Innovations in Narrative and Metaphor: Methodologies and Practices

By Sandy Farquhar

This book pursues an interdisciplinary approach to open a discourse on innovative methodologies and practices associated with narrative and metaphor. Scholars from diverse fields in the humanities and social sciences report on how they use narrative and/or metaphor in their scholarship/research to arrive at new ways of seeing, thinking about and acting in the world. The book provides a range of methodological chapters for academics and practitioners alike. Each chapter discusses various aspects of the author’s transformative methodologies and practices and how they contribute to the lives of others in their field. In this regard, the authors address traditional disciplines such as history and geography, as well as professional practices such as counselling, teaching and community work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Feb 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9789811361142

Book preview

Part IInnovations in Narrative and Metaphor

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019

Sandy Farquhar and Esther Fitzpatrick (eds.)Innovations in Narrative and Metaphorhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6114-2_1

1. Narrative and Metaphor: The Beginning Matter

Esther Fitzpatrick¹   and Sandy Farquhar¹  

(1)

The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

Esther Fitzpatrick

Email: [e-mail]

Sandy Farquhar (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

As researchers we need to find new ways of connecting (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011, p. ix).

Abstract

Both narrative and metaphor provide mechanisms for making sense of the world. While metaphors elaborate and articulate particular points in a narrative, narrative provides meaningful connections between sometimes unrelated metaphors, suggesting a symbiotic relationship between the two. The innovative research methodologies and practices that feature in this volume reflect some contemporary post- and trans-movements and reflexive turns of the past 20 years, including post-structuralism, post-humanism, and new materialism. As a collection, this volume emphasizes diversity and difference, rather than looking for a unifying theory or method of narrative and metaphor. As the breadth of work represented here suggests, there are many approaches to narrative and metaphor research. This volume attests to the significance of stories and metaphor in everyday lives and in research.

Keywords

NarrativeMetaphorNetwork

Esther Fitzpatrick, Ph.D.

is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Social Work, The University of Auckland. She originally worked as a primary school teacher and now uses various arts pedagogies in her teaching with tertiary students. She has published on issues of racial–ethnic identity in postcolonial communities and disrupting neoliberal ideologies in Higher Education, using innovative narrative methods of inquiry. Her current research uses critical autoethnography and writing as a method of inquiry to explore emerging identities in postcolonial societies.

Sandy Farquhar, Ph.D.

is a senior lecturer and director of early childhood in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at The University of Auckland. Her book Ricoeur, identity and early childhood examines the role of narrative and metaphor in policy and curriculum. She has co-edited a number of journal special issues on the philosophy of early childhood. Her current research is focussed on early childhood teachers’ well-being and work conditions.

Both narrative and metaphor provide mechanisms for making sense of the world. While metaphors elaborate and articulate particular points in a narrative, narrative provides meaningful connections between sometimes unrelated metaphors, suggesting a symbiotic relationship between the two. As academics, we are increasingly called to account for ourselves and reduce our lived experiences to measurable outcomes (Fitzpatrick & Farquhar, 2018), so the importance of narrative and metaphor to demonstrate the richness and complexity of our lives is ever more vital. To remember what it is to be human, to interact with human and non-human, and to be forever in the process of becoming, we use narrative and metaphor.

The innovative research methodologies and practices that feature in this volume reflect some contemporary post- and trans-movements and reflexive turns of the past 20 years, including post-structuralism, post-humanism, and new materialism. Although each chapter is unique, they all emanate from arts-based disciplines, social sciences, or humanities. The range of contributions reflects the response to the invitation for proposals sent to members of the transdisciplinary Narrative and Metaphor Special Interest Network (detailed in chapter two of this volume). Contributing authors were invited to engage critically and experimentally, and to discuss aspects of their methodologies and practices that were novel and critically transformative for themselves and/or for others. They were also asked to engage with how their research/practice contributes to the lives of others in their field—whether that be in a university discipline such as history and geography, or in practices such as counseling, teaching or community work. As a result, many of the chapters have a reflective quality, with the authors talking about research and methodologies in a way that gets at some of the more ineffable and esoteric qualities lacking in traditional forms of research. Without exception, all of the chapters consider material and pragmatic concerns around methods and methodological approaches, and engage with empirical research in vital ways.

