Reading :: Handbook of Narrative Inquiry

 Handbook of Narrative Inquiry: Mapping a Methodology

Edited by D. Jean Clandinin

As mentioned in a previous review, I have been looking for good sources for better understanding narrative inquiry. This behemoth of a book (24 chapters, 693pp) delivers, although as is often true with such handbooks, it covers such a broad swathe that it’s hard to get one’s arms around it. 

Partly because it is so broad, and partly because I have discovered that I’m not that interested in narrative inquiry, I’ll just provide a broad overview.

In Part I: Situating Narrative Inquiry, the contributors offer a historical overview and a map of the “landscape.”

Part II: Starting with Telling Stories offers six chapters, covering archival work, narrative interviewing, autobiography, conversation, and life stories.

Part III: Starting with Living Stories includes four chapters, one of which was written by Boje, with whom I have already become familiar. 

Part IV: Narrative Inquiry in the Professions offers four chapters, focusing on teaching, organizations, anthropology, and psychotherapy.

Part V: Complexities in Narrative Inquiry examines narratives of young children, cross-cultural narratives, and indigenous narratives.

Part VI: Narrating Persisting Issues in Narrative Inquiry covers ethics in NI and writing up narrative research.

Part VII: Future Possibilities ends with two chapters: One on NI’s future influence on policy/practice and one conversation with prominent NI researchers.

A few chapters in, it struck me that NI researchers primarily work in the mode of storytelling, so everyone was going to reach into the same bag of tricks. This turned out to be largely true. This volume is 693pp of story after story, not always told that engagingly, with each story taking the foreground and methodological details fading into the background. What I learned from this was that although I always thought I liked a good story as much as anyone, that wasn’t strictly true; I found myself skimming stories and looking for methodological details that weren’t always present. 

So should you read this book? If you are planning to use NI, definitely — it provides a good comprehensive view of NI, although this edition (2006) is probably a bit dated. If you are a qualitative researcher thinking about using NI, this book is still a good resource, but you might not read it cover to cover. 

Reading :: Engaging in Narrative Inquiry, 2ed

Engaging in Narrative Inquiry, 2ed

by D. Jean Clandinin

I’ve been interested in narrative inquiry since reading Boje’s book on narrative methods for organizational and communication research, and I dipped my toe into it when analyzing some of our data on small town Texas. But when I taught a recent survey on research methods, I decided that I needed to learn more about it. So I picked up this book by well-known narrative inquiry researcher D. Jean Clandinin. It’s a methods book, suitable for advanced undergraduates, and it covers the basics of narrative research well.

Clandinin introduces this approach well, grounding it in Dewey, Bateson, and Bruner (p.4), defining it, and outlining its epistemological and ontological commitments. She sees narrative inquiry as both a methodology and a phenomenon (p.6), both designed and lived out (p.19), and reviews its practice through several examples from doctoral research. 

To be honest, though, I came away from this book less excited about narrative inquiry than I had been before reading it. It’s understandable that a heavily qualitative and interpretive research approach would question concepts such as rigor. But, as presented, narrative inquiry is framed more as a way for the researcher to experience something for themselves and to convey their own experience to others. Consequently, later chapters focus more on the creative styles that narrative researchers can use. In contrast, I was looking more for a structured approach that could make narrative inquiry, if not more rigorous, at least more regularized and followable. But this is an issue related to what I want to do with my research, not with the book itself, which is clear and well described. If you’re interested in narrative inquiry, definitely pick it up. 

Reading :: Remembering as a Cultural Process

 Remembering as a Cultural Process

by Brady Wagoner, Ignacio Brescó, and Sarah H. Awad 

This book, like some of the others I have reviewed lately, is a little far afield from my usual interests. And like some of those other books, I read it on the plane, so I didn’t take notes. Overall, I found it interesting, but not closely connected to my research. 

Wagoner et al. approach memory from the standpoint of psychology. Here’s how the authors open the book:

The guiding question of this book is how to think about and study remembering in terms of process, flow, interaction, emergence, as well as culture. This approach requires turning away from psychology’s standard procedures for investigating memory through the analysis of static outcomes of some task, where memories are quantified and compared as finished products. There is certainly value in these procedures and the knowledge they have given us, but at the same time they have missed the fundamental energies, movements, emotions, and transformations that construct these memories. These are forces that cannot be tied down as discrete variables or studied simply as frozen snapshots. In fact, we argue that memory can only ever artificially be considered a finished product in that we are continuously revising, adapting, and developing memories in light of new experiences, changing environments, life challenges, and future goals. Thus, in the place of the language“how variable x influences memory,” this book will focus on how memories emerge within changing patterns of relationships between past, present, and future, as well as people, objects, history, and culture. (p. xv)

I read a lot of cultural psychology, and such complaints about quantification are common, common enough that I sometimes wonder why these authors don’t just talk to each other rather than worrying about those who quantify. I’m sure that the answer has a lot to do with tenure and promotion committees. In any case, the authors examine remembering as a cultural process through their case studies (in Egypt, Germany, Spain, the UK, and the USA), which I believe were conducted separately before being combined into this single book. Their work is collectively based on Lev Vygotsky and Frederic Bartlett.

