issue of hybrid identities in mobility processes as ‘the forgotten reminder of what “everyday life” is’. She discussed the importance of thinking of narrative as a ‘fragmented’ practice on which people can elaborate at any time and anywhere. She examined the importance of defining narrative as part of the ethnographies of mobility and how the concept of mobility would need to be re-examined, especially in transnational contexts, where a new reformulation of time and place is needed. She insisted on the need for further study of the entextualization, transposition and recontextualization of narrative, and the need to include ‘small stories’ research in migration studies. She encouraged the study of ‘storytelling on the go’ and a plausible alternative to understanding fragmented and hybrid identities in narrative. She ended with a reflection on the methodological foundation of sites as a locus to understanding narrative practices (Georgakopoulou Reference Georgakopoulou1997, Reference Georgakopoulou2007).
Professor De Fina's keynote talk took place on the second day of the seminar. She offered a discussion of the main theoretical and methodological issues that had emerged from the presentations. She explained the need to specify how narratives are elicited in different research traditions and the importance of problematizing the notion of context in narrative analysis. The second issue she considered crucial in narrative analysis was the methodological reflexivity that any narrative researcher should engage in regarding their participants and the data collection process. She insisted on the importance of dialoguing and self-reflecting on the impact that we, as researchers, have on the data we collect. In this regard, she argued for the avoidance of linearity and the complexity involved in narrative analysis. The importance of revisiting and reinterpreting narrative data was also part of the reflexivity process she encouraged researchers to be aware of. Finally, she dealt with the need to differentiate the concepts of ‘narrative as representation’ and ‘narrative as social practice’. De Fina supported the notion of narrative as social practice and explained how narrative representations can never be de-contextualized; on the contrary, they need to be understood as practices produced in context, as context-generated, but also as context-generating practices.
The format of having general discussion at the end of each day proved to be fruitful because presenters had the opportunity to further discuss their papers with the keynote speakers in a friendly and relaxed atmosphere.