As a collection, this volume emphasizes diversity and difference, rather than looking for a unifying theory or method of narrative and metaphor. As the breadth of work represented here suggests, there are many approaches to narrative and metaphor research. They tend to emphasize semiotic engagement and lived experience, and so require open-ended and fluid approaches, with a constant focus on problematizing methods and approaches throughout the research inquiry. In this way, then, most of the chapters in this volume doubt the desirability and even the possibility of objective observation in arts-based/social science/humanities research.

In the foreground of many of the chapters is the need for dissensus and difference, for authentic engagement in an increasingly connected and commodified world. This authentic engagement drives both design and desire; that is, the scholars in this volume are passionate about research and practice that engages each participant not as the researched, but as protagonists—making a difference and finding their own meaning and value in the research inquiry.

As we read and re-read each of the chapters in this volume, the mid-nineteenth-century British arts and craft movement became a topic of our editorial conversations. The artists, crafts folk, and writers involved in this movement were reacting to the use of factory machinery to produce overly ornate, excessive, and artificial product. Members of the movement were concerned with the factory takeover of arts and crafts and the attendant decline in creative standards. They were equally concerned with the effects of mechanization on people, arguing vociferously for social reform, and making a stand against the distancing of art from life and experience. Our authors here also elevate the aesthetic, eschewing standardization of research and practice, raising the possibility of a revitalized sense of social justice and social democracy.

This volume attests to the significance of stories and metaphor in everyday lives and in research. Theories of narrative and metaphor used in research often recognize that the world does not exist a priori. Rather, a world is actualized by humans in their relationships with places and things and by the interpretation of experience. It is through these interpretive acts that people give meaning to their experiences of the world and develop their relationships within the world. These relationships rely on complex semiotic exchanges among participants engaging in acts of readership and interpretation, to inform creative meaning-making of life experience. In our reading of the chapters in this volume, creative meaning-making is at the heart of much of the research, capturing the spirit of lived experiences and recognizing the immediate transformative effects that narrative research can have for humans and non-humans.

In this text, we pay particular attention to the methods of narrative and metaphor in research and pedagogy. And in doing so, recognize the theoretical and methodological scholarship that has led the way and given permission for future exploration and implementation of innovative and transforming research methods.

On Narrative

Life may be re-described, revealed, and transformed through narrative. It is through narratives that people come to understand their lives and it is through interpretation that we can be seen to craft our lives within narratives. Since the late nineteenth century, increasing interest in the role of narrative was reflected in the public appetite for the novel, travel writing, ethnography, and biography. Interpretive understanding in the arts, architecture, and literature, from formalism through to structuralism and post-structuralism, recognized, albeit quite differently, the material power of the word and the narrative. By the mid-twentieth century, the subjective account that characterized the short story and new journalism in America generated a strong appetite for the interpretive account and for the minority report. Notably, these developments emanated from within the arts, architecture, and letters, and then spread into the social sciences and humanities.

Significant to the popularity of narrative in qualitative research in the social sciences was Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) development of narrative inquiry as method. Drawing on Dewey’s (1938, 1998) theory of experience to conceptualize a metaphorical, three-dimensional space for narrative inquiry (continuity, interaction, and situation), they posited the dimensions of place (personal and social) and time (past, present, and future) (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007). Clandinin and Connelly (2000) extended two of Dewey’s dimensions (continuity and interaction) by considering the direction of the inquiry: inward and outward, backward and forward. They argued that these four directions are important when researching an experience and that they need to be explored concurrently. Narrative inquiry provided a productive framework for designing and implementing research projects, especially in social landscapes.

Lugones (1987) described the narrative researcher as a world traveler, similar to Ingold’s (2009, 2011) notion of the wayfarer, discussed further in chapter two. As wayfarers, we travel the landscape of the inquiry, for the lifetime of the research. Although these places may change, they represent a concrete physical world with topological boundaries which we traverse (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Clandinin, Pushor, & Orr, 2007):

every experience both takes up something from the present moment and carries it into the future experiences … events, people, and objects under study are in temporal transition and narrative inquirers describe them with past, present, and a future. (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007, p. 69)

Important for research and practice is how we as wayfarers interact and make sense of the interactions that occur, between the personal and the social conditions, with the landscape of the inquiry, and with events emerging over time, to address the complexities of our lived stories. When we engage in narrative, we are not portraying a pre-existing world as it is; we are interpreting phenomena to create that world.

