Browsing by Subject "narrative"
Now showing items 21-29 of 29
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(2008)In this study I construct, together with mothers with substance abuse, narratives concerning the lives of the mothers and their children as well as the supportive child protection servicies they have received. The study belongs to the field of discussion of the support and care methods for substance-abusing mothers and their children. The purpose of this study is to develope professional methods and practicies for social workers within child protection work. My task is to study, a) what substance-abusing mothers tell me about their and their children´s lives and about the supportive child protection work they have received, and b) how a reseacher and a professional social worker studies these stories while building, together with the mothers, a picture about the child and his/her family as well as the supportive social work needed. The research material consists of thirteen interviews. I interview four mothers who have been clients of a central hospital`s substance abuse clinic during their pregnancy. These mothers have altogether five children under the age of five years. My research method, and also my method of analysis, is narrative reflection. With reflection I mean that as a researcher I place the thoughts and feelings that rise through my professional background into targets of research as well as the mothers´ narratives. We discuss them together in the interviewing situations. Narratives mainly help us in this study to reflect and analyze our discussion and me to report it. The most important result of this study was to make the narratives of these mothers and children visible. Social workers in child protection can through these stories learn a lot about what it is like to be a substance-abusing mother and her child, as well as about how these mothers feel about the support they recieve. This study showed the importance of early assessment of the need for child protection and the importance of developing working methods. The support that these mothers I interviewed got was not based on scientific information about early attachment relations nor the risks and protective factors of these families. Careful planning, long-term social work and the importance of social support were highly rated by these mothers. However, the special services that child protection provided for these families worked, according to this study, very well as social support. This study supports the fact that substance-abusing women and their children must be taken care for together and that the supportive social work must be provided mainly at the early childhood. Narrative reflection and a sensitive way of research showed to be a good choise for this kind of a child protection study. They made it possible to build an ethical, co-working-based study together with these mothers.
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(2017)On the basis of the September 1944 Moscow Armistice agreement between Finland, the Soviet Union and the UK, the Finnish government was obliged to intern German and Hungarian citizens in Finland. Applying the concepts of “tellability” and “frame”, I examine how individuals (most of them children of German fathers and Finnish mothers) who were interned as minors and young people in Finland in 1944–1946 describe silence and the rupture of silence. In order to understand the interaction and dynamics between individuals’ remembering and public memory, I analyze oral history interviews of ex-internees in relation to public discussion. I argue that bringing together viewpoints of narrative analysis, oral history research and memory studies facilitates understanding of the link between the individual, private and public dimensions of memory construction. Furthermore, I suggest that the analytical concepts of tellability and frame are highly useful in understanding why some experiences and events of the past are narrated and remembered while others are forgotten or silenced.
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(2020)Ethnography is not just a literary description of a social group or culture, it’s also writing about the researcher him/herself. In this article an ethnographer as a storyteller refers to a point of view, where the researcher as the narrator of an ethnography tells an informative, evocative story of his/her fieldwork and the dialogue between him/her and research subjects. Analysing ethnography as a written narrative indicates that researcher’s roles as the author and narrator of the text should be taken into account when evaluating ethnographic knowledge in our time.
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(2022)More than 60 countries have implemented a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program. The predominant CCT narrative begins from programs created in Mexico and Brazil in the mid-1990s. The literature concerned with CCTs tends to take this narrative as a given. In this article, we examine the role of international organizations (IOs) in the global governance of social policy by exploring the use of narratives as a strategy IOs employ to claim and generate legitimacy for global policy models. We investigate how the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the International Food Policy Research Institute have discursively constructed the CCT model in their policy documents and thus crafted the CCT narrative. Our analysis sheds light on 'ghost-writing' i.e., the IOs practice of concealing their central role in writing scripts for policy models. Thus, our case adds a novel aspect to the existing scholarship on the global proliferation of policies.
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(Springer, 2022)A large body of experimental evidence in the empirical sciences shows that writing about life experiences can be beneficial for mental and physical health. While empirical data regarding the health benefits of writing interventions have been collected in numerous studies in psychology and biomedicine, this literature has remained almost entirely disconnected from scholarship in the humanities and cognitive neuropsychology. In this paper, I review the literature from psychological and biomedical writing interventions, connect these findings to views from philosophy, cognitive neuropsychology and narratology and argue that examining established regularities in how narratives are structured can shed further light on the psychological processes engaged during writing interventions. In particular, I argue that the narratological concept of conflict can be applied to resolve patterns of seemingly conflicting empirical findings in psychological studies. More generally, I propose that an interdisciplinary perspective can provide a broader theoretical basis for understanding the psychological processes underlying the health benefits of autobiographical writing and provide directions for future research in psychology and biomedicine.
