Conceptualizing the Relational Work of Narrative Inquiry as Spaces of Appearance

Abstract

While Arendt’s theoretical work is now widely taken up in social science research, it has not been taken up in qualitative research methodologies. We use Arendt’s distinction between the private and public through the creation of a space of appearance to show how we can understand participants’ and researchers’ experiences in narrative inquiry. We show how a relational space co-created with each participant shaped a space of appearance. In this article, we draw on one participant’s, Ama, experiences to make visible how we conceptualize research conversations as spaces of appearance.

Introduction

Ama carried a gentle presence and brought a warm and friendly atmosphere to our relational space. Despite a hint of hesitation, Ama slowly shared stories of his experience of becoming, and being, homeless. Ama’s life of being homeless in Japan is constantly challenging; sometimes a can or a firecracker hit him while he was sleeping outside. Strangers shouted at him with insulting words. Often his belongings were stolen; once he lost a whole bag of aluminum cans he arduously collected. Ama rides his bicycle over 80 kilometers every day to collect aluminum cans and to make money to buy one meal and an energy drink each day. One day, while showing a photo of a sheet of cardboard placed on the edge of a street illuminated by the dim light of a vending machine, he spoke, saying, “As you can see in the photo, I sleep on the ground like . . . an animal. I never be able to sleep well. I wake up every twenty or thirty minutes during a night.” I imagined his shame and despair of seeing himself as an animal and situating his body and life in the middle of a world that expresses hostility towards him.

Drawing upon a narrative inquiry into the life of an older man, Ama, who has been homeless for more than 15 years in Japan, I (Hiroko), alongside Jean and Vera, engaged in thinking with two of Arendt’s books, The Human Condition (1958) and Men in Dark Times (1968). While we use Arendt’s concepts to think substantively about experience, we also draw on her concept of spaces of appearance as a methodological move within narrative inquiry. Arendt makes visible that one goal of political speech is to bring into being the “in-between” world between actors, a world that endures beyond them. While we were aware that many qualitative research methodologies used participants’ voices in publications to make participants visible, we wondered if Arendt’s concept would help in conceptualizing the relations between researchers and participants. Was it possible, we wondered, to use Arendt’s concept of spaces of appearance to help us think methodologically in narrative inquiry? In this article, we show how Arendt’s work allows us to understand how relational interactions in narrative inquiry build a structure toward a space of appearance, in which the political aspect of human existence is embedded. We use Hiroko’s study to illustrate.

As part of Hiroko’s doctoral studies (Kubota, 2017) into the experience of being homeless in Japan, Hiroko met three men who are homeless in Japan. Hiroko met Ama, one participant, in the winter of 2015, at an outside soup kitchen serving meals to people who experienced precarious housing in Japan. With support from a community organization, they began conversations in a small meeting room beside the organization. Their relationship continued for several months (Kubota, 2017). We used narrative inquiry as our research methodology with its relational ontological commitment to understand the experience of men who were homeless in Japan (Kubota et al., 2018). Homelessness in Japan has a long history as a social phenomenon and issue especially since the collapse of high economic growth in Japan in the 1980s. In addition, poverty and homelessness are often related to shame and stigma and considered a private matter, which disempowers and isolates people from obtaining social welfare services in Japan (Kubota et al., 2019).

Meeting Ama

Ama is a 75-year-old man who has been homeless for more than 15 years. He became homeless before turning 60 at a time when he lost his job and family. In their first conversation, Ama shared his stories about his work; he worked for more than 40 years at a family-owned lumber business, which his father founded after World War II. At the harbor, he unloaded lumber from huge cargo vessels coming daily from abroad, bundling lumber on the ocean, and carrying it into a lumber pond. His earlier life was characterized by his work dealing with lumber, which still shaped his stories to live. ¹ He described, “Without the lumber, my life was nothing.” During our conversations, Ama repeatedly revisited these moments of his life filled with the enthusiasm for work and the love generously given by his parents; he said, “I think I was blessed with family in my life. My parents gave me a lot of love. Especially, I was spoiled by my father.” After his father died, he added a special attachment to his lumber work, and it became a remnant of his father’s legacy. Later, when a large earthquake hit his home town, his house was destroyed, resulting in Ama needing to move to a temporary shelter with his mother. However, when his mother passed away a few months later, he realized his brother was excluding him from his family business with the result that his brother became the owner of the business. Ama was never able to return to his work at the harbor. Slowly recollecting the pieces of these disturbing moments, Ama remained devastated as he said, “I will never forget that moment. My life was completely changed. I was in despair and wished to die at that moment.”

