2.1 Credibility and coherence are processes

The UNHCR has established the importance of asylum seekers’ oral testimony as evidence. Whereas norms of everyday storytelling generate from the narrator's purpose and, typically known interlocutors, legal norms of credibility and coherence orient the successful asylum narrative:

The oral testimony takes on special weight because people escaping violence do not tend to have time to gather identity documents or material evidence of their persecution (such as cell phone photos or statements by witnesses). In Italy, for example, the ‘narrative’ is generated from a ‘personal interview’ (Art. 12 Legislative Decree No. 25, 2008),Footnote ¹ which takes place in the presence of a member of the Committee ‘paying due attention to the personal or general context in which the application arises, including the applicant's cultural origin or vulnerability’ (Art. 15 Legislative Decree No. 25, 2008). According to Article 13 of the same decree, ‘the applicant is guaranteed the possibility to express in an exhaustive manner the elements employed as a foundation for the application’. Another group of external gatekeepers enters even in terms of the claimant's home cultural knowledge. Fact-finders working in country-of-origin information (COI) units provide decision-makers – case-workers and judges – with the necessary information related to the countries of origin of asylum seekers. Given this peculiarity of international protection law, an evaluation of the credibility of claimants’ narratives is a problematic issue (Coffey, Reference Coffey2003). In terms of our goal to link storytelling for personal purposes in everyday life and legal purposes of saving one's life, the personal story becomes a legal story, in part as it includes country-of-origin details. Given the weight of these legal norms, one of our goals is to figure out how to balance a bit more towards the personal story so internal and external consistency might be in harmony. Each person, of course, knows her/his/their experience and has some control over how to share it.

Table 1 summarises some of the major differences between norms of credibility and coherence in familiar daily life and in contexts where subjects of official policies and laws must orient to those audiences if their claims of inclusion are to be successful.

Table 1.

Narrating differs across everyday and institutional contexts

Having presented some of the official criteria for legal norms, we now illustrate how storytelling differs in a setting where subjects of social inclusion policies worked with educators to generate a range of personal and public stories. This example of dynamic storytelling with Roma adults seeking roles for themselves and their community inside mainstream education will then become a model we expand to collaborative lawyering.

2.2 Narrating beyond vulnerability for inclusion in education

Narrative has been at the centre of a social inclusion process involving the Roma people, in part so Roma voices may formally enter public life in ways that command respect. Roma populations have been living across Eurasia for 1,000 years since the first ones migrated from the Indian subcontinent. Unlike many migrants who eventually integrate into societies, the 1,000-year history of the Roma has been one of exclusion, discrimination, persistent stereotypical myths and injustices. Exclusion has been so great that legal mandates for Roma inclusion in education, housing and health care have been instituted across Eurasian countries, especially where their rights to inclusion continue to be violated. Countries like Serbia, seeking entry into the EU, have paid special attention to their Roma communities. Such EU requirements emanate from human rights norms embodied in a regional Treaty for Roma Inclusion by twelve countries with large Roma populations across Eurasia.

An excerpt of the treaty illustrates how central narrative is to social justice projects. In this case, participants writing the treaty narrated the setting, characters and desired trajectory:

Building on this treaty and previous work with Roma communities in the former Yugoslavia and in the post-1990s Balkan war period, Serbia instituted the Roma Pedagogical Assistant (RPA) Program, with commitments and activities across the state and local governing and education practice entities. Although often living in settlements with no official address or access to basic services like electricity or plumbing, Roma people can be embedded in systems of justice, such as the requirement that they attend public schools. Education is a gatekeeper for access to such services, and the RPA programme aimed to expand beyond the 4–6 per cent of the community who enter secondary education. The ultimate goal of the project was to increase Roma participation in the mainstream society by supporting the participation of community members in education, as liaisons between schools and Roma families as well as with children in schools. This role of the RPA was legislated, funded and implemented with formal training across the country. The programme recruited among the very few Roma adults who had completed secondary school.