On Metaphor

The use of metaphor in research and practice is both expressive and productive, enabling us to see reality in terms of potential rather than actuality. Paul Ricoeur suggests that a successful metaphor shatters and increases our sense of reality. Metaphors are more than tropes of language; they have the power to re-describe the world (Farquhar, 2010). The importance Ricoeur attributed to metaphorical language lies in the power of a well-placed metaphor to disturb our sense of reality, to expand the limits of our language, and to bring about a metamorphosis of both language and reality (Ricoeur, 1991, p. 85).

The point is not whether the physical or social world exists in some objective sense; rather, it is that we inevitably represent our experience or perception of reality through metaphor (Farquhar & Fitzsimons, 2016). Lakoff and Johnson (2003) argue that metaphors structure our perceptions and understandings, and affect the way we communicate ideas. As principal vehicles for understanding, metaphors play a central role in the construction of meaning, hiding some aspects of reality and revealing others: metaphors matter, they argue, because they constrain our lives and can thereby lead to human degradation (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003, p. 236). From a social perspective, the interesting question is how metaphors are formulated, developed, shared, passed on, exploited, transformed, and so on. Egan (2008) elaborates on our fertile capacity for metaphor as fundamental to language, recognizing that even our basic sentence structures consist of metaphors that we often forget are metaphors. These invisible metaphors, he argues, allow us to play with what otherwise we are constrained by, and through that play to enrich our expression and our understanding, enabling flexible and creative thinking. Unless we develop our metaphoric capacity, Egan argues, we are confined to literal thinking that never gets beyond its starting assumptions and presuppositions.

A Bricolage of Innovative Critical Research Methods and Practice

The approaches in this volume provide a wide range of examples of innovative and creative practices using narrative and/or metaphor. Drawing on the variety of work presented through our Narrative and Metaphor Special Interest Network, the chapters represent a bricolage of possibilities.

Casting our authors as innovative wayfarers brings another metaphor to the fore—that of the bricoleur. Bricoleur was originally a term used to describe craftspeople who work creatively with materials left over from various other projects, and who use the tools at hand to create something new (Levi-Strauss, 1974; Rogers, 2012). The arts and crafts, social reform movement of the mid-nineteenth century exemplified this practice. Levi-Strauss (1966, 1974) appropriated the term bricolage in the early 1960s to explain the complex and eclectic process of meaning-making in his work as an anthropologist. He used bricolage as a metaphor to make sense of the underlying structures that determine human meaning-making and to disrupt the binary which, he believed, polarized myth and science. Bricolage has now been appropriated in many ways across the arts and humanities, manifest in philosophical notions of the object of inquiry, and in research approaches that use multiple methods of inquiry, multiple theoretical lenses, and a diversity of perspectives (Denzin & Lincoln, 1999; Kincheloe, 2001; Rogers, 2012).

The practice of bricolage in the arts and crafts movement fits well with innovative narrative and metaphor methods. The arts and crafts movement was characterized by bricolage where practitioners would often source local materials and draw on a variety of patterns and prints from nature (Hawkins, 2018), and with a focus on protection for craft skills (Burrell, 2013). Citton captures the relationship beautifully in the work Theory to Bricolage, arguing

…storytelling and speculating can be perceived as the representatives of difference-sensitive theory, insofar as they tend to resist our best efforts to submit them to any form of well-disciplined method. In spite of analytical philosophy’s imperialist attempts to formalize and normalize the (only) proper way to think, storytelling and speculating remain closer to arts, crafts, virtuosities, bricolages, based on intuitive skills rather than rigid and reproducible techniques. (Citton, 2012, p. 10)

For Kincheloe, bricolage is a strong conceptual metaphor that captures the possibility of the future of qualitative research (Kincheloe, 2001, p. 670). Many researchers and theorists have broken the ground for us—giving permission to be creative, to push boundaries, and to bring justice. In particular, we acknowledge the work of poststructuralists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, the new materialists, critical theorists, qualitative inquirers, the work of Elliot Eisner, Joe Kincheloe, bell hooks, Norman Denzin, Laurel Richardson, and Jean Clandinin, to name but a few.

This book features innovative research stories, with many of the chapters having grown over the years from their origins in various workshops, symposia, and seminars of the Narrative and Metaphor Special Interest Network. We have been privy to their gestations and labors, witnessing the transformation that occurs as researchers’ network and shares their work, as understandings and practices grow, pushing at the boundaries of traditional methods and creating new ways of making sense of their complex worlds.

