Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Effective Family Communication And Job Loss: Crafting The Narrative For Family Crisis, Lynn Turner

Lynn H. Turner

No abstract provided.

Narrative Analysis Of Sexual Etiquette In Teenage Magazines, Ana Garner, Helen Sterk, Shawn Adams

Ana Garner

Expanding on existing research on women's magazines, this essay examines the sexual etiquette developed in advice columns in magazines popular among teenage women. Over a span of 20 years, the advice has changed very little. Serving the rhetorical function of field guides and training manuals, teen magazines limit women's sociality and sexuality within narrowly defined heterosexual norms and practices. The rhetoric of sexual etiquette encourages young women to be sex objects and teachers of interpersonal communication rather than lovers, friends, and partners. Young women are being taught to subordinate self for others and to be contained.

People Don't Want To Call It Your Baby: Stigma And Identity In Misscarriage Narratives, Jennifer Fairchild, Arrington M.

Jennifer Fairchild Ph.D.

No abstract provided.

Studying Prenatal Loss From The Inside And The Outside: The Stories We Create Through Shared Lived Experiences, Jennifer Fairchild, Michael Arrington

Jennifer Fairchild Ph.D.

No abstract provided.

Aftershocks: Sense And Nonsense Making In A Disorganized Narrative, Donna Henson

Donna Henson

A disorganized narrative in both form and content, this article presents the storying and restorying of distant witness experience in the wake of recent natural disaster. A layered, fractured text; the writing blurs the lines between sense and nonsense making, self and other. Presenting the notion of verbal rumination as a theoretical method: This repetitive, ruminative narrative plays with the warm fuzzy and sometimes cold and prickly consequences of interpersonal storying. The resultant piece reflects a psychography of sorts, and seeks to make sense of the nonsensical, to organize the disorganized, to reconcile the irreconcilable. As with all natural disasters, …

Terms Of Perfection, Art Bochner

Art Bochner

In this essay, I attempt to think with the story Michael Hyde tells in Perfection: Coming to Terms with Being Human. Viewing the drive for perfection from the perspective of narrative, I focus on the question of how the language game of perfection might lead in the direction of other ways of understanding ourselves, our writing practices, and the unity of our lives. I question the appropriateness of conventions of rhetorical scholarship that inhibit communication scholars from enacting more personal expressions of rhetorical competence, which could give greater urgency to burning issues at the heart of what it can mean …

Re(De)Fining Narrative Events: Examining Television Narrative Structure, M. J. Porter, D. L. Larson, Allison Harthcock, K. B. Nellis

Allison Harthcock

The authors introduce a new analytical instrument, the Scene Function Model, as an expansion of Seymour Chatman's theoretical classification of story events into kernels and satellites. The Scene Function Model is designed to examine the narrative function of television scenes and provide the user with a clearer understanding of the structure of the television narrative.

Feeling At Home: Law, Cognitive Science, And Narrative, Lea B. Vaughn

Lea B Vaughn

What is the “how and why” of law’s affinity for narrative? In order to explain why the use of stories is such an effective teaching and presentation strategy in the law, this paper will consider theories and accounts from cognitive as well as evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and, briefly, cultural anthropology. This account seeks to address “how” narrative helps us learn and use the law as well as “why” we are so compelled to use stories in teaching and in practice.

Brain science, simplified here, suggests that the first task is to “grab” someone’s attention. Emotionally charged events are more likely …

Making My Narrative Mine: Unconventional Articulations Of A Female Soldier, Manda Hicks

Manda V. Hicks

I use fragments from my own military service to build a narrative of the self and weave this perspective together with the experiences of other female soldiers in prose poetry. This text addresses the complexity of the interview process and demonstrates that a full articulation of experience may include unconventional moments of sense making. These unconventional articulations generally lack a beginning, middle, and end, resist attempts at simple summary, and often elevate the narrative to an abstract level. I argue that articulations of experience are potentially contrary and intraoppositional and that they should be free of any impositions of order …

The Need For Rapport In Police Interviews, Roger Collins, Robyn Lincoln, Mark Frank

