Program

Location | Université Paris Cité: Salle 679C Grands Moulins

Facilitators | Amia Lieblich, Ruthellen Josselson

Location |  Université Paris Cité: Salle 682C Grands Moulins

Facilitator |  Amy Shuman

Location | Université Paris Cité: Salle 682C Grands Moulins

Facilitator | Waddick Doyle

Location | Université Paris Cité: Salle 681C Grands Moulins

Facilitator | William Hirst

Location | AUP: Q-A101
Session Chair | Magdalena Dziaczkowska, Lund University

Voices of/from History: Cultural Memory in Literary and Autobiographical Narratives

Prof. Fiona Joy Doloughan The Open University

For historiographer Hayden White, history and modern literature are complementary insofar as they draw on narrativization as a mode of writing. What White (2006, p. 32) refers to as “literary writing” can be fictional or non-fictional. And according to Erll and Nünning (2010, p. 13), “literature […] can be viewed as one medium of cultural memory” with language “as a basic medium of memory” (p. 13). In this paper, I wish to consider two literary works: one Maja Haderlap’s 2021 Engel des Vergessens, first published in 2011 and translated from the German in 2016 by Tess Lewis as Angel of Oblivion, categorized as a novel (ein Roman); the other Kapka Kassabova’s 2020 [2008] Street Without a Name (revised edition) categorized as memoir/travel writing. Both books, in different ways and to differing extents, treat aspects of a (contested) historical past, whether that be the aftermath of the Hitlerzeit (the Hitler era) in relation to Austria and specifically the partisan war of resistance in Carinthia, or the impact of Communist rule in Bulgaria from the perspective of one family’s history and the book’s engagement with the “relationship between personal memory and communal history” (Duppé 2010, p. 423). The focus of my interest will be twofold: the ways in which familial as well as personal experience is mediated and transmitted in literary and autobiographical narratives and the extent to which the chosen genre foregrounds “a kind of political awareness that grows out of personal experience” (Wintersteiner 2019, p. 394) and reflection, set against or in relation to the discontinuous voices of and from history.

Narrative Aftermaths: Translations and Transmigrations of Post-Holocaust Polish Jewish Memorial Books

Prof. Eliyana R. Adler Binghamton University

Following the Second World War, Jewish survivors and refugees living around the world created collaborative memorial books (yizker-bikher) dedicated to the destroyed Jewish communities of their hometowns. These grassroots commemorative projects contain stories, testimonies, documents, drawings, poems, maps, songs, and other materials related to individual communities. Produced mainly in Hebrew and Yiddish, the volumes were rich with meaning and import for the generation that produced them. On the whole, their children did not place great value on these patchwork books about distant locations. However, in recent decades, new audiences have arisen for the yizker-bikher. This paper will explore what happens when new generations of readers, with their own distinct agendas, rediscover a post-genocidal narrative genre with initially narrow and specific goals. While the original books were written for an internal audience, the new readers come with different knowledge and different questions. Jewish genealogists were the first group to find the memorial books. In crowd-sourced forums, they have initiated translation projects to make the texts available for family-related research in English. Subsequently, as a result of the online English excerpts, non-Jewish Poles with an interest in local history have discovered these unique sources about their places of residence, thus bringing the yizker-bikher back home, in a sense. Over the past two years, I have conducted interviews with Jews who are involved in translating and using the memorial books from the towns their ancestors came from. At the same time, I also traveled around Poland, speaking with a variety of memory activists about their use of yizker-bikher to learn and teach about a forgotten multicultural past. For the Narrative Matters conference, I would like to share my findings about narrative responses to crisis and conflict and their evolving interpretations and meanings.

You Must Not Pronounce the Names: ’Testifying in Secret at a War Crimes Tribunal'

Prof. Timothy William Waters Indiana University

Courts render judgments – authoritative narratives with real-world consequences. War crimes courts do this too, with the additional goal of promoting reconciliation through a shared factual accounting that ‘shrinks space for denial.’ Public, transparent process is important to ensure that international justice is fair, perceived as fair, and effective. Yet one of the critical devices these courts deploy – to ensure trials can be held effectively – is secrecy. Classified documents, closed sessions, protected witnesses permeate the work of war crimes courts. Secrecy makes the work of these courts possible but is in tension with those broader goals: Intransparent narratives are less trustworthy, ceding space to the speculative, and feeding the conspiratorial. Imperatives of secrecy also affect the quotidian process of trial. Layers of abstraction and uncertainty accrete – it’s confusing and frustrating even to the participants. Interruptions are frequent, hearings delayed by the transitions between open and closed sessions, while lawyers debate which questions to ask in public or in private. Individual words and whole pages get redacted, producing often indecipherable texts. The result seriously challenges the idea that courts are transparent, or that their narratives can be scrutinized by the broader public. Yet without these protections there would be no narrative at all; secrecy constitutes the fabric of real trial practice and its reception. The paper describes the theoretical and practical framework in which secrecy operates in war crimes trials, applying that framework to a particular instance of testimony, to show how secrecy plays out in a typical day, in a typical trial: It is the 21st of February 2011 in The Hague. Germain Katanga is on trial at the International Criminal Court, and at 2:22pm, a woman known only as V19‐P‐0002 enters the courtroom and begins to testify.

Evolving Narratives of Genocide Memorialization and Memory within Rwanda

Dr. Stephanie Wolfe Weber State University

This paper explores how memorials have evolved in their narratives following the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, with a particular focus on how memorialization practices have shifted over time. In the years immediately following the genocide, many memorials were created by survivors themselves, serving as intimate spaces of mourning and personal remembrance. These grassroots efforts reflected individual experiences of loss and trauma, creating disparate memorial worlds deeply connected to local communities. However, with the establishment of the Kigali Genocide Memorial, a significant shift occurred in the way memorials were conceptualized and understood in Rwanda. The Kigali Memorial introduced a more centralized, national narrative of the genocide, emphasizing reconciliation, unity, and the country’s recovery. This institutional approach began to influence the form and purpose of other memorials, reshaping what it meant to memorialize the genocide on both local and national levels. By examining survivor testimonies and the development of memorials over time, this paper places a spotlight on the tension between personal and collective memory. It demonstrates how individual narratives have both been shaped by and have contributed to the evolving landscape of remembrance. Survivors’ stories, once centered on private grief, have gradually aligned with broader national themes of healing and reconciliation, but they continue to carry unique, personal dimensions that enrich the collective memory. This paper aligns with the conference theme by examining how narratives of trauma and memory shift over time, creating new spaces for understanding and solidarity. It demonstrates the power of memorials not only to reflect disparate worlds of memory but also to bridge them, offering hope for a shared future.

Location | AUP: C-104
Session Chair | Gabriela Spector-Mersel, Sapir College

Resilience is a central psychological concept referring to coping and adaptation to stressful life events. The concept has gained increased attention in Gerontology, with the paradigm shift from emphasizing decrements and losses of aging to examining older adults` strengths and "successful aging." Indeed, given the losses and stresses that often accompany the aging process, resilience is recognized as a key research topic whose insights can facilitate the development of intervention strategies to improve older adults` well-being. Within the extensive scholarship on later life resilience, relatively little research has examined it from the perspectives of older people themselves. Narrative Gerontology has offered a fruitful direction to fill this void, through the concept of narrative resilience. This notion captures older persons` resilience from "within," as manifested in their self-stories. Despite its promising potential, narrative resilience in later life has been chiefly discussed theoretically. Furthermore, a significant part of its limited empirical examination employs narratives as windows to participants` resilience. Perceiving resilience as a phenomenon separated from its narration divorces from the tenets of the narrative paradigm. Acknowledging the merits of studying older persons` narrative resilience and the limitation of the current scholarship, this panel will elucidate some theoretical premises of the concept and present two studies demonstrating its value in delving into the strengths of older adults in vulnerable situations.

From Tragedy to Adventure: Fostering Narrative Resilience in Later Life

Prof. William Randall St. Thomas University

A central tenet of narrative studies, it may be said, is that how we live our lives is tied to how we story our lives. This can be especially the case in later life, when the dominant storyline about aging is often a “narrative of decline” (Gullette, 2004). Aging is experienced deep down, that is, in largely tragic terms: as a downward slide toward decrepitude and death. For many older adults, this is a recipe for narrative foreclosure (Bohlemeijer et al, 2011; Freeman, 2010). As a narrative gerontologist, I’ve been exploring a more positive narrative than that of decline, one which takes in aging’s tragic dimensions but is not defined by them. It is a narrative of ageing as discovery and of adventure, in a range of directions: outward, backward, inward, and forward. As we allow it to claim our imagination, this way of storying later life (Kenyon, Bohlmeijer, & Randall, 2011) can be a recipe for narrative resilience in the face of the challenges and losses later life brings.

Narrative Resilience Among Holocaust Survivors Who Immigrated from the Former Soviet Union to Israel and Lived Alone During COVID-19

Prof. Gabriela Spector-Mersel Sapir College

Prof. Natalia Khvorostyanov Ben Gurion University of the Negev

Dr. Evgeny Knaifel Ashkelon College

Holocaust survivors who immigrated from the former Soviet Union (FSU) to Israel and live alone are exposed to a triple vulnerability, arising from childhood in the shadow of WWII, immigration at an advanced age, and living alone in later life. This vulnerability was intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, which posed unique difficulties to both older people and immigrants. Given the intersection of risks characterizing this group on the one hand and the limited external resources available to them on the other, this study aimed to understand the psychological mechanisms that enable them to cope with the multiple challenges. Premising that resilience is intimately tied to people's life stories, we examined how these individuals recount their long-life exposure to traumatic events. 12 Holocaust survivors who immigrated from FSU and lived alone during COVID-19 were invited to recount their lives freely. The stories were analyzed holistically using the narrative selection mechanisms model (Spector-Mersel, 2011, 2014). The participants recounted their lives as a series of challenges they successfully faced through self-reliance, activity, courage, rational acceptance of reality, flexibility, and insistence on independence. This end-point crossed all the stories, forming the template for their five chapters: childhood in the shadow of war, growing up in FSU, immigration, aging, and COVID-19. The findings support "the immune hypothesis" that emphasizes older people`s resilience due to cumulative coping with stressful life events. However, since stories are always told in retrospect, the participants` resilience seems, first and foremost, the result of an active meaning-making endeavor made in the present. Including life in COVID-19 within a holistic sequence of successful lifelong coping is a narrative strategy that empowers the participants, allowing them to draw hope and confidence that they will face the current challenge, as they did – in their stories – with past challenges.

Location | AUP: C-102
Session Chair | Maria I Medved, The American University of Paris

Discussing illness narratives from various everyday and literary contexts, this symposium is concerned with the narratability of human experiences in conditions of sickness and dying. The three presentations explore different ways in which narrative gives shape to the experience of illness and dying. At the same time, they ask how experiences of illness and dying in being told can – or cannot – give rise to meaning. A central theme across the talks is how health conditions (including the conditions of a person who is terminally ill) intermingle with important aspects of persons’ lives and life narratives. This raises the question as to what degree illness narratives are “only” about sickness and thus are independent genres. Can people be existentially concerned with illness without being concerned with other aspects of their lives? Or do all aspects of a life turn into aspects of being sick and dying? The talks will point out that illness narratives are typically stories told to and attuned to others – family, friends, healthcare providers, fellow patients. They are stories that carry out acts of self-reflection and self-definition (and not only acts of illness-reflection): stories of agency that realize gestures of sympathy, solidarity, and resistance. Drawing on empirical everyday and literary illness stories (by Hilary Mantel, Kathleen Watt, and Anne Carson), the panel examines the language of first-person memoirs of chronic illness and facial cancer to shed light on the disparate narrative worlds of sickness and death.

Not an Empty Vessel. Hilary Mantel’s Narratives of Chronic Pain

Prof. Alessandra Fasulo University of Portsmouth

Hilary Mantel (1952-2022) the renowned British novelist, wrote a memoir (Giving Up the Hosts, 2003) and several autobiographical pieces around her lifelong suffering with three painful conditions: migraine, gout and endometriosis. Drawing mainly on her piece “How much pain is too much pain?” (IASP Insight, 2013), I will discuss two related themes, and how they illuminate the centrality of time as an agent in chronic pain narratives. First, I will discuss how the ability to communication about symptoms is narrated as co-constituted with norms around healthcare engagement, gendered practices and the different cultural currents crossing in the female body at any point in time. Secondly, I will analyse how the author narrates her misunderstandings with healthcare professionals and social relations. The “empty vessel” of the title refers to the expectation that pain travels through a person's body without leaving trace, as a self-contained temporary intruder; Mantel illustrates instead the intricate ways in which a condition interacts with all aspects of a person’s life, not just affecting them but also responding to them, and playing a part in their emotions and thoughts. Overall, my reflections draw on those narrative segments to highlight different dimensions of time: the historical-cultural landscapes that shape responses to pain, and the sufferers’ learning of how a condition moves with their life rhythms and the life arc. The latter learning is depicted as a turning point in pain management and acceptance, but also something that takes in itself time and resources to acquire and is hard to share. Mantel, who was herself in debt to other writers for insights into her conditions, takes her own expert pen to those matters in an attempt, it seems, to help with the narratability of pain-in-time.

Narratives of Illness: Or Are They Really?

Prof. Maria Medved The American University of Paris

What is an illness story in contrast to a health or wellness story, or even a life story? This is question I have been pondering in my research. As Sontag (1978) so poignantly observed, we all hold citizenships in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick and eventually we are all obliged to identify with the “night side” of life. In my talk, I argue from the position of researcher and clinician that the borders between these realms are fuzzy – and this is especially the case when narrative meaning- and sense-making inevitably becomes involved. To make this argument, I draw on first-person narratives from the memoir Rearranged: An Opera Singer’s Facial Cancer and Life Transposed by Kathleen Watt (2023). One interleaved thread throughout the book is her insistence of reclaiming the life story that had been taken by her cancer and its treatments. One way she does this is by rendering her experiences, via narrative, the subjects of her gaze. Her story is all but limited to her illness narratives, which alone bring along certain constraining narrative arcs and expectations. Watt’s book can be read as act of resistance against embodying, and representing, solely an illness story. In other words, her illness memoir asks, using various strategies of narrative agency towards her own life stories, that the reader attune to her life and its experience rather than to her sickness.

I conclude by observing that clear genre distinctions between sickness and health almost never work when dealing with subjects that are as complex as narrative, illness and life.

Between Experience and Narrative: The Language of Dying

Prof. Jens Brockmeier The American University of Paris

The relationship between experience and narrative has been a topic of discussion both within narratological, literary, and philosophical traditions, and within social and cultural narrative studies. One issue often addressed revolves around the question whether narrative names, reports, and represents human experience, or whether it shapes and structures it; in fact, there are some experiences where it has been claimed that language itself creates them. Vis-à-vis this question, the experience of dying is an insightful case because, on closer analysis, it is amazingly diverse – as is the language that is used to talk about it. Intimately merged with cultural (including religious) traditions, individual attitudes, and personal idiosyncrasies of meaning-making, this terrain of the human condition is more variable and multilayered than is often presumed, particularly when the existential dimension of dying is reduced to a biological and biomedical process. Recent developments such as narrative medicine and narrative hermeneutics have shed new light on the many diverse worlds in which we experience and speak about illness and dying. Against this backdrop, I will look at some narrative examples from every day and literary contexts to get a better sense of the language in which we talk about, and give meaning to, the experience of dying.

Location | AUP: C-101
Session Chair | Philip Golub, The American University of Paris

Exploring Post 9/11 Revisions in Narrative Form: A Study of Slimane Benaissa's The Last Night of a Damned Soul (2003)

Mohamed Amine Khoudi Mouloud Mammeri University of Tizi Ouzou

My presentation explores the genre of the terrorist novel and its revisions in The Last Night of a Damned Soul (2003), by the Algerian writer Slimane Benaissa. The terrorist novel is an old genre, which has kept renewing itself in the last two decades after the catastrophic events of 9/11 to cope with the complex and global threat of terror, which plagues the contemporary world. Benaissa exploits its capacity for transformation in order to dramatize the mindset of the main character, Raouf, and represent the latter’s transformations into a radical, terrorist figure. Benaissa’s complex representation of character prompts the following questions: in what ways does his novel re-examine the “terrorist novel” and transgress its conventions? Why does his narrative focus on the terrorist mindset instead of the trauma of 9/11 as most post-9/11 novels do? Why does Raouf ultimately renounce to perform the attack? Given Benaissa’s transnational context, the answers to those questions will open new perspectives to the “terrorist novel” and its relationship to the literature of catastrophe.

Conspiracies of Maintenance: How Science Fiction Reflects Climate Change’s Disparate Narrative Worlds

Orin Posner Tel Aviv University

Science fiction (SF), as a literary genre of strange worlds, is well-suited to reflect our era of climate crisis and political polarization. This paper examines how two postapocalyptic SF novels—Christopher Priest’s Inverted World (1974) and Karin Tidbeck’s Amatka (2017)—literalize the power of language in worldmaking and underscore the problematics of disparate narratives and conspiracies, particularly in addressing environmental concerns. In Inverted World a city is moved on train tracks to avoid perceived environmental dangers, and this spatial maintenance is ingrained in the city’s language: “I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles” (Priest 4). In Amatka a colony’s existence depends on constant linguistic reinforcement of reality: all objects are made of a natural alien material and lose their shape if not continuously named in speech or writing. These anxious yet consistent practices suggest that addressing environmental concerns requires physical action as well as an epistemological shift: recognizing humanity’s role not as users of nature but as its maintainers or custodians. However, each novel also centers an ontological investigation interrogating why, if at all, the fictional world’s spatial and linguistic maintenance is necessary. In both novels, the protagonists’ investigations lead to ambiguous outcomes, exposing the limitations of their societies’ maintenance strategies but also failing to offer better solutions. This ambiguity reflects real-world tensions between maintaining current systems and radically reimagining our relationship with the environment. The characters’ actions also mirror our own efforts, as scholars or activists, to create and analyze climate change narratives. Just as the characters engage in Sisyphean maintenance tasks or question this work, we continually produce knowledge about climate change or challenge existing narratives, often without clear environmental improvements. By highlighting these parallels, this paper shows how SF undermines real-world narratives of resilience and hope in the face of the climate crisis.

"Everywhere, in these Occasions, Danger Grows": Conspiracism and the Foundations of Empire

Dr. Christian David Alvarado University of California, Davis

In recent years, the notion that the 21st century is witness to an unprecedented boom in conspiracism has produced a burgeoning body of academic work, journalism, and polemics about the nefarious effects of social media. On the one hand, the expansion of access to the internet has indeed produced a narrative landscape without parallel in human history. However, the novel ways that conspiracism intrudes into social life can only ever be credited with the surfacing of latent narratological tendencies, patterns of thought, and worldviews which condition the horizon of possibilities for conspiracist discourse. Ours is not a world in which conspiracy theorists are generated out of “normal” individuals being exposed to “disinformation,” but one already populated with people harboring (sometimes) dormant biases, metanarratives, and tropological imaginations that generate understanding. If the internet is a novel element shaping the trajectories of conspiracism in our time, these processes are not. By reading across historical and present-day manifestations of conspiracist tropes, this paper argues for a more expansive form of inquiry regarding the history of conspiracism. It does so by situating it as a narratological force during the centuries of formal Western imperialism—as well as the postcolonial legacies this has fostered. This is premised on what I see as a calcified relationship between the entangled logics of empire and conspiracism, anchored in the relations of distrust that emerge in the social and political contexts they (re)produce. The iterations of conspiracism we see both in the West and in parts of the world it once ruled (across empires, national boundaries, and political traditions) is an instantiation of a more general problem faced in the realm of biopolitics; namely, the management of populations out of place—against Order—that confuse imperial taxonomies and the coherence of identity formation under conditions of (post)colonialism.