The RPAs were the frontline mediators of this process in education via their participation as teaching assistants working in school buildings with everyone, as well as specifically by helping Roma children and families navigate their participation. Acknowledging the numerous obstacles to this endeavour as well as to practical obstacles to Roma attending school, a goal embedded in the programme was for the RPAs to have a voice at all levels of policy implementation. To support the RPA participants’ bridging of their personal and public voices, a Dynamic Storytelling Workshop occurred with 174 RPAs during a pause in the regular training sessions (Daiute and Kovacs-Cerovic, Reference Daiute and Kovacs-Cerovic2017). We wish to clarify that supporting Roma communities’ narratives that bridge their experiences of exclusion in generational cycles of poverty and their participation as educators in public schools is a less rigidly scripted task than asylum seekers’ needing to present a successful credible fear interview. Highlighting that distinction, we discuss how the RPAs demonstrated extreme care with every sentence of every narrative to avoid conforming to the explicit and persistent stereotypes about their people. Although one problematic detail in their interaction with a colleague or student would not have sent them on a plane back to India, many local officials and parents proved ready to end the RPA project even with scant evidence that the Roma children were not clean enough, healthy enough, etc. to sit alongside mainstream children (Daiute and Kovacs-Cerovic, Reference Daiute and Kovacs-Cerovic2017). We now discuss how dynamic narrating in the RPA programme served as a bridge between community and public expectations.

Based on principles of dynamic storytelling, the two-day workshop was convened with educators and community leaders they knew, as well as with researchers (including one of the authors of this paper). In addition to one another, some of the non-Roma interlocutors were more and less familiar. The RPAs participated individually and collectively to narrate their experiences and reflect on others’ narrations, including those of the policy-makers and journalists reporting on the Roma inclusion practices. Narrative activities in this professional development context thus invited the participants to share their experience and knowledge for diverse purposes and audiences. Among other activities like commenting on the treaty presented above, the RPAs wrote two narratives and a letter to make sense of their experience relevant to the social inclusion treaty, their role in it and their evaluation of how the programme should move forward.

The narrative prompt ‘Write about your journey to becoming a PA’ was designed, as human rights interviews are, to elicit the first-person perspective – that is, with the author the main character or assumed main character:

As with any personal narrative, this one exposed the authors as they wanted to be perceived for that purpose and audience. The author of this personal journey narrative, like most others, emphasised three values in particular, including collaborating with all Roma and the majority community (27 per cent of sentences across all journey narratives), the importance of education (23 per cent) and considering the RPA role (16 per cent) (Daiute and Kovacs-Cerovic, Reference Daiute and Kovacs-Cerovic2017). These three values accounted for a majority of the personal journey narratives, indicating that the PAs perceived their activities in terms of the collective rather than as an individual struggle against odds. For that reason, social and cognitive dimensions of their personal journeys prevailed over potentially emotional dimensions wrought with their experience in institutions that had historically excluded them.

Another narrative activity during the workshop was meant to broaden the participants’ opportunity to share complexities of their experiences. That invitation was ‘Write a story about a Roma child in education’. Such a hypothetical, even possibly fictional, story allowed the author to craft a stance as an observer, with a focus on third-person characters, and thus to be more off-centre-stage. Notice the very different emphasis the author of the journey story expressed when shifting gaze to a Roma child, the major beneficiary of the RPA work:

Shifting his perspective with the affordances of this narrative prompt, the author of the Roma child story used the stance of omniscient narrator and literary devices to emphasise obstacles in Roma living circumstances, humanity of Roma characters and a potential role for the RPA. Roma child stories by this same group of PA participants emphasised the importance of acknowledging and addressing obstacles (26 per cent of all sentences in the Roma child stories), collaboration (24 per cent) and human qualities (14 per cent) (Daiute and Kovacs-Cerovic, Reference Daiute and Kovacs-Cerovic2017). These findings show how a slight shift in an invitation to narrate became extremely useful for a policy subject under scrutiny. In the first narrative, for example, this author demonstrated his community orientation, whereas in the second unpleasant details and dependencies of Roma life. It is this kind of narrating as observer of one's own plight that brings critical knowledge to light, thereby increasing the complexity, humanity and, we think, success of narrating for social inclusion. This can, we argue, apply as well to collaborative lawyering with asylum seekers and others.

The third of the individual writing activities was to ‘Write a letter to a future Roma Pedagogical Assistant’, thereby explicitly involving the authors in their roles as experts:

The letter by the same author of the two narratives above uses the direct communication to a like-minded recipient to emphasise the importance of PA role activities (54 per cent of all sentences in the letters) as well as the value of collaboration (16 per cent) and acknowledging and addressing obstacles (14 per cent). As in the letter above, those values came to life in mentions of the details, psychological expressions and policy strategies of RPA actors.