Before becoming homeless, Ama visited the welfare office to apply for welfare support, but his claim was rejected with a request to ask his siblings for support. Saying, “I didn’t want to bother my sister anyways,” he gave up asking for support from anyone. He unsuccessfully attempted to find a job; recalling his dejection, he said, “Many employers prefer young workforces, so it was very challenging for me to win a job against younger applicants. I was completely excluded from the circle.” Without means and resources, he struggled in loneliness. Over time, Ama lost a place of belonging and became homeless. After losing his parents and job, Ama’s life was so disrupted that he considered suicide. His despair, at that moment, was so intense that he wished to withdraw from his life, something that powerfully signified his refusal to continue to live his stories.

After becoming homeless, he was finally given welfare support and housing but twice ran away from the apartment he was provided with during this time. Ama shared his stories of why he ran away from his apartment twice and returned to being homeless:

A welfare staff visited my apartment and checked my room once every few weeks. I was annoyed by their visits. As my apartment was regularly checked by a staff, I felt obliged to clean up my apartment, do laundry, and hang my blanket outside for sterilizing under the sunshine. All of these housekeeping chores were really troublesome. And I felt bored to stay in the apartment alone. So, I had been getting tired of that life and thought it was much better to live without an apartment. I don’t like to be restricted by others.

Being homeless, Ama also had to fight with many inhospitable people, places, and rules to secure a place to sleep. “I only sleep here and never block your way. I will leave here before the first train. You should just let me sleep here! Please don’t be so unkind! It’s a matter of life or death! Let me sleep here!,” shouted Ama to a security guard at midnight, when he was told to leave from the train station entrance. Although he finally found a place to sleep, he always needed to be alert to a security guard trying to evacuate him or to people who constantly interrupted his sleep. Recently, he suffered from severe heart disease, but he insisted he live on the street. His determination to stay homeless even changed the way he reacted to discrimination, as he said, “I always feel I’m despised by others just because I am homeless, but I have already given up to fight with these stigmas because these people would never understand how I live.” Ama is determined to protect his independence by being homeless. We received ethical approval for the study from the Research Ethics Board at the University of Alberta (Pro00053089); narrative accounts that reflect the experiences shared were negotiated with participants.

Thinking Methodologically With Arendt’s Distinction Between Action and Speech

In contemplation of the human condition, Arendt (1958) attends to the significance of action and speech, which reveals what is specifically human and what distinguishes each person as “who” not “what” they/she or her is. Arendt (1958) values both action and speech, noting, “A life without speech and without action . . . has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men [people]” (p. 176). Human action and speech create appearances of individuals and disclose the singularity of each human life while also bearing relevance to others and to the world. Action, for Arendt (1958), constitutes the fundamental element that liberates human beings from the toil of their biological life and creates the human condition of plurality underpinned by equality and distinctness. Initially when Hiroko, Jean, andVera wondered about Ama’s sense of action and speech when he storied himself as “an animal” and as “me as a homeless” in conversations, we wondered what Ama intended to reveal about himself through his action and speech. We heard his expression of himself in his conversations with Hiroko as more likely his resistance, rather than complete resignation, to use his body (Kubota, Clandinin, & Caine, 2018) and embody his experience against the sweeping force of normalization. As we further thought with Arendt’s ideas and what Hiroko was doing methodologically in her conversations with Ama, we wondered if, together, they were co-creating a space of appearance for themselves.