Location | AUP: Q-801
Session Chair | Brian Schiff, The American University of Paris

My Brother's Keeper: Narratives of Rescue and Moral Compromise

Prof. Andreea Deciu Ritivoi Carnegie Mellon University

In this essay, I discuss how narrative helps us cope with the frailty of human affairs by discussing one of the biggest dramas of our times: the death of migrants to who flee their countries in the hope of finding a better life somewhere else. I use the story presented in Wolfgang Fisher’s 2018 film Styx, which depicts the encounter between a German female emergency physician, Rike, embarked on a solo voyage to the Ascension Island, and a ship with African migrants. Tracing how the story reflects Rike’s gradual transformation and awakening to the suffering of people radically different from her, I discuss the emotional function of narrative as a way to “attest our elective harmonies or disharmonies with realities whose affective image we carry in ourselves in the form of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (Ricoeur 1986, 88). Through her affective orientation to the refugees on the ship, Rike changes from an impersonal, duty-bound rescuer to a compassionate and understanding helper. Albeit reluctantly, Rike grows increasingly worried about the people on the ship, who are seemingly beyond her reach, and not just the boy she can help. In the end she decides to try to help all of them, and boards the ship, where she can see the tragedy of their suffering and dehumanization and becomes herself overwhelmed by the amount of pain she witnesses in others. While this film is quite effective at showing the tragedy of migrants, it also glorifies the Western rescuer. Drawing on Ricoeur’s concept of the Good Samaritan, in conjunction with his reflection on fragility, I ask: what moral compromises do heroic narratives of rescue demand of their audiences, and how can we best acknowledge and resist them?

Restorative Narratives

Prof. Silvia Pierosara University of Macerata

In this contribution I intend to present an interdisciplinary project aimed at investigating the restorative power of narratives. The project has been funded and has a duration of two years. Narrative practices are usually associated with a bonding power. By virtue of its compositional and ordering capacity, narrative retraces the lived experience in search of its meaning and connects dimensions that would otherwise be distant. In personal and communal life, tears, unnecessary suffering, defective experiences in general - in a word, evil - demand to be told and confusedly search for an 'impossible' meaning. The search for continuity, integrity and coherence motivate the use of narrative as a construct capable of giving meaning to the whole by linking together different parts that are seemingly unconnected. Inherent to narration is the possibility of always weaving new textures. The basic, trans-cultural, quasi-universal construct of narration must be investigated according to the various fields in which it is practised, precisely with respect to its reassuring, exonerating, restorative capacity, while evaluating its resources and limits. If storytelling is like sewing, are there fabrics that are so torn, or characterised by such a fragile structure, that they are impossible to be sewn back together? In human experience, are there such a disparate before and after, that they cannot be welded together? Or, conversely, is it enough to reconcile with oneself, between communities, between seemingly irreconcilable histories? Is it always right to reconcile and repair? Is it always morally good to re-integrate? The value assumptions implicit in narrative constructs need to be tested, evaluated and studied through an interdisciplinary approach, in which the different personal and social contexts of emergence and practice of narratives can on the one hand be analysed, while on the other they shall manifest their contaminations and offer opportunities for generative intersectionality.

Narratives of Compassion and Hope in the Face of Despair

Dr. Roger Frie Simon Fraser University | University of British Columbia; Associate Member, Columbia University Seminar on Cultural Memory

What does it mean to have compassion in the midst of despair? What does holding on to hope tell us about the human condition, especially when we struggle with a sense of powerlessness or the ability to create meaningful change? This talk will contribute to building a narrative of compassion and hope that draws on historical examples, in particular the use of unpublished letters from the Nazi past and the Holocaust. Drawing on my research of Erich Fromm, the twentieth century German-Jewish public intellectual and psychoanalyst, and on the Holocaust letters in Fromm’s family, I will show how his relatives lived in the most inhumane and unimaginable circumstances but were able to hold on to a sense of self through caring for those around them and emphasizing compassion and relatedness. At the same time, I will draw on Fromm’s unpublished letters with Max Horkheimer, which he wrote from Europe at the time of the November Pogrom (Kristallnacht) 1938. Using excerpts from both sets of letters, I will illustrate how the writers maintained a sense of compassion and hope that was grounded in an ethical responsibility to others. I will consider the nature of hope, which I distinguish from optimism, and its importance for our own contemporary situation, as we face a renewed threat of fascism, racial narcissism and right-wing extremism today.

Location | AUP: Q-604
Session Chair | Catherine Gaughan, University of Toronto

“What Would Clint Eastwood Do in This Situation?”: Narrative, Metaphor and Masculinity in Autopatographies on Cancer

Per Krogh Hansen University of Southern Denmark

Although more men than women are affected by cancer (according to the Danish Cancer Society), women are apparently more likely to communicate about their experiences of illness. Research indicates that "men feel particularly vulnerable in connection with illness, aging, injury, impotence or sexual deviance" (Hanlon 62), and that they are generally less likely than women to reveal emotions and show themselves as vulnerable in public (Baik; Kim). However, since the turn of the millennium, a number of stories have been published in book form written by men about their cancer experience. In this presentation, I will take outset in a 2021-study (Hvidtfeldt and Hansen) of a selection of contemporary Danish autopatographies. The authors being examined include two athletes, a stand-up comedian (with two books), an author, and a journalist. In the presentation, I will present our findings regarding the relationship between cancer narratives, war and combat metaphors, and hegemonic masculinity, and provide an analytical framework focusing on master and counter-narratives, as well as what I elsewhere (Hansen 2018) have coined as master and counter-metaphor. The analysis’ point of departure is that the perception of a cancer diagnosis, the concept of masculinity, the autobiographical genre, and language/discourse each play a crucial role in shaping masculine cancer experiences. It will be shown how autobiographical accounts of well-known individuals’ illness experiences help convey and circulate emotions and experiences, and how they utilize and evolve the traditional combat metaphor. New diverging narratives and (counter) metaphors emerge in the autobiographies examined, influencing both the experience of illness and the understanding of masculinity.

Anti-Narratives Matter: Zines as Restorative Objects for Psychiatric Survivors

Prof. Hel Spandler University of Central Lancashire

Traditional restorative justice practices have tended to either exclude people with significant mental health problems or assume that they are the perpetrators rather than victims of harm. Yet is well-evidenced that people with mental health problems are more likely to be victims rather than perpetrators of harm and sometimes this harm is caused by mental health services themselves. Meanwhile, restorative justice practices tend to take the form of in-person or text based verbal testimonies and narratives. However, whilst developing survivor narratives are usually seen as essential to restorative justice processes, not all experiences are possible to narrate, and it is increasingly recognised that not everyone experiences themselves as ‘narrative selves’, especially those who are defined as neurodivergent or mad. Narratives can be especially challenging when one experiences of madness and distress and interventions which are notoriously difficult to narrate, apart from through conventional ‘recovery’ narratives, or what Arthur Frank refers to as ‘restitution’ or ‘quest’ narratives. Therefore, people who are not able or willing to share their testimonies in a more conventional format, or those might not be able to access restorative justice opportunities, like psychiatric survivors, might need to develop alternative ‘chaos’ or anti-narratives, as a pre-condition for restorative dialogue. Drawing on findings from a Wellcome funded Mad Studies research project about madzines, this presentation will explore zines (hand-crafted DIY booklets) as an alternative medium for developing and sharing the experience, perspectives and testimonies of psychiatric survivors. The late Alison Piepmeier referred to zines as ‘pedagogies of hope’ and I will suggest that zines potentially offer a medium for restorative and epistemic justice.

From Feminist Practice to Public Health Threat: Analyzing the Securitization Narratives Surrounding Medical Skepticism

Dr. Helen Lu Murphey The Ohio State University

The narrative convergence between alternative health movements and conspiratorial sentiment has received considerable attention after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, as many alternative health advocates began to voice ardent opposition to vaccine and mask mandates. In response, popular podcasts like Conspirituality and articles in news outlets covering this phenomenon repeatedly emphasized that the valorization of intuition over scientific evidence has dangerous consequences for public health. Some commentators also noted the increasing political alignment between conspiritual beliefs and far-right ideologies. Before Covid-19, however, narratives about alternative health were very different. Suggestions that individuals conduct their own research and trust their lived experiences were deeply tied to feminist initiatives identifying and protesting the patriarchal surveillance, regulation and production of knowledge surrounding women’s health. This is also apparent in the pre-Covid-19 academic research on natural healthcare, which drew attention to women’s experiences of dismissal by mainstream medical institutions. This scholarship also noted how opting into alternative healthcare practices, such as natural pregnancy and birth, could represent a way to maintain and negotiate bodily autonomy.This paper traces the evolution of popular and academic narratives about the political and social implications of alternative health practices, particularly surrounding women’s healthcare. Drawing on the critical securitization framework advanced by the Copenhagen School, it argues that, after the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been an increasing securitization of healthcare which has implicitly positioned ‘science’ and ‘evidence’ as critically threatened by medical skepticism and conspiracy theories. Consequently, the epistemological foundation of alternative health – the elevation of intuition and lived experience – is posited as an inferior and dangerous mode of knowing. By advocating for a more nuanced notion of ‘harm’ in narratives surrounding medical skepticism, this paper contributes to a growing body of literature on how to address challenges to public health without valorizing an imperfect status quo.

Location | AUP: C-103
Session Chair | Constance Pâris de Bollardière, The American University of Paris

The Crisis of Man – Albert Camus in Crisis

Micha Zvi Danziger Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel; micahdanzigergmail.com

On March 28, 1946, at Columbia University, Albert Camus opened his US tour with the lecture “La Crise de l’homme” (“The Crisis of Man”) (Crisis). He had finished writing the lecture a few hours before arriving in the New York Harbor on March 24. In the lecture, Camus states that the historical and philosophical elements which facilitated the rise of Nazism, the atrocities of WWII and the Shoah has caused humanity to be in a state of crisis. The intellectual Nicola Chiraomonte attended the Crisis lecture. In a commemorative essay, written in 1960, Chiramonte reflected on the notes he had written while attending the lecture, arrived at the following conclusion: “It seems to me today that in this speech, which was a sort of autobiography, there were all the themes of Camus’s later work…But in it there remained discreetly in shadow, the other Camus, the one I can call neither truer nor artistically superior…Camus whose yearning for human communication…the man who, in questioning the world, questioned himself, and by this testified to his own vocation.” Picking up on Chiaromomte’s insights, I shall draw the specific historical context of post-World War II and Camus’s social position at the time. Then, I shall examine the structure of the lecture, including its philosophical elements, sources, and the important methodology of a narrative illustration to induce the actuality the of crisis to in his American audience. My analyses argues that the lecture encapsulates a relentless personal and philosophical crisis for Camus. The Crisis lecture, in this interpretation, was Camus’s first attempt to restore a humanism that directly engages in the repercussions of the dehumanization and terror during WWII by identifying and recognizing the gravity of the crisis.

Disparate Subject Positions in WWII Historical Fiction: Navigating Complicity and Resistance

Archana Ravi International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), University of Giessen

A retrospective reflection on the Second World War enables us to recognize the systemic and structural violences and injustices caused against individuals and groups of certain racial, religious, or national identities. By being framed and perceived as the ‘other’, Jews, Slavs, Black people, and people with disabilities, were considered ‘inferior’, leading to various forms of oppression, forced labour, genocide, and a brutal War. While the contemporary world may recognise these unjust and oppressive structures of the past, how can we confront the disparate ways in which individuals existed and behaved in view of the same? The proposed paper will discuss how historical fiction on the Second World War allows us to consider how institutionally propagated violent structures are constructed and how various individuals and groups respond to such structures by either being complicit to it or by resisting against it. Through an examination of Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief (2005) and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (2014), this paper looks at how the novels frame the disparate subject positions that the characters occupy – as perpetrators, implicated subjects (Rothberg, 2019), victims, and resistors – as a product of a larger fascist structure. As Michael Rothberg suggests regarding “implicated subjects” (2019), these characters often move in and out of their subject positions and, at times, occupy more than one position. The paper also looks at the affective evocations within the novels such as notions of guilt and discomfort, and expressions of empathy and resilience. These affective evocations, as framed in the novel, simultaneously underpin notions of collective solidarity and political responsibility, affirming the potential of individual ‘action’ despite the limitations on individual ‘agency’ imposed by violent regimes (Grinchenko and Narvselius, 2018).

Paul Vaillant-Couturier’s Disparate Worlds

Pierre Dharréville UCA

Each narrative is a subjective way of telling history, world and their representations that collide. For Paul Vaillant-Couturier (1892-1937), writer and politician, narrative is first and foremost an art of confrontation and combat. As writer-reporter, he produced a narrative about a world apart, the USSR’s one, which demonstrated, at the same time an intention to show and understand it, and its commitment against the opposing narratives of demolition coming from another world. But a single narrative can contain disparate worlds. This is how Paul Vaillant-Couturier staged the impossible dialogue between the world of the front and the world behind the lines during the First World War, in the form of a novel, a short story, a tale or even a play. Using the autobiographical register, finally, Paul Vaillant-Couturier recounted the childhood that predestined him to be both a writer and a politician, thus reconstructing, through a more autonomous narrative, a singular world irrigated by other singular worlds. Three uses of the narrative for three ways of making a world : the dreamed world, the lived world, the reconstituted world. The political resurfaces in the literary gesture that sketches these disparate worlds. Through the narrative, it can be question of making a project, of making common, of making movement ; it is always a question, even by ignoring them, of countering other narratives, of encompassing them, of contradicting them, of deviating them, of surpassing them… Because, beyond the disparate worlds, the world is all one, as Édouard Glissant theorized, through a permanent process of creolization. In his literary practice, as professional or political, Paul Vaillant-Couturier was a border-crosser. How does this creolization appear in the different forms of worlds in his narratives?

Location | AUP: Q-704
Session Chair | Alexandra Georgakopoulou, King’s College London

‘Her Behaviour Wasn’t Ethical’: Impoliteness and Morality in Small Stories about Third Parties

Dr. Vasiliki Saloustrou Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

This paper draws on the growing mass of studies that has cross-fertilised im/politeness with narrative and identities research (e.g. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich & Sifianou, 2017; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich & Georgakopoulou, 2021) to explore how lay participants talk about impoliteness and morality in naturally-occurring small stories about third parties. Although researchers coming from narrative-and-identities research (e.g. Georgakopoulou, 2013; Georgakopoulou & Vasilaki, 2018) or conversation analysis (Hutchby, 2008), have evidenced the validity of storytelling for inquiring into im/politeness-in-interaction, im/politeness scholars have not systematically engaged with narratives (but see Haugh, 2013). Narratives about third parties remain under-researched even within the field of identities studies (but see Georgakopoulou, 2007), given its long-standing emphasis on the personal past experience story as a locus for identity construction (Labov, 1972). This paper, therefore, aims to make an original contribution to both im/politeness and identities by examining naturally-occurring narratives about impoliteness in the interactions of two Greek friendship groups. Data collection involved 73 hours of audio- and video-recordings, field notes, and playback interviews, while data analysis drew on small stories research (Georgakopoulou, 2007) in its interconnections with positioning analysis (Bamberg, 1997; Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008) and conversation analysis. The analysis shows (a) the existence of systematic relations between impoliteness evaluations and small story genres which are conducive to the positioning of others as impolite/unethical; (b) the important role of co-tellers’ contributions in endorsing impoliteness evaluations about absent others, and in turn ratifying the position of the complainant assumed by the teller in the here-and-now; and (c) the existence of links between other-positionings and self-identity construction, as participants perform stories about unethical others to basically position themselves as ethical and thus to jointly restore personal experience and the moral order. Overall, the paper shows the importance of narratives in exploring lay understandings about social phenomena such as impoliteness and morality.

Narrative Ethics in Curations of Migrant Storytelling: Voice, Agency, and Positioning in Stories about the Refugee Olympic Team

Dr. Korina Giaxoglou The Open University

Dr. Tereza Spilioti Cardiff University

Recent research in migrant discourses has argued that positive representations of migrants in an otherwise ‘hostile environment’ raise questions of narrative ethics (Phelan, 2013). Such questions are worthy of ongoing critical reflection and analysis in different contexts, as part of attempts to bridge disparate narrative worlds and mitigate their real-life consequences. In this presentation analyse stories of, about and with migrants, with a focus on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Refugee Olympic team, which took part in the last three summer Olympic Games (2016, 2020, 2024). We examine personal stories of individual athletes, narratives about them and hybrid stories (see Gebauer and Sommer, 2024) featured on the official page of the Refugee Olympic team, on the sites of humanitarian organisations, on mainstream media, and on the social media accounts of the Refugee Olympic team. We track the curation of these stories across different media formats, using a critical storytelling approach (Giaxoglou and Spilioti, 2024; Lampropoulou, Giaxoglou, and Johnson, 2024) and address questions pertaining to the ethics of storytelling (Meretoja and Davis, 2018). Specifically, we ask how the ‘positive’ stories of the athletes are constructed, retold, shared, and framed, focusing on the implications any changes in narrative agency and positioning may have on narrative voice, depending on target audience, overall aims and affordances. Our discussion draws attention to narrative ethics dilemmas and tensions in different types of storytelling about the Refugee Olympic team and provides critical reflections on how these are negotiated in context.This paper contributes to the study of migrant discourse, seeking to bridge critical storytelling with narrative ethics. It also has potential practical implications for narrative communication on and with migrants towards creating connections in a disparate world.

Narratives of Migration in Belgian Job Interviews

Prof. Dorien Van De Mieroop KU Leuven

Narratives of migration are crucial for those who seek to build a life elsewhere, as these narratives become instrumental when migrants attempt to pass through the various gatekeeping encounters they are subjected to in the course of their journey. A self-evident example of an institutional context in which such narratives feature prominently, are asylum hearings. But also after people have passed through these gates, they are regularly still asked to tell ‘the story’ of their migration. One such a gatekeeping locus where this question regularly surfaces, is the job interview. This is not surprising, given that job interview talk does not only revolve around candidates’ qualifications, but also around aspects of the candidates’ personal life. This focus on the personal rather than only the professional in job interviews is somewhat emblematic of the ‘New Work Order’, which typically demands ‘a close identification between the individual’s self-construction and the culture of the organization that employs them’ (Campbell & Roberts 2007: 244). This orientation to aspects of the candidates’ personal life is probably what also prompts recruiters to ask candidates with a first generation migration background to give an account of ‘why they ended up here’. In this presentation, I study a corpus of 10 authentic job interviews with candidates with this specific background. I draw on multimodal discourse analysis to scrutinize how narratives of migration are elicited and shaped by the participants in these job interviews and how they function within the interactional dynamics of the job interview. On the basis of these analyses, I draw conclusions regarding the role of migration stories not only for the candidates’ identity work, but also in relation to how job interviews are conceptualized in current-day globalized western societies.

Reference: Campbell & Roberts (2007) Migration, ethnicity and competing discourses in the job interview. Discourse&Society 18(3).

Location | AUP: C-505
Session Chair | Tanya Shereen Elder, The American University of Paris

Unravelling the Politics of Solidarity Through the Narrative World of Lipstick Under My Bukha (Alankrita Shrivastava, 2016)

Sruthi Vellerayil Suku Plaksha University

The Bollywood film Lipstick Under My Burkha follows the lives of four women in Bhopal, each at a different stage of life. The film depicts their secret lives where they explore their desire for singing, working, moving out from Bhopal, and expressing their sexuality. The common thread uniting these women in Lipstick Under My Burkha is the film's voiceover, which narrates the story of Rosie, the protagonist of the erotic novel Lipstick Waale Sapney (translated as Lipstick Dreams). Rosie serves as a metaphor for the lives these women aspire to, while lipstick symbolizes their rebellion against societal expectations. On the one hand, this film sparked feminist discourse for its representation of women. However, it also sparked anti-feminist discourse and the complex interplay of both. In fact, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) of India in fact first denied the release of the film stating that “the story is lady-oriented, their fantasy above life. There are contagious sexual scenes, abusive words, audio pornography and a bit sensitive touch about one particular section of society.” Even after its release, the film and the actors faced backlash and trolling online. This paper situates this film at the juxtaposition of possibilities for hope, support and solidarity among women and the tensions of living, embodying and being in a patriarchal society. Through an analysis of the multi-narrative cinematic construction of disparate narratives and their intersections beyond the screen in its multitude of discourses by different groups, it thus presents the complex politics of solidarity. This could perhaps offer an understanding of both theorizing patriarchy and the feminist snap against patriarchy through the narrative world of Lipstick Under My Burkha.