As someone who was peripherally interested in cultural memory, I thought these case studies were interesting and did a good job of developing insights, but not riveting. The book is actually quite short, with references ending on p.89, followed by appendices and index. 

Should you read this? If you’re interested in a psychological take on cultural memory, I definitely think it’s worth a look. It’s a fast and clear read with compelling cases. Personally, I don’t yet see a strong connection to my research, but I’m glad I can turn to it if I ever do. 

Reading :: Dialogical Approaches and Tensions in Learning and Development

 Dialogical Approaches and Tensions in Learning and Development: At the Frontiers of the Mind 

Edited by Nathalie Muller Mirza and Marcelo Dos Santos Mamed 

I picked up this book because I’ve been very interested in dialogical approaches lately. This book was helpful for overviewing dialogic thought in education, psychology, and affiliated disciplines. At the same time, I read it on the plane and didn’t take notes — so this review will be brief, more of a pointer toward what I should reread. 

So what should I reread? Especially useful to me was the editors’ introduction, in which they overview different traditions of dialogue, grounding the collection in the tradition of Bakhtin, Vygotsky, and Mead. I really appreciated the level of detail here as well as the forecasting for the rest of the book.

The rest of the book covers topics such as dialogism in psychology; in the making of social theories; in makerspaces; and in literacy. The only contributor I recognized was Roger Saljo, whose work on units of analysis has been useful to me. In his contribution, “Sign-Making, Inscriptions and Access to Epistemic Practices: Development in a Designed World,” he considers sign-making as a sociocultural activity that we involve across all of our practices. He takes a Vygotskian perspective here, thinking through Vygotsky’s contributions before moving on to more contemporary perspectives.

Overall, I found the book interesting, although a little far from my field in places. Still, I plan to revisit it. If you’re interested in dialogical approaches, certainly pick it up!

Reading :: Data Rules

 Data Rules: Reinventing the Market Economy

By Cristina Alaimo, Jannis Kallinikos

This book is open access, so you can just click through and download the PDF. I recommend that you do so! Although I’ll write just a short review today, I found the book well worth reading and I intend to revisit it as I think through data.

Specifically, the authors are interested in how data have become central to contemporary life, economy, and society. Drawing on social cognition and communication, they “examine the social and economic transformations associated with the unprecedented diffusion and increasing socioeconomic relevance of data” (p.1). They argue that through the digital revolution, life has undergone “datafication” (p.1) — something that spoke loudly to me as I thought about how I obsess over the sleep scores and training readiness scores that my Garmin watch serves up to me. Such data are not just technical, they perform “semiotic, epistemic, and communication functions” in economy and society (p.5). And thus “data making and data use constitute essential areas of social inquiry, distinct from contemporary data science and the framing of data in predominantly technical terms” (p.9). In particular, studying transformations from this perspective can give us new insights into organizations:

These transformations signal a change of paradigmatic import associated with the decentering of organizations. The notion of firms (and formal organizations more broadly) as centered systems makes sense when these systems can keep an external world at arm’s length and obtain a relative operational independence from it. This partition into an internal set of contingencies that could be paid heed to and managed on a continuous basis and an external world that is attended to only periodically is increasingly undone by the machinery of digital data, their dispersion, heterogeneity, uncertain origin, and steady reproduction and renewal/ (p.12)

The authors tackle this argument in two parts. In “Foundations,” they explore the epistemic foundations of data (revisiting Schmant-Besserat’s work with the origins of writing) and examining the digital data revolution, the data life cycle, and surveillance. In “Social and economic transformations,” they examine how digital data work to decenter organizations, pushing us instead toward platforms and ecosystems. Along the way, they consider how digital platforms impact the market economy. They conclude by persuasively calling for a social science of data.

If you’re interested in data, markets, organizations, or social science more broadly, definitely pick it up. I intend to revisit it as I continue thinking about all of these. 

Reading :: (If You) USEME-AI

 (If You) USEME-AI: Learning for Hope & Agency in an AI World

by Stephen Taylor 

Just a quick review of this Kindle book. Stephen Taylor has written this highly readable, practical, focused book on the question of how we teach in a world that is being rapidly changed by generative AI. The book is pitched to teachers and students in what we in the US call “high school” — the last four years of secondary school before college. And it is packed with illustrative dialogues among teachers and students.

The book is framed around an educational framework that “promotes learning for hope and agency.” In this framework, you

• Prioritize agency
• Understand AI and learning
• Support learning
• Expect more ... clearly
• Model interactions
• Expect ethics

And it requires

• Authentic adaptations
• Inspiring innovations

The book has a companion site as well. 

I really appreciated the care that Taylor put into this framework, which is built on established learning theory and really grapples with learning and ethics. It has helped me think through my own responses to student AI use, even though my students are older than those in the examples. If you’re struggling with how to develop assignments in a world awash with AI slop, definitely check it out.