For purposes of this paper, several points about the design and findings of the RPA workshop are most relevant. First, the workshop design acknowledged that narratives are interactions with actual and imagined audiences and purposes. The RPAs were able to present their experience and knowledge in diverse strategic ways, as they were not expected to tell only one single story about their experience in life and in the RPA programme. Because there was much at stake for each Roma participant and for their community more generally, their self-expressions would obviously be subject to scrutiny, for their worth and veracity.

In terms of norms, the personal journey narrative and the letter allowed the credibility of the PAs as their first in their role in mainstream education. The story of the Roma child expressed another kind of credibility – that of the history and circumstances of exclusion the community had and would face were there no increased inclusion efforts. In this way, research and practice inviting complex narrating – the use of diverse expressive stances with diverse implied author stances, audiences and features – have shown that credibility is an interactive and complex process. Given those narrative experiences as reflective interpretation of their official role, the RPAs were subsequently able to offer suggestions for Roma integration policies moving forward.

With the facts and logics across their narratives, the RPAs were, in brief, making a case for continuation of their funded role in education, for their capacity to collaborate with non-Roma educators and to provide valuable resources to all children. The education and research advocacy team worked collaboratively with several of the RPAs to examine the diverse narrative examples to generate a plan for the group's self-advocacy. In addition to skilfully interpreting the experience and knowledge shared across the diverse genres, this collaborative group created a statement and argument for the future of the programme (Daiute and Kovacs-Cerovic, Reference Daiute and Kovacs-Cerovic2017).

In the next section, we discuss the norms of credibility and coherence in asylum law, where they have primarily been applied. The aim is to highlight, with examples, the disequilibrium that may exist between a person's need to tell their story in a spontaneous way and the need of legal professionals to force their account into scripts or embedded institutional story in order to make them credible. From Margaret's case (Di Donato, Reference Di2020a), we move to a case where little guidance was offered.

3.1 Narrating for asylum in Italian law

Consistently with international law (as noted above), Italian law specifies the following: in Italy, the applicant's story must comply with two sets of parameters: it must be consistent in itself, and it must correspond to what is known as the COI. Norms of coherence and credibility must be evident within the applicant's story and in relation to known circumstances in the country of origin. The applicant must tell the story indicating that a return to the country of origin would threaten their life. This threat must be credible in terms of details in the story and confirmed by the COI. Fact-finders draw on information confirmed by official decision-makers to establish the COI, which then affirms external validity of dangers reported in the personal story: ‘Do the place, the event and the traditions that the asylum seeker mentions truly exist and do they fit the given description?’

Absent evidence in the strict sense of the term, the applicant's statements are thus considered to be truthful if they are found to be ‘consistent and plausible’ and ‘do not contradict’ both the general information – that is, the COI – and the specific information about his case:

In other words, should facts as narrated by the client fail to coincide with the COI, the COI is likely to take precedence over the story told by applicants, who are not always in a position to prove truth as required by the court. In practice, this gap may often require verifying the information – a burden of proof that in Italy is not borne by the asylum seeker alone, but also by the examiner. This examiner is a person conducting the investigation at the level of the territorial committee or of the judicial authority. In the case of judicial proceedings,  steps to prove details in question can be shared by the asylum seeker, such as to fill in gaps. The legal team would, of course, also, in their preparation of the client seek to achieve a story that might not require such additional examination. The asylum narrative does not thus stand on its own, as a plurality of people are called into account to define the credibility of the asylum seeker's story (lawyers, social workers, judges, members of territorial committees). This is one way that the asylum narrative is embedded in problem-solving and a resulting collaborative narrative (D'Halluin, Reference D'Halluin2016). That said, the ultimate determination is that this narrative within itself conforms to norms established by the legal context. As we see below, the pressure to achieve one true story may involve a painful process for the client and legal team.

In the section below, we present a dynamic reading of an asylum narrative, building towards a rationale for practice that can examine the potential benefit of a more process-oriented collaborative lawyering development of a story that achieves asylum for the client.