The Invisible Narrator Seeks Methodological Exploration for Race-Related Research Processes: Trust, Knowledge, Empathy and Truth

Dr. Janet V. Grey SPICES Academic Consultancy & Affiliations

While processes of equality, diversity, and inclusion have increased the heterogeneity among researchers and supporting institutions, sociological discussions have not adequately analysed the consequences of these changes or explored the methodological implications. Researchers often remain unmindful of the power relations and imbalances they perpetuate through their own standpoints and research design plans. This paper addresses these gaps, focusing on the power dynamics and biases researchers may inadvertently reproduce. It examines how researchers navigate the complexities of race, cultural relations, and discrimination, considering institutional histories and the challenges of institutional racism. The paper advocates for inclusive knowledge production to improve race and cultural relations, promoting narrative equality and innovative research practices that tackle inconsistences and social inequalities. Arguing for a culturally sensitive research approach rooted in methodological principles, African-centred female epistemology and the ethics of care, the paper emphasize the need for enhanced research methods training on legitimacy, reflexivity and emotional literacy learning. It aims to recognise and better support researchers from marginalised communities as future educational leaders and principal investigators, leveraging their lived experiences to drive transformative research.

Dispatches from the Field: Humanitarian Aid from the Perspective of Haitian Writer Frankétienne

Dr. Jocelyn Sutton Franklin Wofford College

The West has a long tradition of assessing, recounting, and narrating the rest. From the anthropologist to the humanitarian, global South cultures are situated as objects to be understood or to be saved. Furthermore such encounters are accompanied by narratives that are determinative in representing a target population on the global stage. Haiti is no stranger to being assessed, maligned and (mis)represented in global media; one might say that rhetoric surrounding the island nation has been weaponized against Haitians in North Atlantic media and politics. Indeed, Gina Athena Ulysse's call, in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, for "new narratives" for Haiti remains as urgent as ever amid global humanitarian responses to violence and political instability in Port-au-Prince and beyond. In this paper, I consider Haitian perspectives on foreign humanitarian intervention through the lens of Frankétienne's decolonial coming-of-age story *Mûr à Crever* (*Ready to Burst*) (1968). Frankétienne mobilizes dystopian marvelous realism in his depiction of North Atlantic missionaries who devolve from angels to beasts, situating the rhetoric of divine assistance as a shallow disguise for predatory ulterior motives. Frankétienne privileges a decolonial gaze and rhetoric that works to highlight the under-represented experience of beneficiary populations. Indeed, if humanitarian organizations are eager to represent the suffering that they encounter and successes of the programs in a narrative that garners donations, beneficiary critiques do not often have access to the same platforms. I argue that Frankétienne's aesthetic and rhetorical choices evince the power of the imaginary in representing human experiences that are eclipsed by more dominant voices and logics. I illustrate that literatures of the global South have much to offer scholars of critical humanitarian and critical whiteness studies, fields that are struggling to break out of their eurocentrism and US-centrism, respectively.

Location | AUP: C-102

Session Chair | Mark Freeman, The College of the Holy Cross

Memory and Narrative Ethics: Holocaust Testimony, Fiction, and Film

Jakob Lothe University of Oslo

This session is linked to the publication of Jakob Lothe's new book, Memory and Narrative Ethics: Holocaust Testimony, Fiction, and Film (Oxford University Press, 2025). The book explores how different forms of narrative maintain and extend our knowledge of the Holocaust at this critical moment in history when the last survivors are passing away. Arguing that it is essential not to forget the historical event of the Holocaust, the book shows that our memory of the Holocaust is increasingly a cultural memory transmitted through and shaped by the media – including film and TV series. The verbal narratives and film narratives discussed in this book demonstrate that literature and film can be constructive responses to the ethical challenge of remembering the Holocaust. The session consists of two parts. First, the author briefly presents the book's topic, argument, and approach. Second, conference participants who have read the book comment on it. The session is chaired by Mark Freeman, editor of the OUP series "Explorations in Narrative Psychology" in which the book appears. Comments from Hanna Meretoja, Jens Brockmeier, Oddgeir Synnes, and Lotta Strandberg.

Location | AUP: C-505
Session Chair | Jessica Feldman, The American University of Paris

Disparate Narrative Worlds: Environmental Justice and Indigenous Knowledge in NFBC's Interactive Storytelling and Films

John Wilfred Bessai Trent University

In the contemporary landscape of ecological crises, narratives play a critical role in shaping our understanding of and responses to environmental issues. This presentation explores how the National Film Board of Canada's (NFBC) interactive storytelling and films address the intersection of environmental justice and Indigenous knowledge, contributing to the broader discourse on disparate narrative worlds. By examining key NFBC productions such as the VR experience "Biidaaban: First Light," the interactive documentary "Bear 71," and the short film "Losing Blue," this paper delves into how these works depict environmental degradation and its impact on marginalized communities. "Biidaaban: First Light" highlights the resilience and wisdom of Indigenous traditions in navigating contemporary urban landscapes, while "Bear 71" explores the implications of digital surveillance on wildlife and ecosystems. "Losing Blue" examines the fragility of aquatic environments and the urgent need for conservation. These projects highlight the disproportionate effects of environmental harm and the unequal distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. This presentation will discuss how these narratives depict the ongoing struggles of marginalized communities to protect their environment from industrial and colonial exploitation, revealing historical connections between past colonial practices and current environmental injustices. The role of visual media in making invisible environmental impacts visible to a broader audience is crucial. This presentation will explore how NFBC's work confronts systemic inequalities in environmental quality and health outcomes for marginalized populations. Additionally, it will highlight the representation of traditional ecological knowledge as sustainable management practices for managing ecosystems. By engaging with these narratives, the presentation aims to show how NFBC’s projects serve as platforms for diverse voices, offering insights into alternative ways of knowing and living that challenge dominant environmental management narratives. This study contributes to the broader discourse on decolonizing environmental justice and advocating for policies that recognize and integrate diverse ecological wisdom.

Exploring Narratives of Conflict and Hope in Media to Uncover the Truth from the Hyperreal

Dr. Louis Boynton Collaborative for Professional Clinical Development, Prof. Richard La Fleur University of West Georgia

“We have the knowledge, we need to understand what we know, and draw conclusions from that information” Raoul Peck. One of the most disparaging narratives perpetuated in the USA today is centered around gun violence and school shootings. The narrative of the second amendment “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms”, has evolved into a ‘new narrative’ riddled with divisions and tensions, in politics, religion, social constructs and individualistic morality. Gun violence and school shootings seem to be the ‘new normal’ and accepted way of living. Children going to social events or even attending school, are no longer safe spaces and the media has conflated and misconstrued the narratives, which in turn exacerbates fear, anxiety, conspiracy theories and fuels the racial, political and religious divides within communities. As academics in the heart of the American South we feel it is imperative to research these current narratives, and to discover how they shape the current discourse. Our aim is to identify these narratives, from the idea of “hyperreality” or the Simulacra in media spaces. We will show how these narratives create a representation of reality that is not a factual reality. The heart of our work is to develop spaces that promote Health, Happiness and Harmony as a cathartic and positive intervention that also mitigates trauma (local and intergenerational), through psychoeducation, to instill positive narratives for development of new discourse towards a more harmonious existence.

Location | AUP: C-101
Session Chair | Linda Martz, The American University of Paris

The Pre-Patient Illness Narrative – Rethinking Illness Narratives in an Era of Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing

Prof. Carsten Stage Aarhus University

Research into patients’ illness narratives has repeatedly emphasized the significance of diagnosis and symptoms as the pivotal ‘biographical disruption’ or ‘narrative wreckage’ that prompts a need to process and make sense of illness through narrative (Frank 1995; Jurecic 2012; Hawkins 1999; Kleinman 1988; Charon 2006). However, an increasing technological capacity to detect, monitor, and avert potential illness through genetic testing and population screening means that even seemingly healthy individuals can now be framed as ‘pre-patients’ or ‘patients-in-waiting’. Consequently, contemporary illness narratives may take shape well before any actual symptoms or diagnoses occur (Rose 2006; Timmermans & Buchbinder, 2010). The result is the emergence of a new kind of ‘pre-patient illness narrative’ (Schmidt Nielsen & Stage, 2023), which is articulated in a pre-institutional, pre-symptomatic, and pre-diagnostic context. One important arena for the development of new forms of pre-patient illness narratives is linked to the use of ‘direct-to-consumer genetic tests’ (DTC GTs) (Regalado 2019; Saukko 2017). Without medical intermediaries, DTC GT provides consumers with insight into their risk of developing conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, and Parkinson’s disease. This paper explores how the use of DTC GTs is linked to potentially new ways of narrating illness, particularly by biohackers, a group of early adopters of this technology (Cozza, Ellison, and Katz 2022, 4). Based on 15 interviews, the paper investigates how biohackers narrate (potential) illness in the context of using DTC GTs and discusses the extent to which the concept of ‘pre-patient illness narratives’ is useful for describing this type of narrative work.

It Runs in the Family. Narrating Genetic Illness and Risk Across Bodies, Technologies, and Generation

Dr. Ann-Katrine Schmidt Nielsen Aarhus University

Since direct-to-consumer genetic tests (DTC GT) were introduced to the mainstream market in 2007 millions of users have tested to learn more about their ancestry and/or health traits. With a commercial testing kit users can test for various genetic diseases and health traits (e.g. dispositions for cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s) at home without the assistance of medical staff or institutions. Based on 15 narrative interviews with people who have turned to DTC genetic testing in order to address concerns over family pathologies and intimate histories of suffering, I argue that the narratives of genetic illness and risk are examples of distributed storytelling where family narratives about difficult pasts and presents as well as hopeful and/or anxious futures are weaved together across narrators, prognostic biotechnologies, bodies, and generations. Illness narratives are traditionally understood as the patient’s attempt at restoring order in the chaos following a diagnosis (Frank, 1995). However, stories of genetic illness and risk are never simply about the individual patient but are »almost invariably partly stories about the lives of others in the family who are affected or who are potentially affected« (Petersen, 2006: 39). In this paper I ask: How does DTC genetic testing occasion new forms of distributed narratives and how is genetic knowledge incorporated, rejected, and/or negotiated in test users’ narration of the self? The paper, thus, contributes knowledge of how the mainstreaming of new prognostic technologies and genetic information fundamentally disturbs any clear-cut distinction between the individual “patient-body” and the collective “family-body” as well as present pathologies and the potential illnesses of the futures lurking in the genetic bond (Nielsen, 2024; Nielsen & Stage, 2023; Svendsen, 2002; Weller et al., 2022; Heinsen et al., 2022; Dimond et al., 2022).

Location | AUP: C-103
Session Chair | Zed Zhipeng Gao, The American University of Paris

Narrating Enemy Through Political Cartoons: Taipei Times vs Global Times

Natasha Lock King College London

This research reconsiders the Taiwan Strait conflict by encouraging a deeper exploration of the construction of socio-political narratives of enmity through editorial political cartoons. It does so, moreover, by emphasising the need to attend to the triadic China-Taiwan-US relations, rather than just focusing on Cross-Strait developments. Through this study, I focus on editorial political cartoons as visual schematic elements that aid in narrating, describing and explaining overarching discursive practices. This research shows how the political cartoons of China’s Global Times and Taiwan’s Taipei Times reflect the evolving dynamics and contemporary tensions in China-Taiwan-US relations. Furthermore, these cartoons underscore the importance of visual media in co-constructing conceptions of ‘friends’ and ‘foes’ that ultimately influence those very dynamics and, at least partially, aid in explaining those tensions. In this sense, this research reveals the existence of several parallels between the political imaginaries represented by the cartoons of both outlets, especially concerning the construction of an ‘external enemy’: the US in Global Times and China in Taipei Times. However, notable differences also emerge, including the contrasting representation of the US role, as well as the predominant portrayal of ‘internal enemies’ and a higher degree of dehumanization in the Taiwanese outlet. In this way, the political cartoons of Global Times and Taipei Times can show us significant evidence of how narrative matters.

Narrating Difference and Belonging in Focus Group Conversations with White German-Speaking Teachers about Heimat

Friederike Windel The American University of Paris

The construct Heimat, loosely translated to “homeland” or “home” in German-speaking contexts, is a significant concept in German history and contemporary times. In 2018, it re-entered German politics and public consciousness when the interior ministry added Heimat to its name in 2018. The German government’s use of this term has raised questions around its supposed neutrality in German politics, specifically in terms of who is included within the Heimat imaginary and German memory culture. This paper analyzes the narrative constructions of Heimat by White cis-women German-speaking teachers, who participated in focus groups where they shared and discussed personal and political definitions as well as critiques of Heimat. Participants offered their ideas and stories of difference and belonging in Germany. In this paper, I examine the ways in which these stories uphold, reproduce and sometimes resist constructions of Whiteness and nationalism by discussing multiple stories narrated by participants. Based on these stories, I identify several narratives based on “good-meaning” liberals that implicitly reproduce white supremacy. The first narrative uses openness and tolerance to further exclusionary practices like conditional acceptance which reminds of Berlant’s (2001) “bargain of intelligibility.” Another narrative uses colorblind ideology by insisting on “we are all the same” and thereby erasing power dynamics occurring in the classroom. Finally, I discuss an interaction of solidarity, where a participant called another in and challenged a white dominant framework. This paper thus raises questions about the role of narrative in liberal reproductions of racism and ends with a reflection on the potential of challenging these narratives in conversations.

Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Narratives of the AfD (Alternative for Germany) in the Light of German Language and Cultural History

Grigori Khislavski Erfurt University

Anti-Semitic conspiracy narratives are a key component of the New Right. In the language of the AfD, narratives claim a replacement of the German people, for which an imaginary Jewish lobby is made responsible. According to these narratives, Germans are to be eliminated through Islamization. The purpose of this talk is to employ discourse analysis in order to demonstrate that this conspiracy phantasm is rooted in older semantic structures, centered around the term “Jew” in German. Furthermore, it is considered undifferentiated to place the rhetoric of the New Right in a casual relationship with the rhetoric of the NSDAP. Instead, the aim is to lexicographically show that the recent anti-Semitic conspiracy narratives form a link in a long chain that can be historically traced back to the times of Martin Luther.

Location | AUP: C-102
Chair(s) | Lena Lybaek and Lotta Strandberg, University of South-Eastern Norway

This panel takes a hermeneutical approach to the question of translating narratives and reflects on the processes and positions of the translator in mediating, restating and rewording meaning. The process of translation as representation of “the other” is a perilous yet hopeful step towards empathetic retelling of their stories. Translations can take place across or between languages, ideas times and places. Translation may then also be seen as a resource and tool towards mutual understanding, reconciliation and change. We ask whether translation can mediate and create a rapprochement between divergent narratives, and if so, how? What are ethically responsible and just translations as representations/mediations, and are just translations possible? The role and position of a translator is central, yet often invisible. Who is considered a competent translator? The question is relevant on several levels and ranges from the professional craft of translation to perspectives of epistemic (in)-justices and voice, post-and decolonial critique and questions of inclusion and participation.

This panel is one of two related panels addressing the precariousness or hopeful potential of translations.

Narrative Translation Across Scale: Social Memory and Conflict in World Heritage Utopia

Dr. Steffen Fagernes Johannesen University of South-Eastern Norway

Hopes for a peaceful global future was a key motivation for the establishment of the UNESCO in the aftermath of the Second World War. Since the launch of the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1972, these hopes – criticized as utopian – have entered management of outstanding cultural heritage across the globe, much inspired by narratives about successful international cooperation to save the historical monuments of Nubia from being flooded in the 1960s. Critical heritage studies are deeply concerned with narratives, especially authorized or official ones. Historical objects subjected to heritagization can be understood as constituted by enacted stories, in many cases competing stories. In other words, different actors attempt to monopolize meanings of heritage, including who and what they represent. Accordingly, narratives become central to cultural memory, and hence also a powerful tool for political manipulation of the past and of people who are caught as characters in heritage narratives that become dominant. The international UNESCO World Heritage center, however, is very far from the actual sites. UNESCO has few means to sanction and remains very remote from day-to-day negotiations over memory and forgetting on the ground. This leaves much space for local heritage-translations, and thereby considerable power to local street-level-bureaucrats engaged in the everyday management of social memory and forgetting. Against a backdrop of the hopeful UNESCO ambitions to support peace, this paper draws on material from different international World Heritage sites. Through comparison, the paper will demonstrate and discuss the workings of contested World Heritage narratives on the ground. It discusses how they are translated and shaped according to contemporary socio-political circumstances, and addresses the effects that local translations that comment on conflicts has on social memory as well as the hopeful ambition of heritage to contribute to shaping the future.

The Translator and the Residue of Untranslatability

Dr. Lotta Strandberg University of South-Eastern Norway

I take my cue from Barbara Cassin, who, in her Dictionary of Untranslatables (2014), argues that ‘untranslatable’ is ‘what one keeps on (not) translating’ and presents itself as interminable, dramatized and ongoing. Rather than insisting that language cannot be translated, untranslatability insists on it as a continuum an ever-present circulation. The intent of translation is clear, yet beyond reach. Thus, untranslatability insists on a continuous creative process which is never stable, and never within our reach. Emily Apter writes, ‘Cast as an act of love, and as an act of disruption, translation becomes a means of repositioning the subject in the world and in history’ (53). Katie Kitamura’s novel Intimacies  (2021) about a female interpreter at the ICC in the Hague. She interprets for a man accused of war crimes. This novel thematises translation partly as co-creation and partly as contamination. The untranslatability in this novel is multidirectional and, even though situated in the Hague, the novel seems to articulate Sonia Alvarez’s point the politics of translation, addresses a shift to multiple locations or subject positions, which often quite dramatically impact our subjectivities as at once place-based and mis-or displaced. Expanding the concept of translation to include acts of transfer across geographies, subjectivities, emotions,  as well as languages, allows us to break out of the binary that envisions translation from one language to another, from an original text located in the past to its rendering in another language in the always shifting present. This expanded concept of translation serves as a significant paradigm for understanding how the image of the translations has shifted away from individualised autonomy on a path to assimilation toward a subject defined by its relationality, mobility, and multiple entanglements. Translation in Kitamura’s novel exemplifies this mobility and allows us to rethink translation as a multidirectional transfer. 

Reading Herstories of War: Navigating She Translates Herself and She is Translated

Kalpani Dambagolla University of South-Eastern Norway

Following the Derridean paradox of translation, which posits that “nothing is untranslatable, and everything is untranslatable,” this paper explores the narrated experiences of war-affected women, or Herstories. Traumatic events like war and conflict often disrupt narration, complicating the translation of lived experiences into communicable stories. Through analyzing the Herstories selected for this study, a clear distance emerges between the narrative and what might be considered the ‘original experience,’ raising questions about authenticity and fidelity. The discussion addresses two key aspects: how the women themselves translate their war experiences into narrative form, and how these stories are interpreted by the researcher. This dual perspective – ‘she translates herself and she is translated’- captures both the women’s self-expression and the researcher’s interpretive process. Importantly, the exploration extends beyond linguistic and cultural translation, recognizing that it also involves shifts between time and space. By examining these multiple layers of translation, the paper offers a nuanced reflection on the complexities of interpreting and representing the war stories of women, providing deeper insights into the intersection of experience, narrative, and translation.

The Ethics of Translating the Untranslatable. Disability and the Narratable Self

Dr. Lena Lybaek University of South-Eastern Norway

This paper addresses the question of ethically responsible or just translations and representations in light of the rights of persons with intellectual disabilities to their own narratives and to participation in their own lives. Persons with developmental disorders or intellectual disabilities often have limitations in cognitive and linguistic skills, and are dependent on various levels of care and guidance. They may be dependent on carers’ recognition of their semantic agency, and perception and translation of their communicative actions. Taking my point of departure in understandings of the “narratable self” (A. Cavarero) or narrative identity (P. Ricoeur) I begin with a recognition of the uniqueness of self-hood and self-understanding as communicated or transmitted through narratives or life-stories. These are never wholly accessible, even to oneself. (J. Kristeva) Exposed to the uniqueness and alterity of the other, the carer contributes not only to making communication intelligible to others, but also to translating the individual’s story and identity back to herself. How can the carer secure a just translation? In which ways is the individual in need of this kind of care, the owner of his or her own story?