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(2005)The narrative leadership of world politics presented by President George W. Bush in the form of 'war on terror' meta-narrative fulfils the objects of the thesis describing how President Bush is seeing and experiencing the world, and what is the role of information technology in it. The research target to deal with President Bush's speeches becomes more understandable when the thesis constitutes the narrative questions of language such as descriptions, prescription and technological language games Bush tells about the world politics. The thesis uses political philosophy as a context for a narrative analysis. I will use a dromos as part of the political philosophy methodology focusing on the narrative approach. Deconstruction will rely on Jean-Francois Lyotard’s analyses on narratives and Paul Virilio's discussions on tendencies of information technology to serve as a condition for interpretation and understanding. From this perspective relation between Bush's narratives and local realities, intentions and practices, actual and virtual, knowledge and information that are present in world politics can be asked. The study is therefore more about philosophy of (information) war in a world than traditional textual analysis of speeches as it looks into the phenomenon of war in world politics and its practices. This is a way how we can understand Bush's security narratives on terror and information technology constructing a world and world politics. The thesis links two phrases to the 'war on terror' meta-narrative told to the Americans (Chapter 3) that are studied: the phrase 'take the battle to the enemy' directed to a technology oriented audience (Chapter 4) and 'this is a different kind of war' phrase directed to a military audience (Chapter 5). All these three phrases define fundamentally Bush's presidency and are the key for generally understanding Bush's 'war on terror' meta-narrative. The relationship between U.S. national security and information technology will be explicitly studied in the thesis in a way that questions the phrase 'take the battle to the enemy' as not only a challenge to world politics, but also a challenge to Americans themselves in their home country. The thesis's look into to the narrative's relationship to information, knowledge and information technology will suggest how the phrase 'this is a different kind of war' and the images are powerful "weapons" in the current era of information warfare for the President. At the same time it will be shown how problematic the President's phrase relying on speed, performance and efficiency is when seen from somewhere other than the 'bully pulpit'. The final part of the thesis considers and comes back to some of the questions and answers raised throughout the study concerning President Bush's meta-narrative, deconstructing it and returning to relevant security questions in order to further understand the "war on terror" meta-narrative. President's narratives with phrases of war reveal the differend existing between President's meta-narrative and locally experienced little narratives, which reflect the nature of world politics and relativity of war. The thesis also discusses implicitly how challenging it is in the information age to direct speeches to a specific audience, when messages travel across the world from one culture to another as meaning of phrases become meaningful in particular situations. The thesis suggests that President Bush's meta-narrative on 'war on terror' reflects more a narrative power than actual power to free world politics from problems such as terror. In practice, this shows how power of information technology has not been able to solve the problems of terror, but in many ways powerless. Actually use of information technology has enhanced to blur political problems of terror. President Bush's narrative leadership is very much paradoxical in nature as freedom demands restrictions, justice demands injustice, and information superiority demands more information technology. The study argues that it is the paradox that makes President George W. Bush's narrative leadership more understandable, which fulfills the perpetual American dream of freedom. One can ask is the 'war on terror' meta-narrative the ethical way America engages and wants to engage with the world in practice and wage information wars.
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(Helsingin yliopisto, 2021)The thesis studies the European anti-trafficking framework, comprehending relevant EU and Council of Europe instruments, and the narrative of trafficking that it creates. The aim of the thesis is to identify the assumptions and the imagery of trafficking upon which the framework is formed as well as the exclusions and blind spots that these assumptions create. The thesis analyses the legal framework by adopting a critical feminist methodology. It studies assumptions concerning gender and migration in the trafficking narrative by first focusing on a linkage between trafficking and prostitution policies, then on a linkage between trafficking and migration and finally on connections between trafficking and other forms of gender-based violence. Assumptions of what trafficking is are produced through linkages, and sometimes lacks of linkages, between these frameworks. The thesis argues that trafficking is assumed to involve organized criminal groups trafficking migrant women to the sex industry and forced prostitution. Trafficking is combated as a form of organized crime, and legal instruments are based on this assumption. The anti-trafficking framework is also linked to migration policies as trafficking is understood as a form of irregular migration, contributing to a focus on transnational trafficking. In addition, the understanding of trafficking is marred by a debate on the nature and potential harmfulness of prostitution which has been among the most controversial issues of the anti-trafficking framework. The role of the sex industry and prostitution is thus at the focus in the debated narrative of trafficking. As the narrative of trafficking focuses on some experiences, it forgets others. Victims of trafficking taking place within romantic relationships are excluded from the narrative of trafficking, as the relational nature of trafficking remains invisible due to a focus on organized crime. Domestic trafficking victims often remain unidentified as well, as the anti-trafficking framework focuses on transnational trafficking. As the question of prostitution takes space in legal discourses around the anti-trafficking framework, other forms of trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation remain unidentified and under-analyzed. A more inclusive narrative of trafficking would be beneficial for the identification of victims. In addition to being conceptualized as a question of migration and organized crime, trafficking should be understood in more relational terms, as a form of gender-based violence with connections to other such crimes. Trafficking should altogether be understood as a complex phenomenon that can take many forms and needs to be combated in multiple ways, as generalizing assumptions are too often counterproductive and based on political motives instead of empirical analysis.
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(Routledge, 2017)Routledge Advances in Comics StudiesBy placing comics in a lively dialogue with contemporary narrative theory, The Narratology of Comic Art builds a systematic theory of narrative comics, going beyond the typical focus on the Anglophone tradition. This involves not just the exploration of those properties in comics that can be meaningfully investigated with existing narrative theory, but an interpretive study of the potential in narratological concepts and analytical procedures that has hitherto been overlooked. This research monograph is, then, not an application of narratology in the medium and art of comics, but a revision of narratological concepts and approaches through the study of narrative comics. Thus, while narratology is brought to bear on comics, equally comics are brought to bear on narratology.
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(2018)Young consumers hold an iconic position in post-industrial cultures. In spite of youth idealization in consumer culture, we know little of how youth is situated in everyday interactions in service culture. In our study, we focus on age-related power structures in service encounters. We argue that customer service interaction is built on the norm of an adult order; that is, to achieve an appreciated position as a customer, young people are required to act like middle-aged' consumers. To gain recognition, young consumers use resistance tactics: They create co-performing teams together with adults and modify their own performance towards adulthood by masking signs of youth. The findings suggest that young people may also resist the dominant adult order; laughter and smiling express a strategy that re-positions adults into a less powerful position in the service environment. The study shows that young and adult categories in service interaction are constantly under re-negotiation.