3.2 Forcing the right narrative: Margaret's case

We briefly present the case of Margaret, who came to Italy from Nigeria, at first to escape from a forced marriage and then to break free from forms of sexual exploitation (Di Donato, Reference Di2020a). Margaret's story unfolded over a series of interviews with legal staff of a social co-operative based in Naples – an organisation with staff of lawyers and mediators to conduct asylum interviews. As is common practice, the interviews are recorded in written notes by one of the parties present, rather than being audio- or video-recorded. For this reason, we report excerpts, as they are critically important to the legal shaping of Margaret's story (Di Donato, Reference Di2020a).

Based on one of the author's practice, we present some passages of this process undertaken by an anti-trafficking organism based in Naples, in order to show the story process construction and the lawyer's lack of correct training about the fact-finding method and elicitation of the client's story. In addition to the lawyer, a non-lawyer (a cultural mediator) who understands issues of human-trafficking victims assists in the case. This analysis explores how these diverse collaborations interrupt or support, from their diverse perspectives, the construction of a successful case via the client's narrative.

The process of identifying Margaret undertaken by Dedalus (a social work co-operative working with the Territorial Commission to identify victims of trafficking) took the form of a series of interviews that one of the authors was able to attend in the co-operative's offices between February and April 2018. What now follows is a brief description of the three phases of these interviews with Margaret, based on the notes taken during the meetings and subsequently edited.

During the first meeting, the lawyer, Evelyne, explained to Margaret how it would proceed, emphasising the function and significance of the path they were about to embark on together: that of piecing her story together and orienting it for the purposes of the interview she would have with the committee, which was due to meet Margaret several months later. Evelyne also underlined the importance of building a story that would give her a better chance of obtaining the status of international protection, explaining that recognition of asylum is based on the premise that that there are good reasons for believing that the applicant would be running a serious risk if she were to return to her country of origin:

Barbara (the cultural mediator), speaking partly in English and partly in the applicant's language, added: ‘you must convince them about the risks you are going to face, you must show solid reasons. It's not a problem if you don't remember: feel free and relax.’

Evelyne then asked for more details about the various stages of the journey: ‘Shall we go on a little part of this journey? Let's say we are leaving Benin City.’ Margaret took up her story again, specifying that, after several hours of travelling, the person who was responsible for them had left them somewhere, giving each of them a number: they were to stay in this unidentified place until they were called for on the basis of this number. Since there were some gaps in the story, after about two hours of interviewing, Evelyne suggested stopping and taking it up again another time, commenting like this: ‘The journey is a very important stage for piecing the story together. So we'll stop now and continue next time.’ Margaret showed signs of impatience and asked how long she would have to wait before the committee would summon her for the hearing: she had lodged her application in November of the previous year and three months had already gone by. Evelyne answered that the waiting time was generally up to one year from the beginning of the procedure and that the aim was not to rush things, but to do a good job.

During the second meeting, Barbara guided Margaret by highlighting gaps (‘points we miss’): ‘they are direct, you must be specific.’ ‘From Nigeria to Libya, how many days did it take? How long you did stay in Libya? Where? How did you survive? Did they give you clothes?’ Considering Margaret's reticence, the mediator tried to encourage her further, suggesting she think seriously about the consequences of being sent back home, asking ‘What happens if you go back?’ Margaret answered: ‘My life would be worse, nobody could care for my children.’ Barbara explained to her that the questions she would be asked during the committee hearing would be something like ‘Why did you leave your country?’, reminding her that the committee would have to decide whether she would be allowed to stay in Italy:

In the third meeting, which took place after another two weeks, Barbara once again pointed out the need to achieve greater clarity about some of the stages of the journey, explaining the meaning of the questions better and asking her to be more precise and concise in her answers. Barbara started showing signs of impatience, because she and the lawyer had not compiled enough material to piece the story together: ‘I am not understanding anything, so what do we do? You don't forget the truth because it is your truth, truth is inside you, so you answer quickly.’

Barbara then burst out impatiently in Italian, asking ‘ma che stiamo facendo?’ (‘What are we doing here?’), then also in English:

Margaret then began speaking in her own language, without stopping, alternating her story with bursts of tears. Barbara added the occasional comment in Italian that enabled the note taker to understand the gist of the story: ‘She [the madam] brings in seven men every day and takes money for just three weeks.’