Location | AUP: Q-704
Session Chair | Corinne Cecile Datchi, William Paterson University

This panel involves a group of scholars engaged in qualitative research in diverse parts of the world: Argentina, India, Mexico, Romania, and the United States. It looks at the formation of a shared group space dedicated to the study of the internationalization of qualitative research.

The primary aims of the panel are:

1. to describe how we have come together to explore our experiences of learning and doing qualitative research in our respective local contexts; 2. to discuss the methods we used to facilitate the development of individual and group narratives about our experiences of learning and doing qualitative research in our local contexts; 3. to uncover the threads that connect our separate journeys as qualitative researchers; 4. to identify the interpersonal processes involved in the formation of our international research partnership.

Our presentations will examine the individual and group narratives that developed from our autoethnographic study of the internalization of research, and discuss how these narratives participated in the production of shared meanings and the creation of a common space. We will also examine how the processes connecting our individual experiences into group narratives may support efforts to bridge disparate perspectives in various educational and social settings.

Facilitating Group Narratives: Therapeutic Interventions as Tools for Data Generation and the Creation of Shared Meanings

Dr. Corinne DatchiWilliam Paterson University, Dr. Ovidiu Gavrilovici University of Iasi

In this presentation, we will describe the methods we adapted from therapeutic interventions to generate narrative data for our autoethnographic project, specifically, reflecting teams and interpersonal process recall. Reflecting teams and interpersonal process recall are activities commonly used in narrative therapy and the training of mental health professionals. They are designed to enhance individuals’ awareness of self and others. Our autoethnographic project combined these two therapeutic interventions to facilitate the narrativization of our individual experiences in the context of our group meetings. During those meetings, we not only told our stories but also participated in the development of the narratives from our position in the audience. In this presentation we will highlight how our methodological approach to the generation of narrative data highlighted shared realities and supported the creation of shared meanings.

The Interpersonal & International: Knitting Cultural Biographies on the Plane of Qualitative Research

Kantadorshi Parashar National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences, Kathia Rebeca Arreola Rodríguez Universidad de San Andrés

The autoethnographic method is an entry point to understanding the cultures we come from and the ones we interact with. The international experience of qualitative research varies based on geographical and cultural roots_a realization that was drawn by participants in their narratives of personal, interpersonal and international experiences. Family structures, societal sanctions, interpersonal relationships, academic and research traditions, and even teaching and dissemination of qualitative research itself are rooted in the context of where they happen. The process of constructing each participant-researcher’s narratives facilitated reflections on multiple levels and dimensions. This not only prompted personal reflexivity but also encouraged collective reflexivity, raising important questions about how to train researchers and professors in qualitative inquiry, how our academic and research trajectory and experiences influence our doing and writing of qualitative research and also, dissemination of such research.

Friendships and Narrative: Understanding Intimacy as a Process of Qualitative Research

Charvi Tandon IIT Hyderabad, Garima Agarwal London School of Economics and Political Science, Kate McCoy The New School

We often hear the word ‘collaboration’ in research. In this presentation, we speak about bonds beyond collaboration—we speak about forming ‘friendships’ within qualitative research as a unique source of support, intellectual growth, and shared narrative building. As an international group of qualitative researchers, we utilize our bonds around the work we do as a tool to facilitate deeper understanding, allowing intimacy to shape both the process and outcome of our work. This is a journey that the two speakers of this presentation have specifically taken together, shaping their approach to thinking, challenging assumptions, and fostering a willingness to share doubts and failures. More importantly, this friendship has allowed us to balance the emotional labor of qualitative research, as the themes we work on—such as contraceptives and leisure for women—often bring forth instances of violence and inequality.

Discussion

Dr. Michael Bamberg, Si Wang
Clark University

Michael Bamberg and Si Wang are the discussants who will conclude the presentations with their insights and engage the audience by facilitating the discussion and asking questions to the panel.

Location | AUP: Q-801
Session Chair | Jens Brockmeier, The American University of Paris

The panel explores narrative hermeneutics as an approach that can provide important contributions to understanding the problem of disparate narrative worlds. Narratives are culturally mediated sense-making practices that participate in the building of both shared worlds and worlds that fail to communicate with one another. It is important to address the role of dialogue in these processes: can those inhabiting disparate narrative worlds engage in a dialogue and what are the limits of dialogue? Current global crises, the ongoing wars, the pandemic and its aftermath, the ecological crisis, and the general polarisation of societies, have led to disparate narrative worlds that make the issue of the possibility of dialogue increasingly urgent. Drawing on insights from narrative hermeneutics, the panel provides conceptual tools to make sense of the different meanings of dialogicality and of the precise nature of the challenges that we face.

Fascist Folly, Narrative Self-Enclosure, and the Dead-end of Dialogue

Mark Freeman The College of the Holy Cross and Boston College

The United States is currently awash in fascist-stye folly: Haitian immigrants are deemed to be eating family pets, secret gender-affirming surgeries are allegedly being performed in schools, and some believe that recent hurricanes may actually be a creation of the Democrats, who are apparently willing to let loose savage destruction in order to advance their own cause. Patently absurd though such fictions and lies are, advancing them is intrinsic to the fascist playbook and entails believers becoming so hermetically ensconced within the enclosure of their own immovable narratives that dialogue is either obviated or rendered impossible. What is to be done when dialogue is a dead-end? What can break the spell of narrative self-enclosure—if anything? Although there are no sure answers to these questions, it is of the utmost urgency that they be addressed. The very nature of reality is at stake.

Not All in the Same Boat: Dialogicality, Pandemic Storytelling, and Disparate Worlds

Hanna Meretoja University of Turku

Drawing on narrative hermeneutics, this paper starts by articulating two meanings of dialogicality: ontological and normative. The ontological suggests that we are fundamentally relational beings, becoming who we are in dialogue with others. The normative suggests that dialogue is an ethical ideal. There are situations, however, in which this ethical ideal is insufficient. For example, there may be a need to unmask the ideologies that constitute disparate narrative worlds. After discussing this idea in the light of Hannah Arendt’s philosophy and narrative hermeneutics, the latter part of the paper explores how narrative fiction has questioned one of the dominant narratives of the COVID-19 pandemic, the narrative of “we are all in the same boat”, which has been widely used to mask the fact that people live in disparate worlds. While narratives are used as world-building tools, often to create disparate narrative worlds, public discourse can also use narratives to erase important differences between life-worlds. This point is illustrated by looking at how Ali Smith’s Summer (2020) and Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy by the Sea (2022) challenge the narrative of “we are all in the same boat” and articulate the socially situated complexity of the lived experience of those living through a global crisis. The paper thereby argues that narrative hermeneutics provides important insights on the different senses in which we are dialogical beings: on dialogue as part of the human condition, on its limits as an ethical ideal, and on the role of narratives in both building and masking disparate worlds. 

Narrative, Relationships, and the Fragility of Social Change

Brian Schiff The American University of Paris

Ever since Allport’s (1954) The Nature of Prejudice, the dominant paradigm in the social sciences has been that contact between persons from different backgrounds leads to increased understanding and a decrease in prejudicial attitudes and actions. Allport’s ideas have inspired a multitude of research programs and practical applications bringing together persons from groups engaged in various conflicts. Of course, attitudes can change by other means; indeed, there is a peripheral path (Pratkanis & Aronson, 1992), which persuades through indirect and nonrational appeals largely based upon emotion and/or identity. The notion of dialogue is often evoked as a corrective force to such propagandistic appeals. However, even if some form of dialogue does work, social change would be excruciatingly slow. And, I wonder if dialogue is up to the challenge presented by the current state of conflict and polarization. Perhaps we expect too much. In this presentation, I rethink some of the problems involved in theorizing how persons transform their understanding of other groups--especially in the case of persons who held racist or extremist views. In this regard, I examine the narrative transformation of Derek Black in Eli Saslow’s (2018) nonfictional account Rising out of Hatred and discuss the work of Daryl Davis on befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan. I argue that relationships are clumsy and inefficient vehicles but, perhaps, our only means for achieving authentic and deep narrative transformation.

Scientific Forestry and Healthcare: Seeing the Hermeneutical Forest for the Trees

Danielle Spencer Columbia University

The roles of “patient” and clinician occupy what can at times appear to be disparate narrative worlds—one embodied and particular, the other logico-scientific. Invoking an analogy to James Scott’s discussion of scientific forestry as an example of the effect of utilitarian discourse upon lifeworlds, I explore a range of narrative reform efforts in healthcare. I suggest that some instrumental tactics of “remedial humanization” are akin to “forest hygiene”—boxes of cultivated ant colonies placed judiciously within the monocrop biomedical forest, just enough to offer the illusion of diverse forms of life while the system continues to plant and harvest us in uniform rows. Similarly, physician writing, while seemingly offering greater transparency, can threaten a metaleptic breach and instead retrench clinical authority. In contrast, I argue that narrative hermeneutics points us towards a range of emancipatory strategies encouraging the growth of true dialogue. For example, the textual metaphor of narrative medicine invites metanarrative inquiry; here the shared disaffection of those seeking care and those attempting to offer it (themselves increasingly disempowered and disenchanted) may join in a collaborative effort to question the structural frames of biomedicine. The practice of honing cooperative interpretive skills—particularly now, in the face of generative AI—illuminates our hermeneutical capacities as central to our very humanity, in healthcare and beyond.

Location | AUP: C-104
Session Chair | Pia Wiegmink, University of Bonn

This interdisciplinary panel jointly organized by the University of St Andrews and the University of Bonn brings together scholars working in the fields of Arabic and Comparative Literature, American Studies, Literature and Human Rights, and Dependency Studies. The panel examines contemporary fiction from the Americas, Vietnam, the Gulf, and Kurdistan, from diverse authors such as Deepak Unnikrishnan, Tiya Miles, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Behrouz Boochani to probe into the global nexus of storytelling, literature, and aesthetic practice on the one hand, and forced migration, confinement, coerced labor and rightless-ness on the other.

The panel reflects on how writers employ various literary strategies—at times in experimental fashion—to address issues of power and inclusion/exclusion. In so doing, it also explores the writers’ attempts to negotiate, counter, or reconcile, the disparate worlds that shape oppressive experiences. More precisely, the literary works explored in this panel all experiment with different genres in relation to the oppressive experience of forced displacement and various forms of coercion. What connects the works examined in this panel is the emphasis on the literary practice itself and, thus, on the position of the writer who, through their writing, becomes a subject of political action. How does one become a writer? What is legitimate literature? What are the effects of writing from a dominated position? How can writing produce empowerment? Besides discussing these and other questions related to writing, the members of this panel will also examine the particular modes of writing, literary tropes, and aesthetic practices writers experiment with to address the often incommensurable experiences of violence and suffering that accompany forced migration and concomitant experiences of racism, enslavement, war, and indefinite detention.

The RMS Triangle: Racism, Migration, Slavery, and the Powers of Narrative in Contemporary Gulf Fiction

Prof. Ziad Elmarsafy University of St Andrews

The paper surveys several works written by contemporary writers from the Gulf (Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) that deal with troubling themes in need of narrative treatment. Foremost among these is the problem of racism directed against the large numbers of imported migrants ­— many of them trafficked into modern slavery — needed to keep the region’s powerful economies operating. The aim of the survey is to investigate what narrative can do by way of giving voice to the voiceless and suggesting forms of reparation seemingly unavailable to the salient local discourses of government, law, and power. A key feature that runs across all works to be presented is the birth of the writer as a pivotal narrative device. In Saud al-Sanousi’s award-winning Bamboo Stalk (Sāq al-Bāmbū; 2012), a Filipino-Kuwaiti man tries to join his Kuwaiti family only to find himself rejected. He returns to Manila, starts a family, and becomes the author of a book entitled The Bamboo Stalk. In Maḥmūd al-Tarāwirī’s Maymūna (2007), the female narrator becomes the voice of generations of West African migrants to the Arabian Peninsula. In Temporary People (2017), Deepak Unnikrishnan narrates the lives of the Pravasis, migrants from Kerala who build and maintain Abu Dhabi’s economy. Unnikrishnan himself is now an Arts Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at NYU Abu Dhabi. Finally, in Celestial Bodies (Sayyidāt al-Qamar; 2010), Jokha al-Harthi narrates the life of an Omani family focussing on a slave who resists her freedom. The birth of the writer will be presented as a prism through which multiple aspects of racism, migration, and slavery are written, including visibility, pleasure, and the possibility of redemption.

Entangled Narratives, Past and Present: Rethinking Memories of Slavery and Imagining Cross-Racial Solidarities

Prof. Pia Wiegmink University of Bonn

This paper is interested in exploring the possibilities of fiction for remembering the histories of enslavement, displacement, and dispossession in the United States. In my close reading of historian Tiya Miles’ recent novel The Cherokee Rose (2015/2023) I will show how the novel bridges three kinds of disparate worlds: First, Miles skillfully connects ostensibly disparate worlds of the past and present by focusing on three contemporary women protagonists’ attempts to identify the ghost of a historic house. Second, Miles explores the intersections of genres usually kept apart: historical research and fiction writing. The novel is inspired by Miles’ The House on Diamond Hill (2010), a history of the Vann House. The late 18th century plantation house was the home of wealthy Cherokee leader and enslaver James Vann which the Vann family had to abandon when they were forced out of Georgia during the Trail of Tears in the 1830s. Using her research on the Vann House and the historical records she worked with, among them the diaries of Moravian missionary woman Anna Rosina Gambold, in The Cherokee Rose, Miles deliberately turns to fiction to speculatively fill in the blanks historical research could not provide evidence for; she imagines a story of cross-racial solidarity and community literally unearthed by the three contemporary women’s engagement with the history of the house. Thus, thirdly, the novel highlights the interwoven histories, intricate entanglements, and mutual emotional, physical and material support structures of seemingly unrelated groups of missionaries, enslaved African American, and Indigenous women (and men) in a nineteenth century slaveholding plantation in the US South. In short, this paper will explore the potential of storytelling to complement history, bridge racial, ethnic, social divisions past and present, and un-cover neglected alliances.

Narrating Memories of Refugeehood: On the (Inter)Relation of Embodied Disparate Worlds in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s A Man of Two Faces

Luvena Kopp University of Bonn

This paper explores the representation of disparate and, yet, intersecting worlds shaped by the experience of refugeehood in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s memoir A Man of two Faces (2023). In 1975, at the age of four, Nguyen was forced to escape from his birthplace in South Vietnam together with his brother and his parents (leaving behind an adopted sister) in the wake of the American war in Vietnam. The narrative takes readers to different geographical locations—for example, to places in the family’s home country in Vietnam, to military bases in the Philippines and in Guam, to locations in their final destination in U.S.—that have shaped the lives and, particularly, the war experiences of Nguyen and his family. Yet, it is in their memories and in the memories of Nguyen, specifically, that these locations and experiences turn into imagined, and thus transmuted, inner worlds of refugeehood shaped by the specific socio-historical context of American colonization. This paper, therefore, investigates Nguyen’s narrative treatment of the way in which disparate and, yet, intersecting material worlds shaped by violence, racism, and segregation are mediated by fragmented, dreamy and, in the case of Nguyen’s mother, even surreal memories to become imagined internal worlds that create division not only among the members of Nguyen’s family but, as the title of the memoir suggests, also within Nguyen himself. It will also consider Nguyen’s emphasis on emotions which indicates that the material worlds of refugeehood are not merely recollected but embodied. On the level of formal analysis, this paper explores how Nguyen’s literary representation of internal worlds is realized not only within the expanded genre conventions of the memoir, but also through various aesthetic and stylistic strategies including lyricism, dark humor, and formal experimentation that also borrows from cinematic practices.

Writing in Response to the Rightless-ness of Detention: Behrouz Boochani’s Poetic Prose

Prof. David Herd University of St Andrews

This paper will focus on the work of the Kurdish-Iranian author, Behrouz Boochani. Specifically, it will consider the literary strategies through which Boochani has addressed the material reality of his indefinite incarceration on Manus Island under Australian immigration rules. Drawing on both Boochani’s novel, No Friend But the Mountains, and his collection of essays, Freedom, Only Freedom, the paper will explore the complex crossings of Boochani’s writing practice: from the mix of poetry, fiction, testimony and reportage which constitutes his novel, to his collaboration with translators and fellow refugees. The paper will address the way this complex mix of modes and practices constitutes and shapes Boochani’s claim to rights in the context of detention and, therefore, rightless-ness. Boochani’s writing from the space of detention, and therefore from a reality which becomes increasingly familiar to the person seeking asylum in the Anglophone world, is a response to the logics of the State of Exception. Drawing on Agamben, but also highlighting the limitations of his theoretical position, the paper will consider the ways in which Boochani counters the binary of citizenship and non-citizenship on which the exclusions and enclosures of the state of exception depends. In particular, it will take seriously Boochani’s claim that, in the face of rightlessness, the poetic (above all strands of his practice) constitutes the key mode of expression. What Boochani’s claim for poetry rests on, the paper will argue, is metaphor, the potential in language for something to be both itself and something else. The paper will thus explore the political potential of a multi-modal and collaborative writing practice that, as Boochani states, is underpinned by the imaginative methodologies of the poem.

Location | AUP: Q-A101
Session Chair | Jennifer Boum Make, Georgetown University

This panel engages with the complex intersections of individual and collective trauma, oppression and the possibility of liberation and repair in contemporary literatures in French. By examining the works of Gisèle Pineau and Nina Bouraoui, the three papers in this panel highlight a recurring tension: how do individuals and communities attempt to heal from historical and/or personal trauma while confronting oppressive structures that often undermine their efforts? By exploring various forms of oppression–patriarchal, neocolonial violence and institutionalized care–all three papers interrogate the possibility of liberation, whether spiritual, political, or psychological, emphasizing that this process is ongoing and often fraught. The literary works under study in all three papers present narratives in which characters are in conflict with themselves and/or with others, and where care for the self as well as for others and the world is in crisis– distorted if not entirely absent. Finally, all three papers focus on the narrative pathways through which care can be reimagined–whether as healing, introspection and self-therapy, but also liberation–demonstrating the term's polysemic potential. Through these discussions, this panel aims to foster a conceptual reflection on the intersection of care–in its many forms–and liberation, inviting to think creatively and provocatively about the meanings and practices these two terms may hold.

Presenters may choose to deliver their presentations in French or English, subject to the conference's guidelines.

Fragmented Subjects: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Memory in mes mauvaises pensées by Nina Bouraoui

Dr. Don Joseph University of Missouri

Mes mauvaises pensées by Nina Bouraoui explores the fragmented nature of subjectivity through a deeply meditative and quasi-confessional narrative. The protagonist's inner dialogue unfolds within the framework of psychoanalytic sessions, revealing the tensions between her intimate desires, cultural identity, and sexual orientation. This narrative technique highlights the split in her subject as she navigates her Algerian heritage, her French upbringing, and the internalized societal norms alongside her repressed desires.

A psychoanalytic perspective, particularly focusing on repression and the unconscious, shapes her struggle for personal coherence. The text captures the complexity of her identity, presenting her as a subject in constant evolution, destabilized by contradictory impulses and unresolved past experiences. Through this fragmented self, Bouraoui sheds light on broader tensions of identity formation, self-alienation, and the search for a unified self in a post-colonial and patriarchal context. This analysis proposes two central questions: firstly, how does Bouraoui’s use of a psychoanalytic framework bring into question broader issues of identity within a post- or neo-colonial context? Secondly, how does the novel's narrative structure, through introspection and a therapeutic lens, reflect the protagonist's divided subjectivity and fragmented sense of self?

Healing the World, Escaping the World: The Political Paradoxes of Hope in the Work of Gisèle Pineau

Dr. Natacha D'Orlando Université de Poitiers

The novels of the Guadeloupean writer Gisèle Pineau are marked by contrasting reflections on the possibility of hope in worlds that are both hopeless and desperate. The characters are torn between the desire to repair their worlds and the inability to confront them with anything other than virtuality and pure spirituality. Whether one believes in a genuine post-abolitionist emancipation (like the ghosts of Cent vies et des poussières), in a political-spiritual liberation (like that promised by the Rastafarian communities of L'Espérance-Macadam) or in alternative forms of existence (like the ecofeminist utopia of Morne-Câpresse), hope always appears as both a healing technique and a means of escape. Moreover, we find that hope is always sanctioned by failure, as Pineau's stories (seemingly) end with a cruel fall, in which the disillusionment of the characters is matched only by that of the reader. Thus, narratives of care and salvation end in narratives of pain and catastrophe. This paper will examine what I call the author's "desperate narratives of hope," asking in particular what ideas about political and collective care are conveyed through them.

