Whose stories matter? Re-vising, reflecting and re-discovering a researcher's embodied experience as a narrative inquirer

Abstract

This paper centres on one researcher's narrative inquiry of embodied experience. The purpose of this paper is to initiate and extend dialogue which highlights potential possibilities and limitations for those researchers and participants who choose to engage with the narrative inquiry approach. Of special concern are four points or evocations that have been enacted and/or encountered by a researcher (Author 1) as a narrative inquirer over the past seven years. Those being; narrative and the (re)presentation of lived experience; constraints imposed by positivists; the double-edged sword of evocation and verisimilitude, and the potentiality of initiating catharsis. This paper provides personal insights into how one researcher's reactions to tensions, positivist constraints in and through the narrative inquiry process led her to, in some instances to conform to narrative critics’ impositions. The narrative inquiry of embodied experience included in this paper is by no means conclusive, finalised or absolute; it does, however, represent a cross section of conformance as well as theoretical and methodological realisations and tensions encountered.

Keywords:

• Narrative inquiry
• Narrative
• Creative analytical practices
• Alternate representations
• Embodiment

Notes

1 For further information on research questions that were asked and the precise methodological undertaken, see McMahon et al. (2012).

2 For full details on the co-researcher relationship, see McMahon and Penney (2011).

3 See Smith and Sparkes’ (2009) work for further critique of conventional trustworthiness criteria of internal and external validity, reliability and objectivity techniques of data.