The short excerpts from these conversations show how questions evolved from one meeting to the next, becoming more pressing and directive as the meetings grew ever more intense. In addition, this verbal behaviour was accompanied by Barbara's increasing impatience, as she tried to encourage Margaret to tell her story, saying that she had done everything possible to help and support her in the path she would tread towards the hearing before the committee. The steps taken by Evelyne, the lawyer, who was only present in the first of these meetings, were more incisive and restricted to defining the operative and legal framework.

Regarding the interaction between Margaret and the two operators, there appears to be an apparent lack of understanding and respect for daily, sociocultural storytelling when the mediator says that the ‘truth is inside you’. Margaret seems to have little opportunity to tell her stories in a spontaneous way, such as how people she met during the trip treated her/spoke with her and how she came to an awareness of what she was involved in. As has been shown in other cases, the fact that a story is spontaneous and transparent is not enough on its own to make it worthy of legal recognition and protection. This may perhaps explain the artificiality of the situation described above and the apparent forcible reshaping of the story by the cultural mediator.

At various points, the stories are scrutinised and recorded by note takers, rather than audio or video-recordings (Di Donato, Reference Di2021), thereby further abstracting from the client's experiences.

The exact expression of narratives, whether in careful note-taking or available via recordings, is important for capturing full personal and social meaning, as well as for revisiting by the client and team. As the legal considerations of granting asylum increase, the refugee's journey story is important for certain truth norms, but the process used may be at odds with identifying non- stereotypical truths (i.e. specific experiences rather than stock stories or scripts). The process of perceiving and interpreting emotional nuances occurs implicitly in everyday storytelling but also in storytelling for official purposes, especially when narrated experiences have been life-threatening and traumatic. When listening first for norms, we are likely to shape what we hear in terms of requirements, such as for credibility and coherence. The role of the story as a process for the refugee's interactions with others and reflections to cope with his circumstances may remain unattended. Note-taking is less labour-intensive than recording, transcribing and analysing detailed clients’ stories as told, but professionals may bake norms into their notes, as writing every word verbatim is extremely challenging. This analysis proceeds to explore whether and how norm-based storytelling and listening might make a difference in the fairness of the asylum process and perhaps even eventually in efficiency.

In this way, a story of personal experience becomes a legal story. Storytelling always occurs in relation to audiences, actual and imagined, and when the audience has enormous power over one's life, clarity of expectations is helpful. The COI report may, of course, be subject to the very circumstances causing flight (such as myths that a country does not encourage people to flee) and the severity of judgment may be influenced by circumstances in the country of asylum (such as a major influx of refugees during periods of mass displacements). In terms of internal consistency, stories conforming too rigidly to a script defined by escapes from extreme violence and moral threats if one returns might seem inauthentic. What may fall through the cracks of fairness is that, from the perspective of the applicant, an account of events that is credible and coherent in her more familiar circumstances, such as recounting the journey to family or friends, may by necessity include contradictions.

Coherence and credibility are, after all, both subjective concepts as well as legal concepts crafted in diverse disciplinary contexts – law and psychology. While the successful asylum narrative requires the raconteur's direction to legal norms and values, their living narrative involves complex positioning around the migration journey, which is by definition a psychosocial process (relational, conflicted, changing, etc.) and, thus, in the interactive lawyer–client development of the case. Because narrative competences and familiarity with social and legal norms evolve together, our interest is to highlight what happens when lawyers understand the asylum seeker as a collaborator with experience that is foundational to the knowledge-building process of the case. Next, we offer an example of an asylum interview that is interactive yet provides as little guidance as Margaret's situation provided too much.

3.3 Ambivalent interaction with Middle Eastern refugees: Rifat's case

As in Italy, the Netherlands also requires norms of credibility and coherence in asylum story appeals. Available with Rifat's consent (Lighthouse Reports, 2016), the interactive digital narrative (IDN) enacts the potential complexity and variability of an asylum narrative, as well as the pressure to get the right version. Interlocutors with an iterative version of a story could appreciate the reality of sharing one's story of displacement many times and the apparent lack of response beyond the selection of the next steps. ‘The story’ changes over time with the storyteller's different vantage points in time, space and social milieu. The story is dynamic in its development, and it is also static in that the life may be squeezed out of if over-told to conform to rigid requirements.