Losing One's Mind as a Practice of Healing and Liberation in Gisèle Pineau's la vie privée d'oubli (2024)

Dr. Jennifer Boum Make Georgetown University

Gisèle Pineau’s latest novel, La vie privée d'oubli, intertwines the lives of women across the Caribbean, North America, and Africa, remapping the geography of the transatlantic slave trade. Against the backdrop of this fragile collective history, these women face the haunting legacy of that past, while being confronted with their own repressed trauma. After a harrowing and near-fatal attempt to smuggle drugs into mainland France, Yaëlle, one of the novel’s protagonists, becomes possessed by the spirit of Agontimé, a princess captured in Africa and enslaved in Guadeloupe. This encounter with a haunting ancestral figure sets in motion a complex web of intimate and collective connections, unearthing a past that refuses to be forgotten. While in hospital, recovering from a coma, Yaëlle becomes consumed by an overwhelming urge to tell the stories of slavery, channeling the voice of her ancestor, Agontimé. However, under the medical gaze, she is diagnosed with schizophrenia—a diagnosis that is said to reflect the epigenetic effects of historical trauma manifesting through her body and mind. In this paper, I seek to question the boundaries of medical discourse and institutionalized "care," which I argue represent a key mechanism of neo-colonial oppression in the French state. For indeed, I propose to explore the liberating potential of symbolically losing one’s mind (‘délirer’ in French) as a form of resistance against the violence and repression of the French neo-colonial state. Notably, the French word ‘délirer’ derives from the term delirare in Latin, which means 'to go off the furrow,’ or to derail. Thus I ask: How does this act of derailing become the expression of a refusal of oppression? In what ways might the symbolic act of derailing carve out a space for individual and collective healing as well as liberation?

Location | AUP: Q-604
Session Chair | Shamla Kelechedath Mohammed, University of Calicut

The panel is an attempt to critically analyze the role of early women’s Magazines published in Malayalam in the late nineteenth and the first three decades of the twentieth century in Kerala to intervene in the conventional gender representation in the nineteenth Kerala society. The panel includes three papers. The paper titled, “Transgressions in Gendered Space through Counter Narratives: A Revisionist Reading of Select Articles from Early Malayalam Women Magazines” by Shamla K.M. is an attempt to study how spatial definitions of gender mobility has been challenged by the articles published in women’s magazines representing Muslim women published by Halima Beevi, the first Muslim woman publisher and journalist from Kerala.

The paper, ‘Culture on the Brink?’: Narrative Ideologies of She/ Her Revolution in Print in Early Women’s magazines Keraleeya Suguna Bodhini and Sarada” by Razeena P.R. tries to trace the roots of Kerala Renaissance in print culture,starting with the earliest recorded magazines printed and published by women. Keraleeya Suguna Bodhini and Sarada. The paper,” Navigating Cultural Realms: Representation of Namboothiri Women in EarlyKerala Magazines” by Jasin Taj.T, explores the representation of Namboothiri women in the early twentieth century magazines like Sumangala, Mahilaratnam, and Sahodari. This tries to locate the ways in which the educated Namboothiri women engaged in cultural activities, reflecting a gradual recognition of their contributions beyond household duties.

‘Culture on the Brink?’: Narrative Ideologies of She/ Her Revolution in Print in Early Women’s Magazines Keraleeya Suguna Bodhini and Sarada”

Prof. Razeena P Razack University of Calicut

Malayalam magazines dating back to the early 19th century in Kerala, India present a contrasting depiction of women compared to the narratives that emphasize women’s literary and educational achievements, diverging from celebratory accounts and developmental discourses of magazines of the time..Keraleeya Suguna Bodhini, published from Trivandrum in 1886 and Sarada, first published in 1904, were the earliest of Malayalam( the native language of Kerala) magazines in this genre and contained all the ‘necessary’ ingredients to be an instant sensation with the female readers– cookery columns, articles addressing relationship challenges, discussions on women’s concerns, parenting advice, narratives, and poetry- that constituted a pioneering blueprint for subsequent magazines of a similar nature. But these magazines also revolutionised the way women defined their social constructs of identity and shifted the focus from the ‘inner space’ onto the ‘outer space’. These magazines trace the hegemonic mapping of narrative culture trails that traces its roots to gender empowerment in its stages of inception. And print culture had a lot to contribute in this regard. Magazines in Malayalam of the yore reveal interesting traces as to how the seemingly innocent ‘soft prints’ actually set the trail ablaze with ideas for reformation and education.Social Reforms in Kerala gathered momentum in Kerala during the latter part of the 19th century and in the initial stage of the 20th century. The manuals of the period trace the hegemonic mapping of cultural trails that traces its roots to gender empowerment in its initial stages of inception. And print culture had a lot to contribute in this regard. This paper proposes to analyse how these magazines re-defined the Malayali woman through a linear progression of her cultural growth over the years and created for her a space outside the home.

Navigating Cultural Realms: Representation of Namboothiri Women in Early Kerala Magazines

Dr. Jasin Taj T University of Calicut

The representation of Namboothiri women in early Kerala magazines reflects the complexities of their social status and cultural norms. Namboothiri women, as members of a prominent Brahmin community, often faced strict societal restrictions, which influenced their portrayal in literature and media of the time. Magazines of the early twentieth century often depicted Namboothiri women as embodiments of tradition and cultural heritage. Their roles were usually framed within the context of family and domestic responsibilities. This highlighted their lack of agency, showcasing them primarily in domestic settings. Magazines like Sumangala, Mahilaratnam, Sahodarietc. began to feature Namboothiri women who were educated and engaged in cultural pursuits, challenging the prevailing norms. This shift indicated a gradual recognition of women’s contributions beyond household roles.As Kerala underwent social reform movements, the magazines began to explore the tension between modernity and tradition. This paper is an attempt to delve into the representation of the Namboothiri women in these magazines, and discuss the diverse issues faced by them during their struggle to navigate these changing landscapes.

Transgressions in Gendered Space through Counter Narratives: A Revisionist Reading of Select Articles from Early Malayalam Women Magazines

Dr. Shamla K M University of Calicut

Late 19th century and the first three decades of the twentieth century witnessed the publication of women’s magazines by women in Malayalam language in Kerala. The critics in the area regard it is the result of reformation movements in Kerala in the period that led women from Kerala belonging to various religions and castes within Hinduism to come forward boldly into the public sphere and enter into highly masculinised world of printing and publishing. The reformation movements in Kerala led to women getting education and a few educated women from various communities in Kerala entered into public domain discarding the unwritten taboos set by conservatives in the society. The present paper is an attempt to study a few select articles published in three magazines published by the Muslim woman publisher , Ms. Halima Beevi, who published three women magazines, Muslim Vanitha , Vanitha and Adhunika Vanitha and one general magazine, Bharatha Chandrika in Malayalam language during the twentieth century. The paper aims to study how perhaps the first Muslim woman writer and publisher form Kerala has contributed in transgressing the gendered space within patriarchal misogynist society to represent the Muslim women identity through the articles published in the women magazines published by her which in turn act as counter narratives. The concept of ‘Gendered Space’ from the border area of ‘Spatial Studies’ may be applied to analyse the mode and means of transgressing by delving deeper into the specificities of select articles from the three women magazines published by Halima Beevi.

Location | AUP: Q-704
Session Chair | Bodil H. Blix, UiT The Arctic University of Norway

Narrative Care: Attending to Forward Looking Stories

Prof. Bodil H. Blix UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Prof. D. Jean Clandinin University of Alberta, Dr. Pamela Steeves University of Alberta, Dr. Charlotte Berendonk University of Alberta, Prof. Vera Caine University of Victoria

Over the past years, attention has been drawn to how narrative ideas could be integrated in care practices (Ubels, 2015), and narrative practices have been conceptualized as a never-ending process of becoming better story listeners (Kenyon & Randall, 2015). Although we find the concept of narrative care intuitively compelling, it is tremendously challenging. For many years, we have inquired into, challenged, and stretched the concept of narrative care (Berendonk et al., 2017; Blix et al., 2019). For us, narrative care is not merely about acknowledging or listening to people’s stories or attending to the silences that are present in people’s lives. We see care itself as an intrinsically narrative endeavor. We think of narrative care as an active and relational co-composition of experience – a way of making sense of the world together, with or without spoken words in playful ways. Within this understanding, narrative care does not depend solely on the ability to tell or listen to stories, rather it depends on the ability to engage in, and become part of, experience. Narrative care is also a way to honor silences (Blix et al., 2021). In this chapter, drawing inspiration from the feminist pragmatist Jane Addams’ writings (Addams, 1902; Seigfried, 1999), we think with our experiences alongside older adults and family members, as we look both backward and forward to continue to learn. We show how narrative care is about an opening to learn, to be surprised and to be perplexed. It is in these moments that we can find ways in which we can retell and relive lives in ways that allow us to become otherwise.

Transformative Transpersonal Narratives of Woundedness in Healthcare Professionals

Caroline Marie Fernandes Mercer University

Grounded in Narrative Inquiry methodology, this presentation will explore the transformative and transpersonal narratives of woundedness in healthcare professionals, with a particular focus on their experiences with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. These narratives highlight the profound journeys of professionals who have navigated complex trauma, spiritually transformative experiences, altered states of consciousness, and post-traumatic growth. The presentation will reveal the deep personal and professional transformations experienced by healthcare providers as wounded healers through their engagement with psychedelic therapies, offering insights into the intersections of trauma, healing, and spiritual awakening. Attendees will gain a deeper understanding of the potential of altered states of consciousness to facilitate healing and growth within the context of trauma recovery. Additionally, participants will learn practical approaches for conducting narrative interviews, focusing on ethical considerations in interviewing and storytelling, preventing vicarious trauma, and mitigating interviewer burnout. This presentation offers valuable knowledge for professionals involved in trauma work, counselor education, and those interested in integrating psychedelic-assisted therapy into their practice.

Ukrainian Nurses in War

Dr. Elizabeth Burgess-Pinto MacEwan University, Dr. Lyudmyla Mazur Ternopil National Medical University, Dr. Olabisi Oyelana MacEwan University

Modern professional nursing has evolved within the context of social conflicts and disasters. The majority of nurses are women in war situations and women are a vulnerable group. Nurses’ roles are multidimensional, and they have an ethical commitment to care for people regardless of circumstances. It is critical to document the experiences and the contributions of nurses in these situations. Most research on nurses in war is retrospective and focuses on military nursing or on civilian nurses who are assigned to conflict areas. At all times, the lived experiences of nurses present personal and professional challenges. In Ukraine, nurses experienced the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and now face war conditions no matter where they practice. With war, health systems in beleaguered cities have largely collapsed and many workers have fled to safety. The disruption of health services along with the forced movement of people introduces substantial challenges to the management of hospital services and health conditions in all settings. Hospitals are experiencing disruptions to services such as frequent power outages, issues with delivery of medical supplies and resources such as ICU and general hospital beds, ventilators, bandages and antibiotics, reductions in screening and rehabilitation services, decreased staff numbers along with increased work hours. In addition, internal displacement of people from the conflict zone places increased strain on hospitals in Western Ukraine. A narrative inquiry was carried out to understand the experiences and perspectives of Ukrainian nurses working in civilian hospitals in Western Ukraine. Their stories of experiences of living in a war-affected community while having to provide care in civilian hospitals and settings to those affected by war can provide a deeper understanding of this unique situation. The threads that emerged from the inquiry will be discussed along with the challenges of conducting a narrative inquiry during war.

Location | AUP: Q-801
Session Chair | Mark Freeman, College of the Holy Cross

This panel looks at the ways in which memory of politically significant encounters is transformed over time, the ways in which different political constituencies reconstruct the past in accord with their respective aims, and the challenge of establishing dialogue between those inhabiting fundamentally disparate narrative worlds. As will be evident through the four cases explored on this panel, such contestation is not only about the meaning of the past but also about reconstructing a new vision for the future. To speak of contested political memory, therefore, is also to speak of contested political purposes and ends. By addressing the relationship between disparate narratives of times past and disparate visions of the future, this panel seeks to shed light on the limits and possibilities of dialogue as well as those ethical and political stances that might move beyond dialogue altogether.

Revolutionary Dialogue Revisited: From the East German Citizen’s Movement to the AfD

Molly Andrews University College London and City University of New York

The founding statement of Neues Forum, the East German citizen’s group which spear-headed the revolutionary changes of 1989, opened with the declaration that “communication between the state and the people has broken down.” Their radical desire was to provide a platform for dialogue across the population, a forum. Their slogan “Neues Forum, neue hoffnung’ – new forum, new hope – expressed their commitment to the primary principle of dialogue and communication as the basis for a civil society. Ingrid Koppe, East German activist, described the impetus of the citizen’s movement of 1989: “They demanded a dialogue, right, a dialogue with the mighty. They did not demand that the mighty should go, but simply 'we want to talk with you, sit down with us around a table and let's talk.” On the face of it, dialogue does not sound like a revolutionary clarion call. Far from desiring the overthrow of their country, their aims were modest: to establish communication between the state and its people. Their founding statement was signed by hundreds of thousands of people, and precipitated the massive demonstrations which eventually led to the fall of the wall and the unification of Germany. Now, 35 years later, the dramatic rise of the far right in the eastern lander builds upon what the AfD calls “unfinished business,” mobilising around a re-purposed framing of the revolutionary impetus of 1989 and promoting ‘Wende 2.0’ and giving new meaning to the phrase ‘we are the people.’ Leaders of the 1989 citizen’s movement, older now but still politically engaged, try to combat this cynical reclamation of historical memory.

Game-Set-Attune: Attuning Everyday Extremism Between Contested European Political Democratic Futures

Kesi Mahendran The Open University

This paper presents a political attunement model for building democratic capacity in contested political contexts where populist oppositional political narratives of immigration and climate-change are likely to be entrenched into disparate worldviews. This contestation we propose leads to a form of insidious prosaic political hostility which within the OppAttune project is conceptualised as everyday extremism. Everyday Extremism occurs in on-line/offline hybrids and is often understood by its protagonists as necessary direct democratic action. Political attunement offers a dialogical intervention into these contested narrative visions that characterise direct democracy. Our political attunement model proposing a figure-ground-horizon arrangement which potentially diffracts the binaries within intergroup approaches to political extremism. Dialogical self-theory (Bakhtin, 1991 Markova, 2022) is used to articulate the potential I-positionality of political actors (figure) and political narratives (Andrews, 2007) and social representations are used to understand the presuppositional ground that interpolates that positionality (ground). Finally Bakhtin’s chronotope is used to interpret the shape of past and future horizons within extreme narratives where threat and imperatives to reconstruct the future can relate to willingness to engage in political extremism. The process of attunement is gaining interest within narrative approaches such as Ragnar Rommetveit ‘attunement to the other’, speculative fabulation methods such as Tina Campt’s attunement as listening to images and posthuman attunement as creative listening (Brigstoke and Noorani, 2016). Game-playing narratives have long been intertwined within political discourse but rarely in ways which fully appreciate their chronotopic (time-space) and multi-positional protean qualities. The paper concludes by presenting the I-Attune on-line interactive which will be available to the public in a European context. It articulates five democratic actor positions which are currently being tested and their implications for dialogical democracy and dialogue.

Dialogue and Encounter: A Wartime Memory of Emmanuel Levinas

Colin Davis Royal Holloway, University of London

The possibility of dialogue is fundamental to hermeneutic thinking, be it dialogue with individuals, groups, cultures or other periods in time. One issue that arises from this is how to engage in dialogue with those who are unable or unwilling to participate, including non-human interlocutors, or when the memory or narrative of events is contested. The current paper addresses this problem by contrasting the hermeneutic concept of dialogue with the notion of encounter in the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Hermeneutic dialogue seems to require at least some degree of shared ground; but in Levinas’s work, a genuine encounter with the Other entails the shock of discovering something completely unknown, with which I have nothing in common. And yet, the Other addresses us, commands us and requires us radically to rethink ourselves and our place in the world. Levinas’s perspective is mainly human-centred, entailing what he calls the ‘humanism of the other man’. But where does this leave encounters with non-human agents? In an untypically anecdotal and personal text, Levinas recalls an incident from his time as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany. A stray dog, given the name Bobby, befriended Levinas and his group of fellow prisoners; and the dog appeared to recognise the prisoners’ humanity which their brutal conditions sought to repress. The incident may suggest a possible extension of Levinas’s ethics to non-human encounters and to encounters with those with whom I have no shared language or memory. Even so, this paper suggests that Bobby remains in service of a human-centred perspective, and the opportunity to extend the possibilities of dialogue and encounter is missed. Levinas expresses a demand to welcome the Other. At the same time, his work illustrates the difficulties involved in developing notions of dialogue and encounter which would enable an ethics and politics of unconditional hospitality.

Disparate Memories of Entangled Histories: Diasporic Postmemories of Local Collaboration in the Holocaust in Latvia and Lithuania

Eneken Laanes Tallinn University, Estonia

This paper explores two literary non-fiction texts by Baltic American women authors Linda Kinstler (Come to This Court and Cry, 2022) and Silvia Foti (Storm in the Land of Rain, 2022) that address their familial implication in the Holocaust in Latvia and Lithuania respectively. The paper is interested in how the texts deal with (trans)nationally disparate memories of the local Holocaust and its entanglement with Soviet state terror in the region. Additionally, the paper inquires the specific narrative form these non-fictional texts take to initiate a dialogue between disparate memories. The paper is also interested in the interplay between the national and transnational memory of the Holocaust in the reception of these texts and in their impact on difficult public remembering of the Holocaust in Latvia and Lithuania. Written by third generation Baltic American authors, these texts are conceived for multiple national (American, Latvian/Lithuanian) and transnational (Holocaust memory) audiences. The paper shows how literary non-fiction texts can catalyse the dialogic processes of public remembering and the dynamic transfers of memory across its different scales.

Location | AUP: Q-A101
Session Chair | Ioanna Kouki, Université Paris Cité

Poetic Representation of Lived and Imagined Experience of Language in Exile

Dr. Katrin Ahlgren Stockholm University, Sweden and Paris Institut of Advanced Study

This paper explores the aesthetic possibilities and ethical challenges of poetic representation. It is based on a representation practice originally developed in connection with a longitudinal ethnographic study focusing on foreign-born adults who arrived in Sweden at the beginning of the 21st century. Today, these individuals can be considered ”integrated” and socially included in their respective contexts. However, spanning 25 years, the study captures both challenging situations and discrimination, as well as instances of achievement, contentment, and success. Furthermore, it reflects the speaking subjects’ narrations of alternative, imaginary, and utopian aspects of life. The representational practice is referred to as 'writing nearby'—a concept inspired by the postcolonial theorist and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha, who asserts that she does not want to speak 'for' or 'about' the people she portrays, only 'nearby' (close to). Through an epistemological grounding in hermeneutical interpretation, the reconfiguration of oral narratives into written poetic texts is emphasised. An ethical implication of this approach is that the resulting texts should be seen as new versions of the original narratives, reconstructed by the researcher, or sometimes in collaboration with the speakers. Regarding aesthetic considerations, poetic representation relies on the performative ability of poetic language to convey an emotional and embodied understanding of the lived and imagined experience of language in exile. This approach can also promote aspects of linguistic creativity that do not always align with a monolingual standard norm, thus proposing alternative models of speakerhood. For this occasion, I will propose a polyphonic mode of representation—where the speakers’ voices illuminate diverse experiences, emotions, strategies, and degrees of abstraction—permitting the voices to engage in thematic dialogues with one another, representing disparate narrative worlds.

