Abstract
This book offers a robust response to what the authors describe as a ‘turn towards the technical’, a trend they perceive in academia to make research a technical exercise focused on methods. Their aim is to return to the central ideas of narrative inquiry – of which experience is a defining focus – and make visible the philosophical roots of narrative. This, the authors claim, is why the book is distinctive – it is not a methodological guide or research project, but an explicit discussion about how theorists have shaped their understanding of narrative inquiry as a phenomenon.
The book is indeed, the opposite of a ‘how to’ guide for an off-the-shelf methodology. It is one to read slowly, thematically and reflectively, absorbing complex dimensions of experience and temporality within narrative inquiry, its potential for dialogue and social change. Cain, Clandinin and Lessard draw on concepts from established pragmatist philosophers such as Dewey, but also draw in feminist scholars including Addams and Heilbron, philosophies of resistance particularly indigenous heritage and a multitude of references to essayists, fiction writers and poets. Thus, while shaped by North American philosophical histories and debates, the book invokes a broad canon of disciplines, professions, national contexts and times, and the Reference list features much that will be familiar to a range of readers.
Clandinin’s seminal article with Connelly (1990) described narrative inquiry as both a way of viewing experience and a way of studying experience. While the methodological aspect was quickly taken up, this was often without an acknowledgement of its philosophical dimension. Here, the authors stress the primacy of experience in narrative inquiry and that their aim is to apply theoretical ideas to experience, not to use a particular theory or concept as an analytical lens of experience.
The book is structured into five themed sections: Experience, Temporality, Living within Landscapes, Imagination and Relationality. Each section contains a group of chapters on a significant idea within that theme, for example, Section 1, Experience, contains three standalone essays on experience, knowledge and embodiment. Each chapter or essay includes theoretical work that shapes understanding of each idea and how it is central to thinking narratively. At the end of each section is a Methodological Notebook drawing on the authors’ research alongside Syrian refugee families with young children to demonstrate the application of philosophical ideas as an integral part of the methodology of narrative enquiry.
I am no ‘natural’ philosopher but was rapidly drawn into the book by the Introduction’s ‘Coming to the Book: Autobiographical Origins’ in which Cain, Clandinin and Lessard introduce themselves and their perspectives by recalling their earliest connections to shaping ideas, people and places. Knowing firsthand, the challenges of co-authoring, I was struck not only by the voices and presence of all three authors throughout the book but also by their clear delight in the process of writing together. They describe the process as one of familiarity and discovery; of engaging in conversations with theorists and their ideas and placing them in new conversations with each other.
The philosophical discussions in each chapter and across the book are carefully illustrated and mediated by the authors’ interwoven narratives. Clandinin, the doyenne of narrative inquiry, frames her reflections on her childhood in rural Alberta and early experiences of dominant and counterstories as a teacher, against the interplay of Dewey, Buber and Friedman’s concepts of community. Cain’s narrative thread about her experience of being diagnosed and treated for breast cancer punctuate the chapter on Memory (Section 2: Temporality). Her story illuminates a detailed discussion of memory’s significant and critical role in creating narrative coherence across time and how memories are shaped by forgetting, emotion and imagination. A key concept of narrative inquiry – wakefulness to uncertainty – is explored through Cain’s stories of her experience of nursing in Canada’s NorthWest Territories, interwoven with Heilbron’s writing on liminality, Kennedy’s notion of the abyss, Bhaba’s in-between spaces and Anzaldua’s borderlands. Lessard’s reflections on his relationship to physical spaces and imagined geographies of lost First Nation communities are mobilised in explorations of embodiment and temporality.
The authors’ narratives are inevitably shaped by their own origins in Canada (Clandinin and Lessard) and Germany (Cain) but are positioned as fragments of larger social and cultural narratives. The final section of the book: Relationality, stresses the importance of acknowledging commitment, responsibility and obligation in the practice of research. The authors argue ‘We are reminded of the importance of . . . how we understand the larger narratives in which we live. Inspired by Arendt’s use of a table metaphor in her writing on dialogue and social equity, they portray narrative inquiry as a means of ‘shaping the world together, at a table where we are, at once, both engaged in the personal, the social, the political and the spaces between’ (p. 219).
Published soon after the crisis years of COVID-19, the book closes with a quote by Arundhati Roy, depicting the pandemic as portal, a gateway, an opportunity to live otherwise. Cain, Clandinin and Lessard align her words with narrative inquiry’s temporality of being in the midst and its potential to re-imagine.