Each of the chapters in this collection adopts an eclectic approach to understanding human endeavor. While each author engages uniquely with narrative and metaphor, their methodologies and stories all explore the depth and texture of the lived experience of their participants (be that themselves and/or other participants). Each chapter explores ways to recognize human difference through research, engaging ethically with participants and their communities, contributing to their lives, and dealing with issues of social justice, race, and politics, and in some chapters, indigenous knowledge.

Chapter Overview

The authors draw on narrative and metaphor in significantly different ways. Their treatment includes genres such as science fiction, poetry, and the essay. This volume includes method-focused pieces such as performative inquiry, fictionalization, and autoethnography. It also includes pieces focused on disciplinary knowledge from fields as diverse as dance, philosophy, and geography. Some authors focus on the technique and craft of narrative and/or metaphor as methods, and others use narrative and metaphor as method in the research process. Each author’s chapter stories one feature of the landscape on our journey as writers/researchers. The first is the story of the Narrative and Metaphor Special Interest Network (NaMSIN), the place where all of the authors have, at some time in the past few years, presented their work. They write from positions as researchers, teachers, counselors, and performers, engaging in both teaching and research, committed to communicative and transformative scholarship.

The book comprises a number of sections: writing as craft, writing as inquiry, ethics and rethinking narrative, metaphor and fiction, autoethnography and duoethnography, and performance and practice. The first section, writing as craft, comprises two chapters—one by Paula Morris and the other by Helen Sword.

Paula Morris, a novelist and short story writer, highlights the resistance of many writers to the act and art of writing. She maintains that many people who make their living as scholars, researchers, or critics complain about the act of writing, arguing that writing is a concrete act, rather than theoretical, and one that takes time and skill. We are reminded that writers need to have access to language and to the imagination, even when we’re not making things up. An accomplished writer of fiction and creative non-fiction, Paula, provides colorful anecdotes from her personal experience with writing workshops, arguing for the development of technical skills—particularly point of view, locating the elements of story in small moments.

Helen Sword has written several books and facilitated countless workshops on academic writing. Understanding the importance of writing and publishing in academic work, she explores how we may find the air, the light, and time and space to get writing done. Helen argues for writers to take greater pleasure in their craft. Her chapter involves a systematic analysis of 335 metaphors of writing, demonstrating how metaphors can impede or empower the writing process and the development of a writer identity. She shares her personal story of always becoming a writer, deciding to let the metaphors show the way. Helen argues that we should find metaphors that are craft-affirming alternatives, demonstrating how in her own work she shifted from fuss, fiddle, and tweak, to adjust, tinker and polish. However, she also recognizes the importance of what Parker Palmer calls the shadow side, the negative elements that lead us to change and grow.

The next section comprises two chapters that focus on writing as inquiry. Toni Bruce’s research encompasses a range of alternative qualitative methodologies, including autoethnography and ethnographic fiction. In her chapter, she explores fact, faction, and fiction in research. She describes faction as a new ethnographic species, opening up what can be counted as legitimate research. Factionalization as a method combines elements of fact and fiction. Toni again emphasizes the importance of craft in writing factional works, where they should be methodologically rigorous, theoretically informed, ethically reflexive, and interesting to read, see, or hear. Because faction is a juxtaposition of fact and fiction, the writing criteria for both fact and fiction need to be considered when writing faction. Creating faction, Toni argues, provides a way to say the unsayable, to take risks and importantly meets the requirement of academic research being accessible to more than just the academy.

Esther Fitzpatrick and Molly Mullen’s chapter draws on the work of several different ethnographic projects to demonstrate how they have used writing as a method of inquiry, in which writing is understood as a performative act and an act of justice. They discuss and illustrate the method of research poetry, employing different forms for different purposes, describing Wolff’s methods of surrender and catch, poetry as conversation, and poetry for justice. Esther and Molly have also employed scriptwriting as method in their various projects, sometimes, drawing on interview data or conversations through duoethnographies, and at other times with their ghosts. They argue that creative writing practices demand a type of courage in the academy, an attention to the craft of the writing, and a recognition that others have carved a poetic path, giving them permission.