Narrative Crossings in the Works of Claudia Rankine

Dr. Angela Ruth Mullis Rutgers University

Claudia Rankine needs no introduction as one of the great American poets of our time, especially with the acclaim of her American trilogy: Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004), the award-winning Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), and Just Us: An American Conversation (2020). Her body of work presents us with ways to deconstruct America—ways to see ourselves and our participation in a larger imagined, “beloved” community. The first two works in this trilogy speak through the lens of history, coupled with recent headlines, and the brutality of repetitious, horrific racial violence. Then, Just Us, turns its focus to the personal—echoing back to her earlier works that are grounded in the poetic “self.” The End of the Alphabet (1998) and Plot (2001) delve into explorations of self—moving deliberately and unflinchingly through despair, loss, and voicelessness to “seeing” all too brilliantly the pain and torturing emotions of the human experience. Calvin Bedient writes in his introduction to The End of the Alphabet, “this book is the curtain-closer of the century’s staging of psychological torment and entrapment, life in an emotional crawl space.” Through Rankine’s “emotional crawl space,” she pulls from other literary giants (Virginia Woolf to William Faulkner and beyond), builds and weaves her voice on top of them and presents an abstract collection of poems via a narrator whose very style evokes the suffering that is so difficult to touch. This paper will examine Rankine’s earlier works, focusing on the “body”—tortured, fragmented, and bearing witness—as an entré to her later trilogy that extends these metaphors and imaginings to the macro, making the unseen visible on all levels. And ultimately, how her last work ends in an earlier starting place, an unfolding yet again into the personal, cross-racial conversations—an intimacy between Just Us.

Presupposition and the Establishing of Narrative Reality

Prof. Jonathan Culler Cornell University

During this American presidential campaign, we are painfully confronted by incompatible narrative worlds: Trump’s America is a hellscape, a failing economy, with record inflation, unemployment, illegal immigration and crime rates, whereas government narratives tell of declining inflation, crime rates, and immigration and a stock market with record highs. It is difficult to imagine techniques of reconciliation, but it is certainly worth thinking about the narrative processes of establishing fact, truth, and reality.I propose to focus, prosaically, on the role of presupposition in the establishment of narrative worlds. On the one hand, you have narratives that attempt to lay out their constituents without presupposition, such as “Once upon a time, in a faraway kingdom, there lived a beautiful princess named Snow White. She had fair skin, rosy red lips, and ebony black hair.” At the other extreme you find examples such as: “It was now lunchtime and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened.” Beginning with accounts of presupposition in linguistics, a discipline that has been less prominent in narrative theory of late than formerly but where there are interesting arguments about distinctions between logical presuppositions, pragmatic presuppositions, and implicature, and their relation to general textual structures such as anaphora, I propose to argue for the efficacy of presupposition in the establishment of narrative worlds. Examples will be taken both from narrative fiction – texts by Hemingway and Katherine Masefield – and lyric poetry, where the brevity of examples makes all the more salient the efficacy of presupposition in establishing the world of the poem.

Location | AUP: C-103
Session Chair | Jessica Feldman, The American University of Paris

“Join us next time to see what happens”: Player-Generated Content as Life Writing in Computer Games

Chi-Chieh Huang Örebro University

Our understanding of what it means to live a life has increasingly become an ever-shifting target since the digital (and now post-digital) era. How do subjects carry out disparate lives across digital platforms? This talk follows such interests in digital lives and presents player-generated content about their gameplay experiences as engaging in playful interactions with life narratives genres. I consider the composition of such materials as a form of life writing/autobiographical act in computer games. The materials examined here consist of let’s play videos and archives of challenges playthrough for computer games such as the Sims franchise and Elden Ring (2022), where players follow self- or community- imposed rules during gameplay. I identify these as digital mementos for player’s fond memories of their (inter-)actions and experiences in games, relating to ludic, extraludic, and narrative elements such as (unexpected) emergent narratives or the trophy/achievement system. Composing, i.e., recording and arranging, these materials entails players’ use of a diverse repertoire of in-game and third-party resources, situating them within the collaborative, socio-cultural practice of specific gaming communities. Further, I suggest that these materials can be viewed as engaging in playful interactions with diverse genres of life narratives, ranging from keeping video diaries of one's own island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020) to constructing digital genealogies for one's beloved characters in Oasis Springs in the Sims. Importantly, these materials demonstrate the complex interplay between rule systems in computer games and player agency. Players engage in the binary process of ludic and narrative hermeneutics, where they constantly reinterpret and reflect upon the instantiated gameplay experiences and game narratives. Player-generated content may then be considered as traces and remnants of players’ ludic and narrative identities, which crucially showcases the shared, yet disparate gameworlds in which they inhabit.

Generative AI and Storytelling: A Narrative Practice Approach

Dr. Stefan Iversen Aarhus University

The cultural spread and impact of generative AI, powered by large language models and driving popular platforms such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, Google’s Gemini and Meta’s Llama poses challenges to most of the fundamental concepts in the humanities. This includes ideas about what narration is and what it might do. The starting point for this paper is the observation that generative AI is not merely a platform for telling, not merely an infrastructure. Aided by but not reducible to prompting, generative AI can co-produce semiotic artifacts that tell stories which has led some to suggest that there now is a call to study not only storytelling in the digital, but also storytelling by the digital. Theoretically, the issue is contested: One position argues that because the output from a computational model is based on probability and statistical correlation, such a model is incapable of understanding or producing actual narration (Fletcher 2021, 2022; Phelan 2024); such models are merely “stochastic parrots” (Bender et al. 2021). Another position holds that “there is much to learn from our creations—our machines that can both ‘read’ and write stories” (Chun and Elkins 2022) because generative AI and large language models can “generate compelling narratives” (Hayles 2023) by using new forms of meaning making that potentially “disrupts human exceptionalism” (Rees 2022). Beyond this ontological debate and the many ideological debates that follow in its wake, it is clear that humans and generative AI-systems do collaborate in storytelling activities in ways that narrative theories have yet to learn about or from. Drawing on a narrative practice approach (Bamberg 2011, 2012; Georgakopoulou and Giaxoglou 2021), this paper sets out to investigate what narrative analysis can bring to the understanding of such acts of human-AI collaborative storytelling and vice versa.

AI Narratives and Their Discontents

Prof. Joshua Michael Parker University of Salzburg

This proposed presentation unpacks the way historical racism and gender bias, baked into technologies of the past, continue to proliferate in developing technologies, specifically in new narrative-making artificial intelligence programs. From the routes of early telegraph cables and electric grids, to the same topographical channels used today along the same or similar routes providing internet access to people around the world; to biases in early web design which still affect the way smartphone apps are designed to prefer users of specific ethnic, socio-economic, or cultural backgrounds; to what information from cloud storage units is drawn on by new computer algorithms – bias and discrimination built into historical technologies still affects the ways contemporary technologies provide services to users around the world. This presentation looks at discriminatory bias in story-generating artificial intelligence programs. An introduction explains the history of these technologies, tracing its similarities to the early work in structuralist narratology of Gerald Prince, from his A Grammar of Stories (1973). It then presents examples of several story-generating AI programs, some designed specifically for creating narratives, others designed for more general use. It closes with a discussion of the film Eternal You (Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck, 2024), in which a computer program allows subscribers to “speak with their dead loved ones” by synthesizing their emails and text messages. Designed by two white heterosexual men, the program provided sometimes horrifying messages “from the grave” to ethnic minorities and women, while, perhaps unsurprisingly, leaving mainly its white heterosexual male users satisfied with their interactions. As one interviewee noted, “This technology feels eerie to us now, while it’s new, but it will eventually come to feel normal. Still, it cheapens us, as humans. It cheapens human life.”

Location | AUP: C-101
Session Chair | Caroline D. Laurent, The American University of Paris

Growing Minds Growing Worlds: Traces of Extended Cognition in Literalizations of the Container-Metaphor

Katja Warstat-Willms RWTH Aachen, Germany

Fictional characters’ interaction with their environment can be understood as a literalization of extended cognitive processes and give us insight into experiences of extended cognition. Based on Stockwell’s cognitive-poetic account of conceptual metaphors (2002), McHale (2018) considers speculative fiction to literalize the figural meaning of metaphors. Metaphors are literalized through their (physical) realization, for example when books really become doors to another world in The Neverending Story. This paper argues that the literalization of metaphors in literature serves as a negotiation of the experience of extended cognition. Traces of this negotiation can be found in literalized body-as-open-container metaphors. A focus on the practice of understanding our body as an integer form that may contain a self, soul, or mind – of making sense of our human situatedness with the help of the container schema (cf. Lakoff & Johnson 1980) – allows us to trace realizations of extended cognition in which a self is no longer defined by a finite body. Kukkonen (2018) already argues that the theory of extended cognition challenges the mind-matter border. Like Clark (2008), she describes the extended mind as leaking out into the body and world. The metaphor of the leaking body-container is literalized in contemporary fungus fiction, for example in the mycelium which extends into a body made of flesh and greens (A Botanical Daughter), or in the fungus that controls a mansion and its inhabitants (Mexican Gothic). Extended cognition theory addresses the question of our (inter-)dependency with the environment. It puts a focus on our situatedness by positing that engaging with technology or in joint cognitive efforts means to extend our cognitive systems beyond our mind-body; but it also decentralizes the human from a cognitive process (cf. e.g., Hutchins 1995; Shaviro 2016). This perspective acknowledges that all (fictional) environments can be agentive.

Changing Bodies, Changing Minds: Transformations and Transformative Encounters, Dismantling the Human Animal Binary

Sam Pheby-McGarvey York St John University

Dualism, the separation of mind and body, is an underlying cause of the separation between human and non-human animals. Positioning animals as separate from humans due to their lack of language, and subsequently a conscious mind. Within human to animal transformation narratives Dualism draws a clear line between the transformed animal body and unchanged human mind. Within my research I have defined these narratives as Anthropocentric Transformations, which reinforce the mind body binary of Dualism due to the unchanging human mind.This paper will examine human animal transformations and transformative encounters. A transformative encounter with a non-human animal can be part of a human to animal transformation but is broader. Encompassing any encounter which changes the participants perspective and place in the world. The role of human animal transformations will be examined in the context of reinforcing the mind body binary. Transformative encounters can break down the barrier which separates human animals from non-human animals and improve human animal relations. This paper will explore, through close readings, the human animal transformation within Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. Gregor's transformation into vermin and his family’s negative reaction which reinforces the human animal binary, through his unchanged mental perspective and the identity as animal his family constructs for him. Transformative encounters will be examined through Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation. The biologists encounter with the strange non-human animals and landscape of Area X influences her perspective, breaking down her separation from the environment. The paper concludes that narratives, like Annihilation, which actively engage with breaking down the barriers between humans and non-humans can influence attitudes towards nonhuman animals. They can highlight issues with the treatment of animals and the world, suggesting and demonstrating new collective ways of being in the world, opposed to apart from it.

Secondary Storyworld Possible Selves: Narrative Response and Cultural (Un)Predictability

Dr. Melina Ghasseminejad University of Antwerp, Dr. Mariá-Ángeles Martínez Universidad de Alcalá

Narrative experiencers often report broadly differing narrative responses. Literary scholarship customarily addresses those shared by communities of readers as pertaining to implied and rhetorical readers. However, empirical reader-response research reveals that flesh-and-blood readers and audience members often show idiosyncratic narrative responses based on their individual experiences. Storyworld Possible Selves (SPSs) Theory (Martínez, 2014, 2018) offers an analytical toolkit for the study of both culturally predictable and completely individual responses to narratives, drawing from cognitive narratology, cognitive linguistics, and social psychology. Further empirical reader response research, however, revealed a gap in the theory by finding reader responses that are neither universally shared nor entirely idiosyncratic. This paper examines the affordances and limitations of the SPSs framework in addressing the bearing of hegemonic cultural models on narrative responses and introduces the concept of ‘secondary storyworld possible selves’ to account for responses predictable within communities that share non-hegemonic cultural models. Using an empirical reader research study on James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and the Harry Potter series as case studies, we demonstrate how subcommunities create their own dominant narratives, such as the emphasis on parental experiences in A Million Little Pieces and queer readings of non-queer narratives in the case of Harry Potter. The proposed concept of secondary SPSs offers a pathway to delve deeper into empirical narrative response data, enabling a more comprehensive exploration by shedding light on minority groups and their culturally predictable SPSs. In essence, the inclusion of secondary SPSs into the SPS framework can contribute to refining the analysis of empirical responses to narratives and facilitate a more nuanced understanding of narrative experiences and their intrinsic embeddedness in socio-cultural experience.

Location | AUP: Q-609

Session Chair | Petri Samuli Björninen, University of Turku

The four papers in this panel each discuss, from various angles but with a common focus on contemporary literature, the perceived and assumed cultural roles of authors – and fiction-writing at large – in the ongoing era of ‘multicrisis’ or ‘permacrisis’. In this are preoccupied with the uncertainties of the future, the polarization of the political sphere, and the ‘post-truth’ sentiment allegedly permeating the public discourse, literary authors are commonly looked to as prophets of sorts – and fiction itself is asked, by critics, readers and scholars, for its contribution to our society. This instrumentalization of fiction in times of crisis may involve expectations of prophetic visionary work (Kraatila’s paper), tools for thinking and discussing ongoing crises in a productive way (Laukkanen’s paper), mediation and bridge-building between various disparate realms of existence (Pirinen’s paper), or evocation of hope and resilience in a dark world (Hämäläinen’s paper). This panel asks how such cultural expectations impact the role of literary authors as participants in public discourse on the one hand, and the ethos coming through in their fiction-writing on the other.

Creativity and Speculation in Times of Uncertainty: Instrumentalizing Ethos of Storytelling in the Works of ‘Visionary’ Cli-fi Authors

Dr. Elise Kraatila Tampere University

This paper discusses ways in which contemporary speculative fiction authors regard their literary works as instruments for confronting the current era of global crises, and how such ethos comes through in the poetics of these works (cf. Korthals Altes 2014). Speculative fiction, and especially climate fiction (cli-fi) frequently consolidates possibilities of and anxieties about the future into tangible ‘what-if’ scenarios. Amid our current cultural preoccupations with verious uncertainties of the future (e. g. Caracciolo 2023; Kraatila, forthcoming), such scenarios seem to promise tools for anticipating possible futures, and sometimes even roadmaps towards better ones. In these fraught times, popular authors like Kim Stanley Robinson and N. K Jemisin are often lauded for the ‘visionary’ ways in which their fiction seems to contribute towards a better future for our planet, or humankind at large. Jemisin herself has described speculative fiction as an expression of “the aspirational drive of the Zeitgeist” (Cunningham 2018), and Robinson has discussed that his cli-fi novel The Ministry for the Future (2020) as an ‘argument’ that “we should go for the optimum society, the best one possible, given where we are now, given everything” (Mikes and New 2023). Creative futures thinking thus becomes regarded as a resource for saving the world, and wielders of that creativity assume a sometimes quasi-prophetic cultural role of reaffirming utopian desire for positive societal change.

Reading A Song of Ice and Fire in the Trenches of the Culture War: Climate-Fiction and the Crisis of Authority

Markus Laukkanen Tampere University

Is George R. R. Martin’s pivotal fantasy epic A Song of Ice and Fire, on a thematic level, about anthropogenic climate change, or is it not? In internet-age media culture, characterized by the prevalence of context collapse (Marwick & Boyd 2011) and a crisis of epistemic authority (Leiter 2024), that question cannot be easily answered. The generally agreed upon answer is always contingent, changeable, and open to negotiation. Markus Laukkanen’s presentation explores how participatory audiences use online discourse about the series as a framework for imagining climate change. In the negotiation about the meaning of the series, alternative narratives are in contest (Phelan 2008), and the authors of the most compelling ones are crowned as winners (see Mäkelä et al. 2021). These narratives are embedded in the mesh of online discourse at large and take on many characteristics of that context. They are recruited to be a part of the so-called online culture war: in this case the debate over the validity of the climate-fiction interpretation of A Song of Ice and Fire is approached as a hegemonic struggle between climate activism and denial.

From Disparate Voices to Intersectional Interpretation: Challenging the ‘Ethical Reading’ of Zadie Smith’s Short Fiction

Riikka Pirinen Tampere University

The paper explores ways in which Zadie Smith’s short stories “Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets” (2014/2019) and “Kelso Deconstructed” (2019) challenge and ironize didactics of literature and ethical reading practice by analyzing the intersectional potentialities of narration. Smith’s stories can be read as representations of characters struggling against societal discrimination, and of showing how the characters identifying in multiple minorities confront racism and sexism in their everyday lives. However, Smith problematizes the didactic interpretation of the stories as merely ‘lessons from intersectionality’ by combining disparate character voices and authorial narrators in the level of narration (Pirinen 2024). Instead, this paper proposes that the stories invite the reader to ponder and question the authority of narrative voices (see Shuman 2005). The focus of the paper is particularly on narrative devices that construct narrative authority and ethos (Korthals Altes 2014), and furthermore, on how the narrative structures of Smith’s stories are intertwined into authorial ethos and identity politics (cf. Busse 2013). The paper suggests that the analysis of narrative voices and the ethos of Smith’s stories can reveal challenges for ethical reading practice and, more broadly, for literature as an instrumental tool for training readers’ values.

Messiah Would Prefer Not To: Prophetic Cli-Fi, and the Critique of Instrumentalizing Literature in Frelseren fra Hvidovre

Ville Hämäläinen Tampere University

With the rising awareness of climate change, literary authors are called upon to address a range of crises. The expectations of spreading hope are particularly high for authors of cli-fi and spe-fi. Kaspar Colling Nielsen’s novel, Frelseren fra Hvidovre (2021, “The Redeemer from Hvidovre”), employs the genre of speculative climate fiction to reveal not only the futility of seeking simplistic answers to the climate crisis but also the instrumentalization of literature. The novel presents a retired poet who could purportedly tackle various crises simply by writing one poem. The protagonist finally agrees and becomes an unwilling Messiah. Ville Hämäläinen’s paper discusses Frelseren in terms of prophetic cli-fi (Goodbody 2018; Jackson & Jensen 2022), and divergent authorial/character’s ethos (Korthals Altes 2014). Satire allows Nielsen to ridicule disparate political views and social circles (of authors/readers/journalists) and to invite the reader to empathize with the disinterested protagonist. Beyond the ostensibly nihilistic ethos, the novel diverts attention to the narrative form. Thus, the proposed rhetorical reading shows how literary narratives can dispute the story economy (Dawson & Mäkelä 2022; Björninen et al. 2024) and critically debate the limits of storytelling.

Location | AUP: C-102
Session Chair | Ariela Freedman, Concordia University

How -- and before whom -- can survivors of a period of mass murder or death memorialize the lives and deaths of a collective? How do survivors and witnesses meet the imperative of marking loss and trauma from within moments of historical crisis or in their recent wake? How do “now testimonies” or testimonies contemporaneous with trauma as it unfolds mark the narrative particularity of survival and reckon with anxieties about complicity and survivor guilt? This panel examines questions of testimony and memorialization in relation to three periods of historic crisis, mass death, and world-breaking and making narrative disruption. In “’Now’ Testimonies by Female Physicians at Auschwitz, ” Dr. Sheila Jelen examines three memoirs by women who worked in the infirmaries of Auschwitz-Birkenau. These understudied testimonies play a crucial role in better understanding the production of Holocaust testimonies in the immediate aftermath of the war and in a time of elevated anxiety about condemnation, persecution, collaboration and survival. In “Mourning Portraits: Portraiture as Memorial and Elegy of the COVID-19 Pandemic” Dr. Ariela Freedman explores the way the portrait emerged as a prominent form during the COVID-19 pandemic, first as a way of documenting and individuating the faces and forms of life banned from mass assembly, covered with masks, and mediated through screens, and then as an elegiac work of mourning during a time of ambiguous grief and loss. Finally, in “Each Person Has a Face”: Mass Murder and Memorialization” Dr. Ilana Blumberg continues the interrogation of life narrative and portraiture as testimony and memorial through a case study of the powerful grassroots strategies used in the wake of political mass murder in the aftermath of the October 7th, 2023 massacre.

