Storytelling as research praxis, and conversations that enabled it to emerge

Abstract

This paper introduces conversations and stories that were central to my PhD research. Journal writing, poetry, story and transcribed conversations became texts and data I reproduced in response to the research questions, dreams, memory work and collective biography workshops with my participants. The paper rechoreographs the process that enabled storytelling to emerge as a method of inquiry and a mode of representing the research. Crucial to the process was the supervisory relationship wherein my supervisor modeled a decolonizing pedagogical practice that held uncertainty in chrysalis while the methodology emerged.

Notes

1. Shorter Oxford Dictionary. 2002. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2. Angela Hyrnuik's (1993) poetry and prose demonstrates that life etches experience in the body, and the body re‐members.

3. Confabulation: talking together, conversation, chat; a familiar conversation (Shorter Oxford, 2002).

4. Methodology: a body of methods used in a particular branch of study or activity (Shorter Oxford, 2002)

5. Lexicology: the branch of knowledge that deals with words, their form, meaning, and (sometimes) history (Shorter Oxford, 2002).

6. Adj. wildly excited (over) enthusiastic, fanatical, 3. frenzied, erratic, uncontrolled (Shorter Oxford, 2002).

7. A comprehensive discussion of collective biography is available in Doing collective biography (2006) ed. Bronwyn Davies and Sue Gannon, and ‘Memory work the method’ Jenny Onyx and Jennie Small (2001).

8. Angela Hyrnuik (1993).