The next three chapters in the section on ethics and rethinking narrative research grapple with ethical dilemmas academics often struggle with, of telling others stories, the ownership of those stories, and the love and care that is required in the retelling. Frances Hancock writes about her struggle with the ethics of co-authorship when working with a community research project. Her struggle with how to respond ethically to issues of co-authorship will resonate with many qualitative inquirers who draw on others’ stories. Her chapter charts a journey of striving to do what is right and proper by the people and the place. Crafting the writing involved making countless decisions, to ensure respect for the cultural values and mana of the people she is working with. Humility, care, and respect for the narratives she works with are important to Frances. In struggling to represent her co-researchers, she developed a strategy of the humble brackets, a mechanism that gives prominence to the person whose story is told in the poem, while also recognizing that someone else has contributed to its production.

Melinda Webber is a Māori scholar with a passionate interest in fostering cultural pride and academic aspiration for her people. Her research examines how race, ethnicity, culture, and identity impact the lives of young people, particularly Māori. Melinda argues that we should practice research as an act of aroha (love). Her chapter describes her engagement in a large research project which collated stories from victims, perpetrators, and frontline workers, about their experiences of child abuse and/or domestic violence. The aim was to help those whose identity stories had been stolen from then—to recover their narratives, hold them, and have them respected and recognized. She discusses Māori Kaupapa methodology and reminds us that storytelling (pūrākau) is an important part of Māori pedagogy and research. How, she asks, does one write inspirational narratives of hope from what appear to be stories of suffering, hopelessness, and despair? By prioritizing aroha (love) and manaakitanga (care and support).

Marek Tesar and Sonja Arndt’s chapter draws on their shared academic interest in philosophy and new materialist ideas of the vibrancy of matter and things. In their chapter, Marek and Sonja critique dominant narrative practices, reminding us of Haraway’s assertion that it matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. They challenge the dominant view of narrative research, arguing that its humancentricity may serve to limit our research and thinking, thus providing a challenge to respond to and engage within the real world. They suggest academic engagement with counter-colonial indigenous ways of being—ways of becoming worldly with. They direct our attention to indigenous Australian thinking on dreaming/s narratives. They also remind us that not all knowledge is knowable or accessible, and that some knowledge can’t/shouldn’t be known.

Three chapters demonstrate examples of innovative research design that draw on metaphor and fictional devices. Sheila Trehar has published several books on narrative inquiry. She is particularly interested in philosophical assumptions underlying traditional methodological approaches and engages creative writing methods and autoethnographic explorations to provide a critical approach to her work. In her chapter, she employs the method of fictionalization through a series of scripted scenes, forming an autoethnographic account of interrogating her whiteness. She aims to create a decolonizing methodology through her creative writing, disclosing epistemological racism and artfully using the traditional tale of Snow White and the magic mirror as a strategy for self-analysis and critical reflection. Sheila describes how positioning the mirror as her interrogator allows her to enter the world of the illusory and imaginary, while at the same time, entering her own world through different doors.

Andrew Gibbons and David Kupferman’s chapter, a philosophical essay, takes a critical view of the digital curriculum, through artful play with a Richard K. Dick novel and the writings of Ursula Le Guin. Andrew and David use science fiction as method, to critique the lack of understanding of what technology is and does, and how this lack is reflected in New Zealand’s technology curriculum. They argue that science fiction as a method has important potentialities for research, describing science fiction as a critical tool, as metaphor, and an invitation to engage in deep questioning of an intensely technological existence. They argue that science fiction offers hope drawn from seeing things differently, and in particular from seeing things critically, highlighting the importance of the imagination and wonder. In science fiction, they say, the future can be seen as a metaphor for the present.

Robin Kearns, Gavin Andrews, and James (Jim) Dunn are geographers with a shared interest in the health and well-being of urban landscapes. Robin, a sociocultural geographer, has applied ideas of narrative, metaphor, and symbolism to critically advance understanding of the links between culture, health, and place. Likewise, Gavin, a health geographer, explores the dynamics between space/place and has developed an interest in non-representational theory. Jim, with a focus on urban geography, explores socioeconomic inequalities in health in urban areas. In this chapter, they investigate the song The Community of Hope by PJ (Polly Jean) and the very public controversy surrounding the song. Their investigation illustrates the use of metaphor in the song’s narrative about place, to evoke landscape and the felt environment. They argue that a single piece of music can offer a lyrical microcosm through which key tropes such as place, community, and hope are evident. Robin, Gavin, and Jim demonstrate throughout this chapter several narrative layers at work within one song, and how the lyrical narratives of a song’s storyline are complemented by sonic tropes embedded in its musical structures and sounds.