“Now” Testimonies by Female Physicians at Auschwitz

Prof. Sheila Jelen University of Chicago

Ella Lingens-Reiner (1908-2002), Olga Lengyel (1908-2001), and Gisella Perl (1907-1988), each published a memoir of her experiences as a prisoner-physician in the women’s infirmaries at Auschwitz Birkenau in the immediate aftermath of the war. Lengyel’s Souvenirs de l'au-delà was published in 1946, Lingens-Reiner’s Prisoners of Fear in 1947, and Perl’s I was a Doctor in Auschwitz in 1948. As health-care professionals, all three women were able to practice their trade in the camp, garnering special privileges and finding themselves in a better position than most prisoners to assist their fellows. At the same time, during the era of postwar trials, and particularly the doctors’ trials (1946-1947), questions arose about the role of prisoner/doctors as collaborators with the Nazis in the camps. In keeping with the theme of “now testimonies” or testimonies that emerge from the heart of darkness and contemporaneous with the traumas of war, this paper will consider the unique nature of these memoirs, published just after the war. How does each of these women speak to her experiences as a privileged prisoner while emphasizing her attempts to engage in humanitarian acts of rescue and resistance? How does each of these women articulate her own anxiety about the culture of condemnation and prosecution that arose in the years just after the end of the war, particularly as it pertained to camp “functionaries”? Special attention will be given to the fact that these three testimonies were written by women, and that in contrast to Lengyel and Perl, Lingens-Reiner was not a Jewish prisoner, but an Austrian non-Jewish one, situated during her imprisonment, by her own account, towards the top of the prisoner-functionary hierarchy.

Mourning Portraits: Portraiture as Memorial and Elegy of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Prof. Ariela Freedman Concordia University

How does the memorial portrait serve to individualize and commemorate mass death? Beginning in March 2020, the obituaries desk at The New York Times embarked on a large-scale memorial project titled “Those We’ve Lost.” Obituaries editor Daniel J. Wakin remembers being contacted by Donald G. McNeil Jr., a lead reporter on the pandemic, during the second week of March. “‘You should prepare for waves and waves of obituaries,’ he told me” (Wakin 2020). Inspired by the “Portraits of Grief” series which followed the attacks of September 11, 2001, “Those We’ve Lost” profiled the victims of an ongoing disaster. The New York Times was one of a series of memorial projects which attempted to, as Wakin wrote, “convey the human toll of Covid-19 by putting faces and names to the growing numbers of the dead, and to portray them in all of their variety.” Artists also turned to the memorial portrait as a form of elegy. Christian Boltanski’s last show Aprés, at the Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris from January 20th to March 13th, 2021, served as a reflection on a moment of salience about mass death and loss. Through portraiture and projection Boltanski repurposed his earlier work in the context of the pandemic. Rafael Lozano Hemmer’s A Crack in the Hourglass crowd-sourced a series of obituary portraits, filtered and experienced through technological mediation through a robot that recreated the portrait in grains of black and grey sand and then destroyed it. This presentation examines the elegiac portrait during COVID-19 as a tool of collective memorialization which pulls the viewer into a meditative encounter with the vast scale of pandemic death and with their own mortality during a period of ambiguous loss and grief.

“Each Person Has a Face”: Mass Murder and Memorialization

Prof. Ilana Blumberg Bar Ilan University

How do survivors of the trauma of political mass murder use and innovate forms of life narrative in order to memorialize individuals and testify to their lives and deaths? In this presentation, I want first to consider some of the general features of contemporary mass murder that are widely felt to demand redress via life narrative or portraiture; then, I want to consider the case study of Israeli society in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 massacre. This case allows us to see ways in which the particulars of national history and contemporary technologies shape the strategies used for redress and healing and, at the same time, establish the bounds of political critique. Mass murder denies dignity in death: it limits identity to ethnic parameters and denies self-defining particulars; often, it merges death with other assaults on personhood and body; it denies the comfort of any loved or benign presences as witnesses to life’s end. When mass murder comes as a surprise terror attack, it brings with it other distinctive costs, too. It allows no spiritual or practical preparation. It precludes goodbyes and the expression of final wishes, whether written or spoken, to persons present or anticipated future generations. How, then, can a society reverse or refuse dehumanizing death narratives? I will survey some of the powerful grassroots strategies used by Israelis who immediately produced and circulated virtual images and then created inexpensive, easily reproducible stickers that gave rise to shrines with images and words associated with young deaths. In recent days, Israeli political protesters have begun to produce stickers of Palestinian victims of the war as well, suggesting that the relationship between memorialization and critique is an important area for study.

Location | AUP: Q-604
Session Chair | Jelena Gledić, University of Belgrade

In an era when global challenges and various crises increase tensions between great powers, narratives merit special attention. Narratives about the “other” shape the ways in which Europe and China make sense of each other and themselves, and as such, can play a key role in whether they will pursue a competitive rivalry or collaborate to forge solutions jointly. China has become central to discussions in Europe across a wide range of policy areas, frequently with an emphasis on how the European Union (EU) and different European countries should respond to the impact of China globally and bilaterally. Potential responses are framed in terms of narratives that describe, and thereby interpret and explain, the present and future of China-Europe relations, deeply rooted in the historical context of the past. Such narratives then shape debates on policies related to China in the EU and its member states and across Europe beyond the EU. Conversely, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been developing its distinct approach to foreign policy in the past decades, in which building a vast global partnership network instead of forming alliances is a prominent part. The PRC also employs narratives to shape its bilateral relations and facilitate cooperation with European states and with the EU. All these narratives become particularly important at times of conflict or rapid change, as actors draw on familiar scripts and themes to make sense of new circumstances. In this sense, narratives play a crucial role in shaping not only how actors understand geopolitics but also how they understand themselves.

This panel explores the central role of narratives in the evolving relationship between Europe and China in a rapidly changing global context. First, the continuity and change in the evolution of EU-level narratives on China is explored, offering insights for improving EU foreign policy. Then, the way narratives reflect different EU and Chinese approaches to cultural diversity in international relations vis-a-vis a non-EU European state is analyzed, with the aim of fostering non-confrontational Europe-China relations. Finally, competing narratives on international order in the context of a rising China are examined, and a novel, more flexible and diversified "modular home" approach is proposed. The panel aims to contribute to academic debates on methodological approaches to narratives in general, as well as to inform discussions on their relevance for policy debates.

The Unicorn, the Dragon, and the Storytellers: Comparing Praxes of Narrating China in EU Foreign Policy

Steven Langendonk KU Leuven

Why are particular stories of China told in EU foreign policy? Answers to this question tend to emphasise the EU’s collective identity or strategy, and rarely touch on the communities that tell such stories. I argue that if we want to understand EU-level narratives of China, we need to consider the choices storytellers face and how their praxis contributes to EU foreign policy. In this research, I explore and compare praxes of narrating China in three distinct communities: the EU studies community; foreign policy think tanks in Brussels; and EU-level politics. My analysis rests on comparison of public documents with interviews and fieldwork conducted at different intervals between 2018 and 2024. The analysis shows that the praxis perspective can account for continuity and change in the evolution of EU-level narratives on China and offers insights for improving EU foreign policy.

The “Iron Friendship” and the “Long and Winding Road”: Narrating Sino-Serbian Relations on the Borders of the EU

Jelena Gledić University of Belgrade

This research focuses on the development of the discourse on Sino-Serbian friendship in the past several decades. The aim is to explore how narratives reflect EU and Chinese approaches to cultural diversity in international relations vis-a-vis a non-EU European state. The first decades of the 21st century have seen significant geo-economic and geo-political shifts that signal global realignments of the international landscape. As the notion of universal values came to the fore in terms of issues that globalization is facing, culture reappeared as a significant factor in international relations. By studying changes in narratives, this study demonstrates the differences between the EU’s “hands-off” approach versus the Chinese “top-down” approach to narratives on bilateral relations and cultural differences through the concept of diversity regimes. Examining how narratives reveal differing approaches to international relations in territories that have historically been perceived as “in-between” the East and the West, such as Serbia, can provide significant lessons for sustainable and non-confrontational Europe-China relations.

The Weight of History: Competing Narratives in the Context of a Rising China

Bart Dessein Ghent University

China is no longer merely an economic competitor on the global scene, but is also perceived to portray itself more and more as a norm/system setter rather than as a norm/system taker. This has provoked the narrative that the world is developing towards a new bipolar order, similar to the period of the Cold War. The call for economic derisking (or decoupling) from China that is the direct result of its race for technological (and potentially military) leadership with the Western world, can be seen as an important outcome of this narrative. At the same time, China is promoting its narrative of "Shared Future for Mankind", which is gaining traction in the Global South. Instead of the two competing narratives the author proposes a more flexible and diversified "modular home" approach, which is made possible by China's compartmentalizing its foreign policy.

Location | AUP: Q-A101
Session Chair | Sylvie Patron, Université Paris Cite

Sermons and Meaning-Making

Prof. Greger Göran Andersson Örebro universitet

Sermons are a practice of text interpretation aimed at transformation rather than mere information. A preacher’s task can be described as threefold: selecting and interpreting a biblical text, relating the message of the text to the Bible as a whole and to theology, and applying the resulting message to their listeners’ lives through analogies and examples. Swedish Pentecostal preachers generally do not follow this threefold model. Instead, they move freely between different passages as if the Bible were a single unified text, emphasizing the closeness between the world of the text and the world of life rather than their distance. Consequently, the assumed experiences of the readers are read into and put in dialogue with the biblical texts. The purpose appears to be to encourage listeners, despite their circumstances, to hold on to essential Christian practices and live committed lives. Studies show that sermons, unlike systematic theology, generally focus on the Christian life—how it can be lived and understood. It is often said that the purpose of a sermon is to open spaces of possibility. It has become common to describe Christianity as a narrative. On one level, the Christian faith can be seen as a kind of meta-narrative and a meaning-making structure that influences Christians’ interpretation of life and provides ethical direction. This might also imply that Christians interpret individual events in their lives in a particularly Christian way. Such an interpretation can be understood in two ways. First, a Christian might interpret life events in relation to the perspective given by the grand narrative. Second, a Christian interpretation of life might mean perceiving that God (or other spiritual realities) is behind what happens in life and/or that they act directly in the Christian’s life.

Countering Shakespeare's Narrative

Prof. Edna Nahshon JTSA, New York

Shylock, the problematic Jewish character of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice transcended page and stage to become the archetype of “The Jew.” Jews have considered the character defamatory and injurious and were eager to pronounce him an inauthentic travesty. Italian historian Giorgio Leti (1631-1701) offered a counter-narrative to that of “The Merchant of Venice” in his book The Life of Pope Sixtus the Fifth. According to Leti, Pope Sixtus ruled on a case in 1587 in which a rich gentile Roman and a Jewish merchant signed a bond that ended with the Christian demanding a pound of the Jew’s flesh. The Pope found both parties guilty and the two culprits narrowly avoided the death penalty by donating large sums to charity. Leti’s English translator, Ellis Farneworth, pinned this narrative as the source of Shakespeare’s Shylock story, and it became widely accepted as the basis for Shakespeare’s play. Farneworth’s attribution was a godsend from a Jewish perspective and was soon quoted in sermons, learned dissertations, and inspired several works of fiction. Jews brought up Leti in pressing the argument that Shylock was based on prejudice that led a malicious inversion whereby the victim became the villain of the story. In the latter half of the 19th century scholars realized that Leti’s account postdated the Shakespearean text. Deemed untrustworthy, it sunk into oblivion, yet it continued to palpitate in Jewish circles into the twentieth century. My presentation will discuss the works of Jewish writers who deployed Leti’s account to counter society’s master narrative of “the Jew” as the archenemy of Christianity and will argue that their use of an inverted narrative empowered them to frame their grievances against their negative stereotype while retaining the original schema of the canonical play.

Reading Monuments: What They Celebrate and What They Suppress

Prof. Maurice Aron Géracht College of the Holy Cross

National monuments are narratives, chapters of history written in bronze and stone.

They are erected to affirm and propagate the interest of their sponsors. Monuments of “pride” such as obelisks and columns, statues, parks and reserves, and architectural appropriations, profess to memorialize and vaunt accomplishments. Encomiums to the past, they can also aim to mitigate present decline, as well as diminish and suppress failures and calamities. The Titus Arch in Rome is a good example. It was built in 81/82 CE by Emperor Domitian, ostensibly to memorialize his father (Vespasian) and his brother’s (Titus) for their victories over the Jewish revolt 66-74 CE. The most famous of the Arch’s decoration proudly depicts the 71 CE triumphal procession. The bas relief parades the material treasures looted from the Jerusalem Temple, as well as slaves brought back to Rome as booty. Domitian’s intent was not only to celebrate Roman successes and pride, but to appropriate the mantles of his father and brother military successes and thus aggrandize himself and the Flavian dynasty. In fact, the Flavian military and foreign policies were brutal, the and not wholly successful. The bas reliefs attest to their brutality. The very insistence of the Arch on glorifying the sacking of Jerusalem also seeks to diminish a series foolish and costly Roman administrative decisions: the mishandling of a minor provincial incident and repeated policy blunders, which fired eight years of revolt and war. More, the 69 CE sacking of Jerusalem did not mark a final Roman victory: the 71 CE celebratory parade was premature. The Roman suppression of the revolt was not at that time accomplished. The first Jewish revolt still raged fiercely in 71 CE, and the war lasted another three years. Unwittingly, the vainglorious stone monument also undermines its own myth of glory.

Location | AUP: Q-801
Session Chair | Maria Mäkelä, Tampere University

The panel presents theoretical and analytical perspectives from the consortium project Authors of the Story Economy: Narrative and Digital Capital in the 21st-Century Literary Field (Research Council of Finland 2024–2028) and from the project’s collaborators. The presenters focus on the role of narrative and digital capital in cultural conflicts around contemporary authors. The panel offers new perspectives on how narrative studies can contribute to understanding transformations and conflicts in the literary field. Literature as an artform can no longer be considered an autonomous realm; digitalization and platformization collapse the literary with other forms of storytelling, exposing fiction authors to the demands and fluctuations of the story economy. The panelists analyze how the author’s personal story (narrative capital) is increasingly intertwined with the risks and gains of the digital literary sphere.

The Effects of Narrative Context Collapse on the Literary Field

Dr. Maria Mäkelä Tampere University

Contemporary storytelling is characterized by what early social media theorists termed the context collapse: the original producer of the content has little control over the communication situation as the audiences and the contexts of reception in social networking sites are highly diverse, and if the content goes viral, they become unpredictable. In short, sharing has become the most powerful gesture of narrative stancetaking. The presentation argues that context collapse forms a pivotal part of the digitalization of the literary field, with significant consequences for literary rhetoric and ethics. Concept collapse fosters what will be conceptualized as narrative context collapse: the reception and evaluation of literature online promotes the collision of storytelling genres, recasting literary fiction as political positioning and authors as representatives of particular narrative identities within the public sphere. In the presentation, narrative context collapse will be analyzed in the context of cultural conflicts in the contemporary French literary field.

Fighting for Autonomy in Literary Fields – The Case of Anna Burns’ Milkman

Dr. Matti Kangaskoski Tampere University

One of the key hypotheses of the Authors of the Story Economy consortium is that the relative autonomy of literary fields is being lost to digital capital. In other words, the power of literary fields to intrinsically determine or to participate in determining the values of literature is diminishing. In my presentation, I discuss this loss as proletarianization in Bernard Stiegler’s sense, in which proletarianization means the loss of knowledge, which leads to the loss of agency. In practice, the loss of agency and autonomy is, of course, not total: literary fields both adopt and resist the values offered by digital capital, thus producing cultural conflicts. A major arena of these conflicts is literary prizes, e.g. the Booker Prize win of Anna Burns’ Milkman in 2018. The book itself stages an aesthetic conflict where contemporary literary values are negotiated, but a similar conflict is played out in the reception of the book, which sparked a controversy around “readability”, a key aesthetic norm of digital capital that Milkman, in my reading, both acknowledges and resists.

Narrative Permissibility and the Story Economy of Minority Voices: Exploring Yellowface and Danish Literary Culture

Prof. Stefan Kjerkegaard Aarhus University

This paper examines Rebecca Kuang's Yellowface as a lens through which to explore the complexities of authorship and storytelling in a literary field shaped by cultural conflicts. Drawing on Christopher González’s concept of “narrative permissibility”, the talk addresses the power dynamics that allow some authors to narrate experiences beyond their own identities freely. In contrast, others often are confined to identity-based, autobiographical narratives. Kuang's Yellowface, where a white protagonist appropriates an Asian-American author’s work, raises critical questions about who gets to tell which stories and for what purpose. From this, I will turn to the current Danish literary culture, where the recent rise in minority authors being published is promising yet risks becoming another form of digital capital in the overall story economy.

The Blurring of Authorship and Distribution: A Case Study of the Pirkka-Product Controversy Surrounding Kari Hotakainen's Novel Helmi

Dr. Laura Piippo Tampere University

Kari Hotakainen's latest novel, Helmi (2024), was released as a private label product under the Kesko Corporation’s Pirkka brand, sparking significant discussion in both traditional and social media. Kesko is a Finnish retailing conglomerate, and this form of liaison was unprecedented in the Finnish context. This paper examines the controversy surrounding Hotakainen's unconventional distribution method, focusing particularly on how the roles of distributor, author, and the work itself become blurred in the reception and other paratexts of the work. This ambiguity raises important questions about the role of narrative and digital capital on the public positioning of both the work and its creator. The presentation analyzes how these forms of capital shape the dynamics of the work’s reception and dissemination, offering perspectives on contemporary media culture and the concept of authorship.

Location | AUP: C-102
Session Chai | Molly Andrews, University College London

In this panel, we examine how narratives stretch across the disparate worlds of refugees and non-refugees, at times supporting or generating collective worlds, however imperfectly shared. Across the papers, we explore ways in which relations between disparate narrative worlds are negotiated across the power differences or ‘disparities’ that invest them. We also address the varying types of translation that achieve such relational negotiations. Throughout, we focus, not on the content of narratives, but on the material, structures and contexts that constitute narratives’ disparities, relationalities, translations and commonalities. While symbol systems that build meaning are narratives’ necessary material, the conventionally assumed universality of such symbolic materials is problematic. For this assumption ignores some distinct or ‘disparate’ materials - for instance, the co-presence in many refugees’ narratives of lexicons of history, politics and theory, not just of experience; the overlooked domestic materiality in refugee men’s narratives; and the effects of refugees’ first languages within their narratives. While such ‘disparate’ particularities of narrative materials remain overlooked within minority-world understandings of narratives, relations and translations between refugee and non-refugee narrative worlds will remain limited. Universalising assumptions about narrative structure also gloss over the registration, as opposed to the representation, of refugees’ traumatic experiences of persecution, escape and resettlement. Such ‘registration’ is a move that allows a limited translation of formally ‘untranslatable’ trauma, bringing it into a provisional but critical relation with conventional narrative structure. This marking of disparate, ‘un-narrated’ worlds within narratives is an important but under-recognised instance of refugee narrators claiming a shared ‘right to narrate.’ Finally, generalised framings of narrative ‘context’ often reify narrative identities such as ‘refugee’ or ‘Black’, simplifying disparity in a way that erases contexts’ complexities. Such generalisations may also operate conceptually, assimilating ‘belonging’ for example to the context of those born in their country of residence, as something stable, complete and unconditional. ‘Context’ generalisations also work to flatten refugees’ individual voices, privileging researchers’ own homogenising versions of those voices. Moving from disparity to narrative worlds shared between refugees and non-refugees therefore requires negotiating narrative power, attending to what is not canonically ‘narrative’, and listening to what non-refugee narrative audiences have not yet fully heard, seen or felt, in order to understand the complicated relationalities between narratives that may, with more just and attentive translations, build narrative worlds held at least partially in common.

Neverending Stories of Rupture and Trauma in Forced Displacement

Dr. Aura Lounasmaa Tampere University

Natalya Bekhta (2023: 3) states, that “Utopia is […] a process of working through the lived contradictions of a given historical situation towards a new configuration”. As its ending cannot be derived, utopia commands a new narrative form, where meaning emerges although the end is not known. Utopia arises from a rupture, and such rupture is also likely to carry with it an element of trauma. While trauma does not necessarily lead to utopia, the rupture that both of these share suspend future, prevent closure and can make it impossible to imagine an ending for the story. Bekhta suggests, that Utopian narratives require a new form, where ending is no longer necessary. This paper considers the possibilities of telling stories about ruptures, including trauma, by people who have been forcibly displaced. There are stories that can easily be told, stories that have already been translated to the language of the host society and its bureaucrats and stories that do not unsettle the (white Western) listener. These stories follow the familiar narrative structure and create positions for both the teller and the listener that allows the listener to feel pity, awe or shock but do not require questioning their own role in the events. Arts-based methods and participatory research can help create relational spaces where different kinds of stories, even unsettling ones, may arise, but these are easily lost in our insistence to translate them into narrative structures familiar to us. The aim of the paper is not to look for Utopia in the told and untold stories of forced displacement, but to consider what we can learn from Bekhta’s conception of narrative logic and its absence. What other kinds of logics arise in the narratives of trauma, rupture, displacement and resettlement, that allow new understanding of what constitutes a story?

