Doing Narrative Analysis a 3 day Summer Course

 

Hi everyone, this is a short reflection on a 3 day summer course I attended.

On August 23rd I travelled to Holland with the purpose of attending a 3 day workshop on  Narrative Analysis. This course was provided by the University of Twente in Enschede.

As I am currently in my second year (meaning that I will be collecting my data this academic year), I thought that attending 14051670_10154026942403090_3875804162858188867_n a course on ‘Doing Narrative Analysis’ could help me both to explore more this area and to expand my own understandings of my future research task/stage (i.e. being the analyst of the data I will gather).  Having no expectations whatsoever of the course, I attended it with an open mind.

I was surprised to know that people from different disciplines (e.g. Biology, Geography,  Education, Psychology) where doing narrative research. For instance, a researcher from Chile was exploring how the narratives of visually impaired University students could help to build up an app which could allow them to transit around the campus with the minimum possible risk. I thought that was an amazing idea and a good way to contribute to our society.

There were many interesting themes. I personally, got engaged in the ‘grand narratives’ / ‘sociocultural narratives’ discourse. I realised how significant it is to explore and/or take into account the ‘grand narratives’ in which people live in order to understand their impact on people’s lives and personal trajectories. Understanding that people create ‘counter narratives’ based on their own lived experiences, beliefs and perceptions in order to make sense of their world became an interesting element which for instance I had not considered for my own research. Neither I had thought deeply about how our own contexts, backgrounds and personal trajectories can impact the way we think, behave and act in our society. I believe this new understanding of ‘grand narratives’ will help me to look at my data with wider  lenses.

Nahielly Palacios

Interesting links about Narrative Technology and the course I attended:

https://www.utwente.nl/igs/lifestorylab/narrativetec/

https://www.utwente.nl/bms/pgt/Nieuws/summerschool-2016-doing-narrative-analysis/

 

4 comments

  • Lada Smirnova

    Nahielly, many thanks for your post! The more I dig into narrative methodology, and narrative inquiry in particular, the more I get inspired by its potential. The ‘grand narratives’ thing sounds interesting! Let’s do sth like a workshop or some when we all, ‘narrativists’ are back from the fieildwork, say in Feb-March?

  • Zhuomin Huang

    Nahielly, it’s great to read that you learnt so much through this summer course. The idea of ‘counter narratives’ sounds very interesting, which makes me to think how I could further address my reflexivity in data analysis. I also agree with you that attending courses/conferences is a very helpful way of opening up our mind. 😀