Chapters 13 and 14 illustrate two methodologies that draw on personal storytelling: Peter Bray on autoethnography and Deidre Le Fevre on duoethnography and the power of the intentional interruption. Autoethnography as a methodology is reflected in the work of many of the authors in this volume where they draw on self-narratives, personal storytelling, and autobiography. In the chapter, Grief, loss and critical autoethnography: The father’s tale Peter re-stories his own encounter with crisis and grief with the death of beloved family members. His story is a harrowing read providing an evocative account of trauma, stress, and grief, although he draws on his experience to inform his practice and teaching in counseling and psychology. This fascinating play with the role of narrative in re-storying richly explores memory and spiritual dimensions of experience at play in post-traumatic growth.

For several years, Deidre Le Fevre has focused her research and teaching on leadership for educational change and improvement. She is especially interested in innovative qualitative approaches to her research and practice. In her chapter, she uses her expertise in narrative, and particularly in the methodology of duoethnography, to explore the strategy of interruption to provoke educational change. The power of interruption is examined in the context of duoethnography as a narrative-based, pedagogical approach, intended to bring about educational change and improvement. Duoethnography is a relatively recent ethnographic form of qualitative research. Its point of difference from traditional forms of ethnographic research is that it involves two or more researchers investigating, through a multi-dialogic process, how their own lives have been situated socially and culturally. The researchers are primarily interested in the process of how human beings make sense of what is being investigated.

The last section comprises three chapters that focus on performance and practice in research, teaching, and therapy. Each chapter reveals a particular practice: performative inquiry, dance narratives, and visual narratives. Lyn Fels uses her expertise in theater/drama education to explore the methodology and practice of performative inquiry and performative writing. She highlights the importance of stop moments, metaphor, and narrative to awaken us to our stories, our relationships with others and our environments. Through personal storytelling, Lyn introduces the reader to the empty chair, a narrative practice of engaging students with an object to respond to and engage with the real world. In engaging with the real world through performative inquiry, an empty chair is not just an empty chair, but a metaphor, perhaps a memory, an action, a narrative, an act of forgiveness, requiring participants to use their imagination. Lyn advises paying attention to the forms that we encounter, whether physical, linguistic, or social, for they impact on relationships, our actions, and the worlds we inhabit.

Alys Longley and Ralph Buck demonstrate the overlap between their researcher selves and their teaching selves, in their roles as dance academics. In this chapter, Alys and Ralph provide two narratives that engage with the tensions and contradictions in creating inclusive spaces for creative arts education. They argue that narrative and metaphor enable dance researchers to write into the moving spaces of practice, to engage space, dynamic, emotion and sensory experience in the process of writing. The authors use two different creative writing styles to present the narratives. The first, autoethnographic narrative, seeks to find a middle ground, where the roles of teacher and student become strangely confused. The second narrative tells a fictitious story of neurodiverse students and practice-led researchers. The chapter engages with affective and effective elements of their interactions as both researchers and teachers and the dynamic processes of meaning-making.

The final chapter focuses on two visual art-making projects to illustrate the use of visual narratives in research and practice as memory work. Kath Grushka is a practicing artist whose research and teaching interests are influenced by her interest in identity, time, memory, and performative knowing. Her chapter connects to her work on art-making, visual narratives, and well-being. Miranda Lawry is a visual artist whose research explores ways the creative arts have value beyond the boundaries of the art gallery. In particular, Miranda explores the value of art in the health sector. Katishe Grudnoff compliments the trio as an art therapist, passionate about using art as a tool for expression and communication. Their chapter focuses on arts therapy in community health. The authors use art-making as pedagogical practice to help reconcile the present and to imagine the future in the management of change for personal agency and in remembering self. Art-making as narrative is presented as a kind of whole-memory work, as it bridges the present with the representational and non-representational past. The authors suggest employing visual narrative practices as memory work where sensemaking, through art-making, is guided through socially shared meanings.