After becoming homeless, Ama was forced into a position where he did not belong anywhere, where his life, hope, despair, and struggles were made unrelated and unidentified. Ama’s voice, unable to reach others, was unspeakable when he became homeless. He lost opportunities to speak in ways that were recognizable to others. Without speech, Ama’s physical body helplessly appeared in the streets and caused people to act—to evade him, to throw firecrackers, and to shout at him. Ama did not speak of these experiences in these moments. He spoke of them only to Hiroko in the conversations.

Both Hiroko’s and Ama’s participation in the conversations elicited a political attitude of courage, expressed as “a willingness to act and speak at all, to insert one’s self into the world and begin a story of one’s own” (Arendt, 1958, p. 186). Hiroko, in thinking about her relationship with Ama, wondered if Ama’s attitude might also come from his care and bravery that, for example, he demonstrated at the soup kitchen where he always volunteered to wash dishes for more than a hundred people even in the winter. His sense of care was present and active in these moments. In thinking about her relationship with Ama, Hiroko, who was born and raised in Japan and moved to Canada, saw how she was more courageous in facing the ways that Japanese society constructed homelessness within the political structures. Hiroko and Ama’s conversations created a political condition under which unexpectedness was brought forth, driven, and sustained by their courage in ways they could not predict at the beginning. Methodologically, we saw that in these moments of mutuality arising from their research relationship, action and speech became first visible and recognizable to Ama and Hiroko and subsequently, through publication, to others (Blix, Clandinin, Steeves, & Caine, 2023). Perhaps Ama’s reason for engaging in conversations with Hiroko allowed him to begin a new story. Perhaps Hiroko’s participation allowed her to begin a new story. In thinking with Arendt, we understand methodologically that we are moving beyond visibility and representation to the possibility of political action and change.

Arendt (1958) attributes natality, the ontological root of action, to the human condition. She demonstrates the power of natality ingrained in human action by saying, “The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable” (p. 178). We wonder if, for Ama, these fleeting moments of the past called up for him, within his conversations with Hiroko, offered him a breath in which he found hope and new interpretations. We wonder, too, if Hiroko and Ama, as they appeared to each other, were both called to act differently, to feel hope within a changed understanding. Arendt highlighted that revelation, that is, the revealing of human beings to each other through action and speech, eludes final conclusions and establishes unexpectedness, possible moments of new beginnings. We wonder if Ama ever had a sense of new beginnings after becoming homeless. Arendt sees the power of natality within human existence of coming into the world and also within the immortal trace of human lives expressed in stories. How did Ama’s and Hiroko’s conversations give rise to seeing the ordinary in new ways in his life and in the world? In Hiroko’s life and in the world? For example, as Hiroko returned home to Canada, she was caught in thinking of Ama and surprised by what she took for granted. When she slipped into her bed, she thought of Ama sleeping on cardboard outside under a winter jacket while fearful of being hit by a can again. Ama added a layer of thinking in Hiroko’s life, which allowed her to step outside familiarity and incorporate his pain as part of her experience.

A life he was given by accepting welfare did not allow him the contingency of action and speech. Instead, his identity was restricted to that of a “welfare recipient.” For Ama, it was more important to situate his physical body in the streets where there were possibilities of response and reaction from others, even though, without his voice and stories, these responses and reactions frequently became cruel. To act, human beings need to appear to others. Yet, we also need to be seen and heard through a relationship. Through their research conversations, Hiroko’s relationship with Ama became characterized by a reciprocity of care. When they finished a research conversation, Ama habitually shared half of his coffee with Hiroko as they casually chatted. He sympathized with her experiences of coming alone to Canada without family or friends and without familiarity with the language, culture, and social context. Ama also shared his joy of finding his faith in Christianity after becoming homeless. His life became more visible and familiar as both Hiroko and Ama appeared in their co-composed relational space, their space of appearance. This openness to others encompasses a political significance inherent in the discourse of friendship, which “manifests itself in a readiness to share the world with other men [people]” (Arendt, 1968/2014, p. 25).

