Narrative Day (28th June) — Developing Programme

In no particular order, I will upload the contributions one by one as they are formulated by you in coming days:

In my contribution, I want to facilitate a discussion exploring what it means to ‘restory a narrative’. It seems that, in different kinds of narrative-based research, there are different varieties of restorying. I think it will be interesting to exchange ideas about this term and to explore what restorying might involve in practice. I will bring some examples to feed into the discussion. In my own research, I have a highly structured approach to restorying which I will briefly share during the day by way of a starting point for further discussion about different approaches that others are considering/have considered.

Miriam Firth – “Storytelling in Vocational education and industry”
My discussion at the narrative day will reflect research found in peer reviewed, published sources to support narrative research in vocational education. Vocational education literature encompasses Hospitality, Tourism, Events, Sport and Leisure fields of study. My talk will refer to current research that has used narrative methods/methodology to align to my forthcoming PhD pilot study.

My contribution focuses on ongoing work with Richard Fay on exploring doctoral researchers’ reflections of doing research multilingually. More specifically we are examining what the doctoral researcher stories published on the website of the AHRC project Researching Multilingually suggest regarding the writers’ developing researcher competence (DRC) (Stelma & Fay, forthcoming) in relation to their awareness of the possibilities and complexities of multilingual research design and practice. Doctoral researchers who contributed with their stories were given two prompts by the project team: 1) What is you experience of doing research multilingually? and 2) What is your experience of becoming aware of the complexities in this area? In relation to these questions we explored what could be learned from the stories separately and collectively regarding how each researcher presented DRC experiences and what specific understandings their stories offer vis-à-vis researching multilingually.

With Leah Davcheva in Bulgaria, I am undertaking a narrative study of Ladino-informed identity performance by elderly Sephardic Jews in Bulgaria. As a contribution to this Narrative Day, I want to reflect on how Leah and I are using storytelling between ourselves in order develop what we see as ‘reflexive mutuality’ (or perhaps ‘mutual reflexivity’?) as a foundation for our work together on this project, work in which the main corpus of data consists of stories by 14 middle-aged to elderly Sephardic Jews. Specifically, I want to reflect on how we are using email/word-based storytelling to surface and share: a) our individual and shared Ladino backgrounds; and b) our individual and shared researcher backgrounds. I both cases, the stories are being told with a view to how these backgrounds are relevant to the study on which we are collaborating. This is very much work in progress and not a formal presentation.

Tanya Halldorsdottir – “The Third Space: Travels with Scheherazad“

Lou Harvey – ‘Where fiction meets reality’: A narrative of language learning motivation

Parneet Chahal –