As a bricolage of stories of practice and research, the volume is structured so the reader can read the book from beginning to end, attend to a particular section of interest, or focus on a single chapter. The chapters represent the diverse and exciting work we have been privileged to have access to through the Narrative and Metaphor Special Interest Network (NaMSIN) over the past few years. The following chapter stories the work of NaMSIN as a research group that has arisen amidst (perhaps in spite of) increasing pressure on academics for teaching and research performance’. NaMSIN has provided a supportive environment and a collegial network for the creation, implementation, and presentation of innovative thinking and research in the territory of narrative and metaphor.

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© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019

Sandy Farquhar and Esther Fitzpatrick (eds.)Innovations in Narrative and Metaphorhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6114-2_2

2. Narrative and Metaphor: The Story of a Network

Sandy Farquhar¹   and Esther Fitzpatrick¹  

(1)

The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

Sandy Farquhar (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Esther Fitzpatrick

Email: [e-mail]

Abstract

The chapter stories the evolution of a scholarly network: The Narrative and Metaphor Special Interest Network. Through a collaborative dialogue between Esther and Sandy (the book’s editors), the different stories and beginnings of the Network are revealed. The stories form a significant narrative in this book, as each author in this volume has, in some way or another, been part of the Network. Throughout the dialogue, the editors draw on a survey of Network participants and informal conversations, to illuminate the role the Network has played in people’s lives. The dialogue documents the complex process of imagining and growing a Network that is not defined by disciplinary borders or physical boundaries, but organically grown in the ebb and flow of participant relationships, and in the temporary gatherings where ideas are shared and developed.

Keywords

NarrativeMetaphorNetwork

Sandy Farquhar, Ph.D.

is a senior lecturer and director of early childhood in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at The University of Auckland. Her book Ricoeur, identity and early childhood examines the role of narrative and metaphor in policy and curriculum. She has co-edited a number of journal special issues on philosophy of early childhood. Her current research is focussed on early childhood teachers’ well-being and work conditions.

Esther Fitzpatrick, Ph.D.

is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Social Work, The University of Auckland. She originally worked as a primary school teacher and now uses various arts pedagogies in her teaching with tertiary students. She has published on issues of racial–ethnic identity in postcolonial communities and disrupting neoliberal ideologies in Higher Education, using innovative narrative methods of inquiry. Her current research uses critical autoethnography and writing as a method of inquiry to explore emerging identities in postcolonial societies.

Introduction: Narrative Interests

And every place, as a gathering of things, is a knot of stories. (Ingold, p. 41)

The Narrative and Metaphor Special Interest Network (the network or NaMSIN) was established within the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Auckland, Aotearoa. It is for those with an interest in the workings of narrative and metaphor across the disciplines, and provides a space/place for narrative and metaphor events to happen: seminars, workshops, symposia, performances, installations and reading groups. The Network is a common ground for interdisciplinary sharing. At the same time, its interdisciplinarity assures its diversity and promotes its disparate conversations. There is no formal membership—only a mail distribution list (all are welcome) and an occasionally updated website. The success of the Network lies in the enthusiasm of the people who engage. There are the long-termers and the once-in-awhilers, including postgraduate students, teachers, professors and practitioners—all from many different disciplines.

When we (the editors) began to talk about the history of the Network, we discovered many beginnings: Each participant has a different story of belonging. Some have stayed the distance, finding an academic home; others drop in and out, depending on what is happening. In the spirit of storytelling, this chapter sets the scene for the authors who have penned the chapters in this volume, having engaged in some way with the Network. Without them, and the many others not represented in this volume, the Network would not have been such a success.

The Network formally began in 2011, when a few of us began to talk about some sort of group or gathering to share our various perspectives on narrative and metaphor in the academy. But its origins go back further, involving many relationships and engagements. Loosely described, the Network gathers together academics, professionals and practitioners who use or are interested in narrative and metaphor in their research and practice. While domiciled at the University of Auckland, it is a transdisciplinary Network admitting to local, national and international influence. Over its 7 years, the Network has held two symposia and more than 30 events including seminars, workshops and writing retreats, all funded by small grants from within our faculty. The events include presentations from a range of disciplines: piano performances, poetry readings and dramatic portrayals; as well as seminars from dance specialists, psychotherapists, indigenous storytellers and cultural geographers.

In collaborative autoethnography, researchers generate data through conversation and other forms of communication such as emails, personal records, photos and so forth. Together, they sift through and reflect on experiences, acknowledge and respect each others’ different interpretations and work collaboratively, deciding what should be included in