Abstract
What is narrative and how does it represent ‘reality’? Indeed what is reality, and is it even possible for narrative voices to portray it? In this chapter, we reconfigure narrative through a post-qualitative methodological and philosophical lens. Against a backdrop of the usefulness of recent shifts in narrative, to elevate social justice, rights and ethical concerns, we argue here for more radical shifts. Questioning the nature and knowability of reality, we use contemporary implications of worldly reality/ies (through Latour) and of subject formations, foreignness and the ethics of thought (through Kristeva) to substantiate our analysis, and to complicate the human-centredness of conventional narrative methodologies. Building on recent concerns with conceptions of voice in narrative as inquiry and possible post-inquiry, this chapter de- and re-entangles the human, blurring the lines between the multiple relationships within which realities are formed, known and not known. Our repositioning of narrative de-reifies but does not remove the concern with human voice as a methodological source of data and knowledge. The chapter proposes a reimagining of narrative as methodological dreaming/s that allow and make space for multiple, diverse, knowable and unknowable potentialities.
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Arndt, S., Tesar, M. (2019). Reconfiguring Narrative Methodologies: Thresholds of Realities in Post-qualitative Methodologies. In: Farquhar, S., Fitzpatrick, E. (eds) Innovations in Narrative and Metaphor. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6114-2_9
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