Shaping the Public Realm

Respecting the revelatory character of action and speech, Arendt (1958) appeals to the vital necessity of the public realm where people live together, and where action and speech are seen and heard by others. The significance of the public realm, where “action and speech are surrounded by and in constant contact with the web of the acts and words of other men [people]” (p. 188), conditions a space where “single individuals, unique, unexchangeable, and unrepeatable entities, appear and from which they depart” (p. 97). In the public realm, action and speech serve as a medium through which people relate, interact, and distinguish themselves from one another (Arendt, 1958). For Arendt (1958), “Action . . . always establishes relationships and therefore has an inherent tendency to force open all limitations and cut across all boundaries” (p. 190). While “the boundlessness of human interrelatedness” (Arendt, 1958, p. 190) of action establishes the public realm, it is also conceivable that interrelatedness of stories could actualize the world and serve as the space of appearance.

Considering the Space of Appearance in the Methodology of Narrative Inquiry

Unfolding Stories in Narrative Inquiry

At the outset of this article, we described how Ama was part of a narrative inquiry study. Narrative inquiry, “a way of understanding experience” (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 20), draws attention to thinking with, within, and around “stories lived and told” (p. 20), while being anchored by a wonder about what it means for human beings to live in relationship with others (Caine, Clandinin, & Lessard, 2022). Narrative inquiry is a collaborative inquiry between researcher and participant while they are continuously living in the midst: in the midst of each other’s stories, an emerging relationship, and other social, cultural, familial, and institutional narratives (Clandinin, 2013; Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007; Blix, Steeves, Caine, & Clandinin, 2025). Dewey’s criteria of experience, interaction and continuity establish the philosophical underpinning of narrative inquiry (Dewey, 1938). Three commonplaces of narrative inquiry, temporality, sociality, and place, demonstrate the interrelated aspects of attending to experiences (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000). In narrative inquiry, “experience itself is [seen as] an embodied narrative composition” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 38), whereby thinking narratively entails thinking with experience, which “highlights the shifting, changing, personal, and social nature of the phenomenon under study” (p. 38).

The ontology of narrative inquiry implies a relational co-composition of stories, underpinned by continuous interactions and negotiations between researchers and participants (Caine, Estefan, & Clandinin, 2013). Clandinin and Connelly (2000) place an emphasis on the interactive aspect of narrative inquiry by saying, “relationship lives at the heart of thinking narratively. Relationship is key to what it is that narrative inquirers do” (p. 189). In narrative inquiry, researchers become an integral part of the narrative phenomena being shaped by a relational space between researcher and participant (Clandinin, 2006). Stories are co-composed within these relational spaces, which are “spaces of belonging for both researchers and participants” (Clandinin & Caine, 2013, p. 169).

In narrative inquiry, neither researchers nor participants leave the inquiry unchanged (Clandinin and Caine, 2013). As we worked with Arendt’s concept of spaces of appearance, we began to see the ways her work enriched our work methodologically as well as substantively. Having conversations with Ama over 5 months from 2015 to 2016 was an educative experience (Dewey, 1938). Hiroko learned how differently homelessness affects individuals’ experiences, how many unexamined assumptions she carried about homelessness, and how powerful a relationship, which creates spaces for stories of experience, can be. Even though she left the conversational space with Ama more than 7 years ago, Hiroko continues to live alongside Ama in her memory, as she thinks with the stories he shared with her. She notices how deeply his stories are inscribed in her body and are working on her (Basso, 1996). Her understanding of Ama’s stories and their relationship have constantly been shifting as she retells and relives them over time, place, and various contexts (Caine, Estefan, & Clandinin, 2013).

Arendt (1958) explicates the polis as an organization of people “as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be” (p. 198). For Arendt, the polis is defined by people acting and speaking together. The polis which becomes present in-between acting and speaking people can only address a space that creates the reality of the world and individuals’ experiences in it (Arendt, 1958). Arendt (1958) further affirms the polis as “the space of appearance . . . where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men [people] exist not merely as other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly” (p. 198).