This story by Rifat, a twenty-one-year-old refugee from Syria, was elicited for a video documentary with asylum seekers by journalist advocates for refugee rights. An interviewer with official experience asked Rifat, and other refugees, typical questions. The IDN designers made questions and responses interactively searchable for scholars, practitioners (as we are) and others who want to become ‘aware of the complexity of accepting or rejecting someone … [and] to experience the tension between a human story and the policy rules’ (Lighthouse Reports, 2016). In addition to reflecting on his/her perception of the narrative quality for asylum purposes, the player can select tags to hear/see additional information about various characters or events, such as about parents or the army. The authenticity, interactivity and flexibility of this process offers insights for considering differences between everyday and legal storytelling. Whereas variability is prominent, so is the guessing-game nature of how to share one's traumatic experiences in ways that are emotionally authentic yet also give the right story.

The video is a close-up on Rifat's face and the audio unfolds in segments of three or four sentences. The narrative begins as follows:

As we played it, the temporal narrative line rambled associatively, in part as Rifat produced it, also because he responds to the off-screen interviewer's questions. Such explicit interactions add to those evoked in Rifat's mind as he recalled events, experiences with different family members, antagonists in the regime, etc. Those past interlocutors, like the interviewer(s), are always more or less part of a narrative, potentially interrupting coherence or challenging credibility. In an asylum narrative, the present audience who will determine the author's life course is primary, but those other characters from the past and possibility projected into the future (such as those one would like to join in another country) emerge not only as static words in the text, but also as real impacts on the narrative via the narrator. Interacting with such diverse others in and around an official story is something we can consider as relevant to an astute listening and interpreting process. Adding to the tone of the questioner as indicated in question framing is the judgment of the player who is completely outside the story yet also engaging with it, perhaps like a judge.

Segments of the interview appear as the IDN player requests to hear/see more related to the tags. Family, for example, is an element of an asylum story and that tag was available for queuing more of Rifat's story:

Nuances such as which characters emerge when in the story may interact or even interfere with the ultimate goals of explaining very clearly why being returned to the original country would be deadly. But those details are coherent within memory search organised at least in part by emotions raised by recounting the story itself, as well as by the fact that someone is asking about it and listening.

Trying to maintain coherence, Rifat self-corrected:

Although not linear in any strict chronological line, Rifat has been sharing what appears to be a credible and coherent narrative of someone hoping to remain in Europe, if not in the Netherlands, and certainly to avoid being returned to a problematic place for him. The jumbled chronology, within sections, as well as the arrangement of sections by the IDN player raises questions relevant to norms for judging this story. Coherence is achieved in part by successfully retrieving and organising many events, characters, dilemmas and temporary assessments from memory into a narrative form, which may not be how they are stored. That the story itself must read as coherent in terms of facts as true, false, compete or incomplete draws on a dimension outside of personal experience, as we observed with interactions to collaboratively create Margaret's story.

At one point, a cellphone appears in the video frame, presumably from the interviewer, and Rifat accepts it. After a long pause looking at it, Rifat says: ‘You found my picture on Facebook.’ Seeming to tear up, he adds: ‘Yes, this is a gun in my hand.’ As if offering an explanation, after several seconds of a visibly emotional pause, he says: ‘There's so much injustice. I really hate the regime.’ He then puts his face in his hands and turns away from the camera, seeming to be on the verge of tears and says: ‘I lied.’ After another pause of several seconds, Rifat says: ‘I lied because they told me I shouldn't tell the truth. After he deserted from the military, my brother formed a battalion. This battalion was part of the Free Syrian Army. Yes, we were there too. I also was part of it.’

The last line of the story was: ‘I am glad that I was able to tell my story. I feel relieved.’

This statement underscores Rifat's claiming of his story, imperfect as it is and as he is aware it is. Upon examination, the asylum investigation committee found evidence that pointed to an association with the Free Syrian Army, meaning that the asylum seeker might have been involved with war crimes. Nevertheless, obviously also aware that applicant could be at risk, the decision was postponed until further research that, at the time of the report in 2016, was still ongoing.

