Entangled Narratives

As people are living longer on average than ever before, the number of those with dementia will increase. Because many will live a considerable time at home with their diagnosis, we need to know more about the ways people can adapt to and learn to live with dementia in their everyday lives. Lars-Christer Hydén argues in this book that to do so will involve re-imagining what dementia really is and what it can mean to the afflicted and their loved ones. One of the most important everyday opportunities for sharing experiences is the simple act of storytelling. But when someone close to you gradually loses the ability to tell stories and cherish the shared history you have together, this is seen as a threat to the relationship, to the feeling of belonging together, and to the identity of the person diagnosed. Therefore, learning about how people with dementia can participate in storytelling along with their families and friends helps to sustain those relationships and identities. In Entangled Narratives, Hydén not only emphasizes the possibilities that are inherent in collaborative storytelling, but instructs professionals and otherwise healthy relatives to learn how to effectively listen and, ultimately, re-imagine their patients and loved ones as collaborative meaning-makers in their lives.

This book argues that there is a complex logical and epistemological interplay between the concepts of metaphor, narrative, and emotions. They share a number of important similarities and connections. In the first place, all three are constituted by aspect-seeing, the seeing-as or perception of Gestalts. Secondly, all three are meaning-endowing devices, helping us to furnish our world with meaning. Thirdly, the threesome constitutes a trinity. Emotions have both a narrative and metaphoric structure, and we can analyse the concepts of metaphors and narratives partly in each other’s terms. Further, the concept of narratives can partly be analysed in the terms of emotions. And if emotions have both a narrative structure and a metaphoric one, then the concept of emotions must to some extent be analysable through the concepts of narratives and metaphors. But there is more. Metaphors (especially poetic ones) are important tools for the understanding of the tacit sides of emotions, perhaps because of the metaphoric structure of emotions. The notion that narrations can be tools for understanding emotions follows from two facts: narrations are devices for explanation and emotions have a narrative structure. Fourthly, the threesome has an impact on our rationality. It has become commonplace to say that emotions have a cognitive content, that narratives have an explanatory function, and that metaphors can perform cognitive functions. This book is the first attempt to articulate the implications that these new ways of seeing the three concepts entail for our concept of reason. The cognitive roles of the threesome suggest a richer notion of rationality than has traditionally been held, a rationality enlivened with metaphoric, narrative, and emotive qualities.

Using storytelling and performance to explore shared religious expression across continents Through a revolutionary ethnographic approach that foregrounds storytelling and performance as alternative means of knowledge, Situated Narratives and Sacred Dance explores shared ritual traditions between the Anlo-Ewe people of West Africa and their descendants, the Arará of Cuba, who were brought to the island in the transatlantic slave trade. The volume draws on two decades of research in four communities: Dzodze, Ghana; Adjodogou, Togo; and Perico and Agramonte, Cuba. In the ceremonies, oral narratives, and daily lives of individuals at each fieldsite, the authors not only identify shared attributes in religious expression across continents, but also reveal lasting emotional, spiritual, and personal impacts in the communities whose ancestors were ripped from their homeland and enslaved. The authors layer historiographic data, interviews, and fieldnotes with artistic modes such as true fiction, memoir, and choreographed narrative, challenging the conventional nature of scholarship with insights gained from sensorial experience. Including reflections on the making of an art installation based on this research project, the volume challenges readers to imagine the potential of approaching fieldwork as artists. The authors argue that creative methods can convey truths deeper than facts, pointing to new possibilities for collaboration between scientists and artists with relevance to any discipline. Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Comprehensive overview of illness narratives in practice, divided into eight distinct parts. The clear layout allows the readers to focus on the area essential to them and get a comprehensive overview and reflective stance of narratives in that field.

This book takes television news seriously. Over the course of nine chapters, Elections and TV News in South Africa shows how six democratic South African general elections, 1994–2019, were represented on both local and international news broadcasts. It reveals the shifting narratives about South African democracy, coupled with changing and challenging political journalism practices. The book is organised in three parts: the first contains a history of South African democracy and an overview of the South African media environment. The second part is a visual analysis of the South African elections on television news, exploring portrayals of violence, security, power, and populism, and how these fit into normative news values and the ruling party’s tightening grip on the media. The final part is a conclusion, a call to action, and a suggestion to improve political journalistic practice.

Reconsidering Dementia Narratives explores the role of narrative in developing new ways of understanding, interacting with, and caring for people with dementia. It asks how the stories we tell about dementia – in fiction, life writing and film – both reflect and shape the way we think about this important condition. Highlighting the need to attend to embodied and relational aspects of identity in dementia, the study further outlines ways in which narratives may contribute to dementia care, while disputing the idea that the modes of empathy fostered by narrative necessarily bring about more humane care practices. This cross-medial analysis represents an interdisciplinary approach to dementia narratives which range across auto/biography, graphic narrative, novel, film, documentary and collaborative storytelling practices. The book aims to clarify the limits and affordances of narrative, and narrative studies, in relation to an ethically driven medical humanities agenda through the use of case studies. Answering the key question of whether dementia narratives align with or run counter to the dominant discourse of dementia as ‘loss of self’, this innovative book will be of interest to anyone interested in dementia studies, ageing studies, narrative studies in health care, and critical medical humanities.

This book investigates how being diagnosed with various disabilities impacts on identity. Once diagnosed with a disability, there is a risk that this label can become the primary status both for the person diagnosed as well as for their family. This reification of the diagnosis can be oppressive because it subjugates humanity in such a way that everything a person does can be interpreted as linked to their disability. Drawing on narrative approaches to identity in psychology and social sciences, the bio-psycho-social model and a holistic approach to disabilities, the chapters in this book understand disability as constructed in discourse, as negotiated among speaking subjects in social contexts, and as emergent. By doing so, they amplify voices that may have otherwise remained silent and use storytelling as a way of communicating the participants' realities to provide a more in-depth understanding of their point of view. This book will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, sociology, medical humanities, disability research methods, narrative theory, and rehabilitation studies.

Against the backdrop of the polarized debate on the ethical significance of storytelling, Hanna Meretoja's The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible develops a nuanced framework for exploring the ethical complexity of the roles narratives play in our lives. Focusing on how narratives enlarge and diminish the spaces of possibilities in which we act, think, and re-imagine the world together with others, this book proposes a theoretical-analytical framework for engaging with both the ethical potential and risks of storytelling. Further, it elaborates a narrative hermeneutics that treats narratives as culturally mediated practices of (re)interpreting experiences and articulates how narratives can be oppressive, empowering, or both. It also argues that the relationship between narrative unconscious and narrative imagination shapes our sense of the possible. In her book, Meretoja develops a hermeneutic narrative ethics that differentiates between six dimensions of the ethical potential of storytelling: the power of narratives to cultivate our sense of the possible; to contribute to individual and cultural self-understanding; to enable understanding other lives non-subsumptively in their singularity; to transform the narrative in-betweens that bind people together; to develop our perspective-awareness and capacity for perspective-taking; and to function as a form of ethical inquiry. This book addresses our implication in violent histories and argues that it is as dialogic storytellers, fundamentally vulnerable and dependent on one another, that we become who we are: both as individuals and communities. The Ethics of Storytelling seamlessly incorporates narrative ethics, literary narrative studies, narrative psychology, narrative philosophy, and cultural memory studies. It contributes to contemporary interdisciplinary narrative studies by developing narrative hermeneutics as a philosophically rigorous, historically sensitive, and analytically subtle approach to the ethical stakes of the debate on the narrative dimension of human existence.