Robyn Lincoln

Police interviews try to obtain a narrative of what was observed by witnesses, victims or suspects. Yet there is considerable debate about the most appropriate interview style, the best strategies to use, and the characteristics of interviewers or interviewees that yield the most useful information. Police interviews are integral to criminal investigations where accuracy and completeness are essential if a case is to be solved. They also have evidential ramifications that affect subsequent forensic and trial processes (Fisher et al, 1994; Py et al, 1997; McMahon, 2000; Gudjonsson, 1992). In addition to the formal interview setting, police engage in “purposive …

Warm Ideas And Chilling Consequences, Art Bochner

Art Bochner

In the process of writing my academic memoirs spanning a period of more than thirty-five years, I discovered how crucial the work of Gregory Bateson had been to my life as a teacher, a scholar, and a relational partner. In this paper I celebrate Bateson’s charming and incisive ideas about how communication works, his deep reservations about the worship of quantification, and his astute analysis of what is at stake when we make epistemological errors in everyday life. Reviewing a turning point in my academic life—a conference held in 1979, I reaffirm the importance of warm ideas and provide a …

What Might Have Been: The Communication Of Social Support And Women's Post-Miscarriage Narrative Reconstruction, Jennifer Fairchild

Jennifer Fairchild Ph.D.

This dissertation explores the ways in which miscarriage survivors construct their stories of pregnancy and the subsequent miscarriage. Although some research has examined illness narratives, women's miscarriage narratives have not received enough attention. An examination of miscarriage narratives is warranted because miscarriage has significant physical and psychosocial implications-effects that are often related to stigma and threats to individual identity. Narrative can be utilized to cope with the stigma of miscarriage, challenges to the woman's identity after a miscarriage, and altered relationships after the fact. Researchers have devoted considerable energy to considering the ways that serious illness alters people and necessitates …

Excerpt From Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy And Power In American Culture (Revised And Updated Edition), Mark Fenster

Mark Fenster

This is the introduction to the revised and updated edition of Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2008). The book challenges the dominant academic and popular approach to conspiracy theories, which views them as a paranoid, extremist expression of marginal groups and individuals that pathologically challenges the basic assumptions of American history and the pluralistic political system of the United States. The book is premised on the contrary proposition that the prevalence of conspiracy theories is neither necessarily pernicious nor external to American politics and culture but instead an integral aspect of …

Love Survives, Art Bochner

Art Bochner

No abstract provided.

Narrative's Virtues, Art Bochner

Art Bochner

Reacting to the charge that personal narratives, especially illness narratives, constitute a “blind alley” that misconstrues the essential nature of narrative by substituting a therapeutic for a sociological view of the person, this article speaks back to critics who regard narratives of suffering as privileged, romantic, and/or hyperauthentic. The author argues that this critique of personal narrative rests on an idealized and discredited theory of inquiry, a monolithic conception of ethnographic inquiry, a distinctly masculine characterization of sociology, and a veiled resistance to the moral, political, existential, and therapeutic goals of this work. Layering his responses to the critique with …

Criteria Against Ourselves, Art Bochner

Art Bochner

In the social sciences, we usually think of criteria as culture-free standards that stand apart from human subjectivity and value. The author argues in this article, however, that conflicts over which criteria to apply usually boil down to differences in values that are contingent on human choices. The demand for criteria reflects the desire to contain freedom, limit possibilities, and resist change. Ultimately, all standards of evaluation rest on a research community’s agreement to comply with theirownhumanly developed conventions. The author ends by considering the personal standards that he applies to works that fall under the new rubric of poetic …

It's About Time: Narrative And The Divided Self, Art Bochner

Art Bochner

When I learned that my father had died while I was attending a national communication conference, two worlds within me - the academic and the personal - collided, and I was forced to confront the large gulf that divided them. In this article, I weave the story of that experience into the wider fabric of disconnections that promotes isolation and inhibits risk taking and change within universities and academic disciplines. In the process, I question whether the structures of power constitutive of academic socialization are not as difficult to resist as those of one's family, and the consequences as constraining. …

'He Says ... So I Said': Verb Tense Alternation And Narrative Depictions Of Authority In American English, Barbara Johnstone

Barbara Johnstone

No abstract provided.