Our reason for our sharing this account is to demonstrate just some of the functions of storytelling as a dynamic relational process and to consider the kinds of interactivity to build into proposals for collaborative lawyering as well as what to avoid. Interacting with unfamiliar yet helpful others as in the Roma case and over time in Margaret's case may not pose a threat to authenticity of the client's story but brings an interlocutor into view, ideally for a knowledge-sharing conversation that evolves well over time. We do not know whether subsequent steps in Rifat's process achieved success, but we can observe from the digitally interactive asylum story some of the tensions between coherence and credibility of an everyday story for personal and social purposes compared to a story that would be scripted to pass the legal test.

5.1 Framework of legal storytelling workshop

In order to achieve social justice goals (Block, Reference Block2011), we propose creating socio-legal spaces to raise different voices democratically and realise effective forms of collaborative lawyering, with the active participation of lay and expert actors (lawyers, volunteer associations), in order to address the multidimensional problems faced by the client and to elaborate a common understanding of socio-legal problems, thereby increasing laypeople's consciousness and narrative mechanisms in institutional settings. We invite lawyers as well as researchers to experiment with interactive narrating to support clients’ comfortable expression in order to allow the legal team to hear more of the contextual and personal details that may be implicit and in order to help the client understand how the legal system works (Nelken, Reference Nelken2012), what the formal and informal rules are (Fuller, Reference Fuller1969) and what practices they are expected to incorporate into their stories.

Shifting to a collaborative lawyering process would involve enacting the dynamic quality of narrating for all major participants, the legal team as well as the clients. Zooming back from the pressure to elicit the singular right story, the process would involve the lawyer beginning by saying: ‘I will tell you a story of how I came to be doing this legal work and why I care about it.’ This would be for the lawyer to open to his/her own sociocultural quotidian narrating experience and for the client to gain a sense of the socio-legal audience and expectations (implicitly rather than by direct questioning towards the goal, which can interrupt important information). The lawyer and client could together evaluate the story in terms of credibility and coherence. Understandings of those norms in the context of mutual informal experience sharing introduces professional and lay actors via their narratives, which become increasingly useful and available for collective examination when creating the public story.

The client, who is normally in the hot seat to share experience, would next share her story in three movements (as in the Roma PA workshop). The lawyer could prompt these movements or the movements could be described for the client to share as she feels most comfortable or relevant. The prompt could be ‘Please tell me the story of how you came here’ (to Italy) (prompts include starting with a timeline, simply asking ‘And then?’ or ‘Can you say more about that event, person …?’). Because the first-person story is the one most under scrutiny for specific legal expectations, it could be shared after the other two, and it could be shared several times for different audiences. The reason for this flexibility is that the first-person story must eventually conform to specific expectations, but the client should have the opportunity to begin with personal purposes such as to release any tension related to the events, to continue making sense of the events, to remember, to cope or other reasons. In that process, the lawyer can remember and refer to her own implicit purposes when sharing her personal story.

Another prompt would be ‘Please tell me about a memorable event in your life as a child in our country, as though you were watching, making a film’. The purpose of this story is to invite the client to ventriloquate – that is, to present as though for someone else like her, to include culturally sensitive, problematic, upsetting, conflicting details in a protected and emotionally credible way.

A third prompt invites yet another stance, like the one we presented in the Roma case – a stance that is rarely considered: the person who is a subject of the law or policy presents the defining conditions, issues, strategies for a like-minded audience or for an authority. The prompt would be ‘Please write a letter to someone like you back home who may be considering or beginning a similar journey’. This discourse stance reveals specific danger and strategies for managing them.

The collaborative process would then involve gathering details from across the client's narratives and letter in a co-construction process by the professional and lay team. This would acknowledge that there is no single story. This would also acknowledge that fact construction is a process and that the client has control of the process. In addition to creating a uniquely believable and nuanced account, such a co-construction process grounded in the client's uninterrupted original story would also include context details that may be obvious to the client yet not apparent to the legal team. Such a developmental process might also avoid any additional harms arising from unintentional premature changing of a client's story and eventually a healthier outcome for the claimant, the team and the process.

Towards that end, the lawyer could say:

The purpose is to collect relevant details from across the stories to create a credible and coherent outline in terms of the legal requirements, acknowledging that these are not the only dimensions of credibility and/or coherence. Discussing the previous steps, the lawyer and client rewrite the client's asylum narrative together, acknowledging that it is a legal embedding of the everyday personal story but not replacing it emotionally or culturally. The lawyer can add that having shared her personal story, she has become even more sensitive to listening to the client's story.