Action and speech are not complete without the presence of others. Arendt (1958) reveals the incompleteness of action and speech and states: “Here it seems as though each action were divided into two parts, the beginning made by a single person and the achievement in which many join by ‘bearing’ and ‘finishing’ the enterprise, by seeing it through” (p. 189). For human beings to appear through action and speech, it is important to be situated in human relatedness. However, the human togetherness becomes questionable if people do not obtain the freedom to act and speak as equals, and if others do not recognize pluralities. In thinking about the space of appearance, it is important to think about the relatedness of human beings. In this space, “words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities” (Arendt, 1958, p. 200).

Narrative inquiry as a research methodology and a way of thinking about experience (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000) creates an opportunity to revitalize the space of appearance. It is Arendt who helps us see this space as being political and helps us understand how the space of appearance can function methodologically in narrative inquiry. It is in spending time with Ama that a space of appearance opens for both Ama and Hiroko. Because final research texts in narrative inquiry cannot depart from a relationship, texts need to be grounded in, and developed through, being in relation. The research text that Hiroko co-created with Ama needed to be grounded in their relationship. At a later point in the research, it is also important to recognize that although the audience has never met Ama in person, his life and his existence hold the possibility to appear to others. This appearance of Ama, through these co-composed stories, creates the distinctness of his body and shapes the space of appearance in which Hiroko, Vera, Jean and others might recognize him. Relationships in narrative inquiry hold the power to relate to the audience in the space of appearance, by calling forth the polis, where the equality and the individuality of each human life are recognized and respected.

Especially for people who are structurally marginalized in society and whose voices are often minimized, it is important to elicit the diversity of experiences, not as a group of people, but as unique individuals. By way of narrative inquiry, experiences, which are often hidden or silenced in society, can draw the space of appearance, actively challenge injustices, and drive to change the world. In addition, as narrative inquiry preserves the particularities and incompleteness of experience, it allows countless incongruities, ambiguities, and fragilities to be incorporated (Clandinin, 2013; Clandinin and Murphy, 2007). Ama’s pains and struggles are evident in the final research texts, as are his dreams and hopes. The stories co-composed between Ama and Hiroko in the space of appearance oppose categorization, silence, and stigmatization.

Conclusion

Stories lived, told, retold, and relived in a relational space can meaningfully constitute the political significance entailed by the space of appearance. Stories give appearance to action and speech of an agent, as much as they are capable of being experienced by others. By thinking with Arendt’s concept of spaces of appearance, we are able to bring this concept to the methodology of narrative inquiry. By living alongside Ama through narrative inquiry, Hiroko perceives how deeply Ama’s life has become an integral part of her stories. The first space of appearance is co-composed by Ama, as participant, and Hiroko, as researcher. In the final research text, Hiroko and Ama create a second space of appearance. Hirokooffered a mediation between Ama’s and her life and their co-composed space of appearance by envisioning potential connections between Ama and the audience.

Stories of Ama that were told and retold in the relational space between Hiroko and Ama are no longer silent. Ama’s fragile body sleeping outside, Ama’s pain when he was hit by firecrackers, Ama’s shame when he called himself “an animal,” and Ama’s resistance to becoming a welfare recipient are transfigured into something palpable that can be seen and heard by others. His gentle voice enclosing both hesitations and friendliness is also encapsulated in his stories. Furthermore, his gesture of gentleness and friendliness infused throughout this relational inquiry demonstrated political relevance in Arendt’s sense, where “friendship is not intimately personal but makes political demands and preserves reference to the world” (Arendt, 1968/2014, p. 25). Ama’s willingness to speak of himself and relate to the world and others makes possible a relationship where human beings relate to each other and learn to humanize the world. Narrating a life through stories can be a way of reinvigorating the space of appearance, through which each individual in their distinctness brings their bodies into the common world. Firmly taking on the courage, Ama chose to appear in the relational space with Hiroko and eventually found in that relational space an opportunity to recollect his stories and share his world with Hiroko.