“It’s very hard to really pin down why people in universities put up barriers”: Complex Narratives as Refugee-Centred Theories of How to Create a Pluriversity for Forced Migrants

Mir Abdullah Miri Bath University, Holly Rooke heffield University, Prof. Corinne Squire Bristol University

Most minority-world country governments currently construct a hostile environment - a disparate, even expulsive world - for migrants, in their policy narratives and those narratives’ enactments. UK universities’ narratives of forced migrant students are often similarly expulsive and ‘bordering’. But the disparate worlds of refugees and non-refugees are not as homogeneous or separate as they seem. UK universities also reiterate internationally-agreed narratives of refugees’ rights to higher education (HE), retain relics of the sector’s post-war commitment to democratisation, offer humanitarian alongside rights-based ‘widening participation’ provision - albeit sparse - for forced migrants, and at times articulate a broader, majority-world created, approach to the ‘pluriversity’. Acknowledging the possibilities opened up by these narrative contradictions, we investigated how refugees and those working with them in HE, further education, NGOs and local authorities in the south-west of the UK viewed the constraints and affordances around refugees’ HE access, through an interview study with 38 participants. We focus here on the complex narratives constructed by participants from all sectors from material that does not always seem like ‘narrative’: that brings together political experiences with policy analysis, political positions and historical accounts. We also explore participants’ narratives of ‘belonging’ in specific educational and community contexts, distinct from conventional narratives of general social belonging . We argue that such narrative complexity works, not to build understanding between equal but differently situated worlds, but to explain and theorise disparity and commonality from refugee-centred positions of greater knowledge and ‘understanding, and in the process, to contest the epistemic violence of dominant university narratives. Relationality and translation are thus possible between refugees’ and non-refugees’ narrative worlds, but these worlds’ contextual particularities and inequalities need to be recognised. For this means that narratives across disparate worlds are never just conversations, but always also contestation.

Narrating Belonging through Food Practices: Home, Masculinities and New Forms of Belonging

Dr. Mastoureh Fathi University College Cork

Narrating the sense of belonging has so far been studied and theorised mostly in relation to spaces and places. It is usually ‘some place’ that we narrate that we belong to – a belonging which can be realised at different scales: a home place, a city, or a country. These similar approaches to understanding belonging in migration settings rely on understanding experiences of exclusion/inclusion through social relations and group memberships that could evoke othering dichotomies of us/them. The use of material entities in understanding the sense of belonging is a a new turn. However, narratives of belonging particularly within migrant men’s lives are rather under-studied in sociology and migration studies. Within this gap, studies of domestic and food-related practices in male migration are even more scarce. This paper approaches narratives of belonging through a material dimension, understanding masculinity(ies) through food-related narratives. Based on a research project with young men about their attempts of find ‘pockets of belonging’ in the non-cosmopolitan city of Cork, Ireland, this paper develops the idea of ‘belonging appropriation’ as a new form of belonging. This new form of belonging is fluid and changeable, adapting its limits to what is viable and available to belong to, rather than depending on the past, or nostalgia for homeland.

Exploring the Narratives of Black Female Refugees Residing in the UK

Safa Ali Manchester University, UK

This study explores the lived experiences of Black female refugees in the United Kingdom, revealing how their narratives shape and reflect disparate worlds, marked by the intersecting forces of race, gender and displacement. Through a narrative approach, this research foregrounds, in its narrative material, the voices of participants in the literal language of those voices, uncovering also how their stories often exist as ‘disparate’: at the margins of dominant societal narratives. These women navigate worlds divided by systemic inequalities, racism and sexism, which shape their everyday realities in ways that set them apart from mainstream experiences of ‘integration’. Key themes which arise including feelings of displacement, systemic discrimination and the preservation of identity which illustrate the tensions between the women’s personal worlds – the individual contexts not assimilable to context categories such as ‘Black African’ and ‘refugee’- and the broader societal narratives of ‘inclusion’ and ‘belonging’ as these are conventionally understood. Yet, the study also highlights the resilience and hope embedded in these narratives, where spirituality, social support and cultural heritage become vital resources for survival and relational connection. By bringing these disparate narrative worlds into dialogue, the study not only exposes the deep divides within refugee experiences but also gestures toward the possibility of a translated and shared meaning and solidarity. The research advocates for policy reforms that dismantle systemic barriers and create more inclusive spaces for Black female refugees, thus contributing to a more just and unified narrative of refugee integration. In doing so, it calls for bridging the divides between these fractured worlds, fostering a shared understanding that can inform more effective and equitable refugee support systems.

Location | AUP: Q-704

Session Chair | Anne Bradley, Toi Ohomai Institute of Technology

Multivoiced Narratives: Perspective Shifting as a Tool for Enhancing Qualitative Inquiry

Dr. Svetlana Jovic State University of New York

A change of perspective enables a multifaceted and layered understanding of everyday phenomena as well as of the subjects of scientific inquiry. In my research I explore the ways in which multivoicedness can be created in the context of narrative research – from the way we invite narrators to position themselves in their stories to how we understand the nature of stories. Since the issues that participants mention in their narratives are likely determined by the present or implied readers and listeners of the narrative (Bakhtin, 1986; Holquist, 1990, Josselson, 2013), eliciting narratives from multiple stakeholders’ perspectives gives sound to voices that would otherwise remain silent had we included only one stakeholder’s stance. While narrating/making sense from one perspective (and for one particular audience), certain issues may be minimized or even silenced due to, for example, power dynamics between the present or envisioned interlocutors. These same issues may arise while taking another standpoint and narrating from different person’s perspective (Daiute, 2009; Jović, 2017, 2020). By designing multiple expressive activities and asking participants to provide more than one narrative, and by engaging them in multiple relational stances, we open possibilities by inviting complexity and contradiction in people’s narratives. I will illustrate different ways in which I operationalized Bakhtin’s concept of addressivity (Bakhtin, 1986) across different research projects (exploring minority youth’s sense-making around issues of injustice and socio-spatial inequality in New York City), by playing with the rhetorical context – audience, purpose, and genre of communication.

Ethical Uncertainty and Disparate Worlds in Multiperspective Narratives

Gabriele D'Amato Ghent University, and University of L'Aquila

Multiperspective narratives offer an effective means to explore the multifaceted nature of reality, where alternative facts and competing versions of the truth seem to coexist. Such narratives expose the divides between disparate worlds—whether shaped by generational, social, or ideological differences. Following Hanna Meretoja (2018), I focus on the ethical value of multiperspective narratives in terms of “potential”: foregrounding uncertainty, perspective-awareness, and the interplay of characters’ values, multiperspective narratives are well-suited for negotiating moral complexity and challenging audiences’ ethical assumptions. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster (2023) adopts multiperspectivity to examine the divides between adults and children, teachers and students, and heteronormative and queer experiences. The movie retells a school-related conflict three times, through the perspectives of a mother, a teacher, and a young boy, each offering a partial and subjective account of the events. As the audience navigates these shifting viewpoints, it becomes clear that generational gaps, institutional power, and concealed queer identities shape the characters’ understanding of the crisis in radically different ways. The movie’s refusal to offer narrative closure—culminating in an ambiguous ending—reinforces this multiperspective uncertainty. By withholding a definitive truth, Monster invites viewers to confront the moral complexities of interpreting crises when no single perspective provides epistemological or ethical closure. The different interpretations of the ending foreground both a tragic reading and the possibility of hope: this unresolved tension reveals how societal assumptions, particularly around authority and normative identities, obscure marginalized experiences—especially those of children and queer individuals in institutional spaces. Through its exploration of these layered divides, Monster aligns with the conference’s theme by showing how multiperspective narratives can engage with the ethical stakes of navigating competing realities, while leaving open the possibility for hope and empathy across different worlds through the narrative juxtaposition of multiple character perspectives.

Towards a Multidirectional Memory: How Ukrainian Literature Reflected on the Holocaust in the 1940s–1960s

Hanna Protasova University of Western Ontario

The paper focuses on the representation of the Holocaust in Soviet Ukrainian and Ukrainian émigré fiction of the 1940s – 1960s. Drawing upon LaCapra’s concept of “empathetic unsettlement” and Rothberg’s notion of “multidirectional memory”, the paper argues that Soviet Ukrainian and Ukrainian émigré literatures created two mutually complementing (rather than mutually excluding) discourses when it comes to Holocaust memory. Thus, these discourses contributed to the creation of “new forms of solidarity and new visions of justice” (Rothberg). Despite the official Soviet policy to refer to the victims of the Nazi genocide as to “peaceful Soviet people” and thus to obscure the experience of the Jews in occupied territories, Soviet Ukrainian writers spoke directly about the tragedy of the Holocaust. In their turn, Ukrainian émigrés in post-war Europe did not face any official prohibitions to depict the Holocaust, but still had to deal with difficult ethical choices while speaking about their recent past. By analyzing Soviet Ukrainian (Varvara Cherednychenko, Iurii Smolych, Iurii Ianovskyi, and Mykola Bazhan) and postwar émigré (Iurii Klen, Eva Biss) fiction, the proposed paper reveals the complexity of the issue of Holocaust representation in postwar writings and shows how the authors oscillated between compassion and indifference towards their Jewish neighbors.

Location | AUP: C-101
Session Chair | Florian Lützelberger, University of Bamberg

Narratives shape reality and have done so for millennia. Since the dawn of time, humans have told stories to explain the origin of the world and the conditions of Their existence, as well as their own place within the cosmos. The most lasting and impactful of these stories have the power to constitute collective identities, establish norms and values, and legitimize knowledge: these narrative structures are called "myths." The proposed panel conceptualizes contemporary narratives as structurally equivalent to traditional myths. Based on the assumption that myths generate meaning without confirming to the standard of rational discourse, the panel explores the implications of this equation: what does it mean for contemporary political and social discourses to be shaped by mythical thinking? Approaching the relationship between narrative and myth from a variety of political, epistemological, historical, ecocritical, posthumanist, and feminist perspectives, I am convinced that this panel will provide a productive addition to the conference "Narrative Matters 2025."

Myth after the Human: Donna Haraway’s Mythical Horizon

Matthäus Leidenfrost Free University Berlin

In Staying with the Trouble (2016) Donna Haraway suggests myth is a viable means to interpret the world as an intricate network of interconnections, allowing an escape from the rigid paradigms of modernity. Not without its detractors, in Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (1988), Jürgen Habermas, the paragonial defender of modernity, identifies the contemporary resurgence of myth as a problematic regression. This theoretical conflict serves as the starting point for my analysis on status of myth as a posthuman strategy. In this essay I ask where this provocative gesture comes from and what follows out of the turn towards myth for a posthuman endeavour. Retracing Haraway’s argument, I will show how she hopes to instrumentalize myth in helping break out of the confinement of postmodern theoretical stagnation. At the same time, I will offer a critical evaluation of her approach that asks what may be put at risk – e.g. the achievements of the Enlightenment, which today remains one of the most impactful “grand narratives”. This focus on myth opens a broader discussion on the theoretical limitations and concealed ambitions of posthumanism. Ultimately, I show that Haraway’s turn to myth does not occur in isolation but is part of a broader critique of modernity that can be traced back, as I argue, to one of its most fundamental critics – Friedrich Nietzsche. Reading him as a posthumanist precursor (Landgraf 2023) allows me to highlight the ambiguous attempt of speaking about the limitations of the discourse of modernity, while not being able to transcend it. This analysis then shows how myth functions as an attempted decentering, because of its liminal status, as always already in the world, but never fully apprehensible.

“You are many all on your own.” Medusa’s Metamorphoses from Antiquity to Contemporary European, North and Latin American (Popular) Literature and Political Culture

Dr. Florian Lützelberger University of Bamberg

The reception and réécriture of myths are thriving, ancient myths, revisited from a contemporary perspective, continue to captivate thousands of readers even in the 21st century. The goal of my paper is to explore the ambivalence and transformation of a very specific female mythological figure, Medusa, tracing her journey from a symbol of female monstrosity in Antique literature to an emblem of vulnerability, diversity and marginalisation, particularly in contemporary (popular) literature and the political discourse of the Western World, prima inter pares for many kinds of marginalised people and groups. However, I contrast those depictions with how ancient texts, primarily written by men, reduced Medusa to an object (or: abject) of fear and violence, stripping her of agency – a misogynistic tendency that (despite the positive trends, particularly in young adult fiction) sadly remains popular, especially in the political discourse all of the world, comparing powerful women such as Angela Merkel, Hillary Clinton or Dilma Rousseff to monstruous Medusa, cruelly dehumanizing them. Thus, the myth of Medusa remains relevant in the 21st century popular and political culture, exposing and deconstructing prevalent misogynistic narratives when describing powerful women. The way the myth is reinterpreted oscillates between an extreme empowerment and devastating discrimination, which I would like to demonstrate using examples from literature and visual media.

Location | AUP: C-103
Session Chair | Caroline D. Laurent, The American University of Paris

Narrativizing the Anorexic Voice: Literary Portrayals of Anorexic Women's Inner Speech

Jasmine Mortazavi Accent, France

People with anorexia have pointed out the presence of an internal dialogue or commentary, an “anorexic voice,” that is primarily concerned with decisions related to food and exercise and that often also makes judgments about these peoples’ self-worth. In studies in the field of psychology as well as in literature, the conflictual aspect of this inner speech is highlighted. The anorexic voice makes negative claims about a person’s physical appearance, actions, and personality while another inner voice fights this narrative once hopes of recovery are in sight. In the first stages of the illness, the anorexic person typically perceives the anorexic voice as a beneficial entity presenting anorexia as a way to better deal with life, which is why the person initially listens to the voice without protest. The perceived positive characteristic of the voice is also part of why recovery is delayed - why the conflict persists once it begins. This paper will study the literary narratives Une Petite voix me disait de maigrir encore by Solène Revol and Skinny by Ibi Kaslik as two different examples of the anorexic voice phenomenon to examine how the protagonists’ anorexic voice has been narrativized, how the relationship between the protagonists and their anorexic double develops, and how the narratives or fictions that the voices create allow the protagonists to both continue being anorexic and start to recover. In a recovery narrative like Revol’s, even if the anorexic voice is not silenced forever, an almost harmonious coexistence of voices is possible. In the absence of recovery, like in Kaslik’s story, there is a convergence of the inner voices’ narratives for the worse, despite efforts to recover. In both cases, there is a search for some degree of inner agreement as the experience of constantly being in conflict with oneself is unbearable.

Haunted by You: Second-Person Narration and Sexual Abuse in Liv Nimand Duvå’s Novel 'The Rose Rule'

Pernille Meyer Aarhus University

In this paper, I propose a new typology that allows me to account for the different uses of second-person narration in Liv Nimand Duvå’s novel 'The Rose Rule' (original title: 'Rosenreglen', 2019). In the novel, a young woman, Kat, prepares an art exhibition, featuring a series of photographs that was taken of her at the age of 12. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the photographer sexually abused her, and that the art exhibition is an act of revenge, culminating in an explosion that severely injures three male visitors. One of the most striking features of the novel is its narrative form: the novel consists of two strands, one about the 12-year-old Kat referred to as “you”, and one about the 27-year-old Kat referred to as “I”. However, the “you” also intrudes the present as a haunting reminder of the sexual abuse Kat suffered as a child: “I open my eyes and see you emerging from the forest” (Duvå 2019, 53, my translation). Challenging current understandings of second-person narration as revolving around a “you” protagonist (e.g. Fludernik 1993; Kacandes 1994; Richardson 2006; DelConte 2003; Herman et al. 2010), I suggest distinguishing between two types of second-person narration: 1) second-person narration without a marked instance of enunciation and 2) second-person narration with a marked instance of enunciation. Through its combination of these two types, I argue, Duvå not only illustrates the past’s continuous presence in the present, but also points towards the reader, emphasizing how sexual abuse can potentially happen to everyone.

Unconscious Crisis: Unreliable Narration as a Narrative of Distress

Jessica Jumpertz Independent Researcher

As a concept in narrative theory, unreliable narration has repeatedly been used as an analytical tool to make sense of ambivalent narratives, mostly foregrounding narrators deviating from moral and ethical social standards. However, Nünning ([1998] 2013) and more recently Beckmann (2020) have included divergences from standards of ‘psychological normality’ as another category in the classification of unreliable narratives. This paper argues that unreliable narratives in the latter case, namely as deviations from our basic assumption of intersubjectively shared reality and ‘normal’ mental states, can act as a narrative of personal crisis. In novels such as Ottessa Moshfegh’s Death in her Hands (2020) or Mona Awad’s Bunny (2019), genre markers and textual contradictions lead to an ambivalent narrative which can be categorized as ambiguous-unreliable narration (see Vogt 2015). Here, the ambivalence in the representation and evaluation of events does not only lead to factual unreliable narration (depending on readers’ interpretations), but they further reveal that the epistemological uncertainties represented in the character-narrators’ mental states are the product of a seminal moment of crisis in their lives.

Ambiguous-unreliable narratives can therefore not only highlight differences of world perception in distressed characters, but also foreground moments of crisis which can lead to a different form of interpreting the world and acting accordingly. This probably leads to recipients’ questioning their own epistemological understanding of the world and creates opportunities for perspective-taking by inviting readers to ask themselves how to solve the contradictions and discrepancies. By confronting readers with these challenges, unreliable narratives foregrounding mental and personal distress can utilize literature’s didactic potential because they offer the opportunity of putting themselves into the narrator’s shoes (see also Beckmann 2020) and understanding differences in world perception which can be triggered by critical life events.

Location | AUP: Q-604
Session Chair | Constance Pâris de Bollardière, The American University of Paris

How is the tragedy of the Holocaust remembered beyond mainstream commemorative practices? How do minority groups, either dissenting from or overlooked by the mainstream Jewish consensus, narrate their unique identities? What tools do individuals have at their disposal when experiencing the long-lasting effects of humiliation? This panel seeks to decentralize the debate on contemporary Jewish memory by focusing on narratives that rarely (if ever) come to the forefront of public and specialized Jewish cultural studies discourse. The peripheral status of these narratives may arise from the social norms governing the groups that produce them (e.g., the language and accessibility of Hasidic theatre) or from the groups’ liminal position, which transcends conventional ways of describing cultural minorities (such as Yugoslav Jewish women). Other narratives may result from individual responses to deeply traumatizing experiences, such as humiliation, the utmost example of which was the Holocaust.

The panel explores three peripheral narratives related to the Jewish Holocaust and post-Holocaust memory and identiy. The first paper focuses on Holocaust narratives and their role in the construction of Balkan-Jewish identity, using the example of Miriam Steiner Aviezer (born 1935). The second paper examines the creative ways in which the memory of the Holocaust is narrated in contemporary Yiddish plays produced by and for Hasidic audiences in North America. The third paper draws on the 20th- and 21st-centuries Jewish and non-Jewish philosophy to explore strategies employed in individual narratives as responses to humiliation.

“This is my Holocaust”: Between Yugoslavia and Israel. The Case of Miriam Steiner Aviezer

Dr. Katarzyna Taczyńska Polish Academy of Sciences

Balkan Jewish women, both Ashkenazi and Sephardic, have often been overlooked in scholarship due to the liminal and subversive nature of their identities. As a multiple minority (Filipović and Vučina Simović), they transcend dominant Balkan cultural narratives, yet their experiences reveal the region’s inherent hybridity. This presentation explores the work of Miriam Steiner Aviezer, born in 1935 in Karlovac, Croatia. A survivor of concentration camps in Croatia and Italy, Steiner later joined the partisan movement with her parents. After WWII, she actively engaged in Jewish cultural preservation and, in 1971, emigrated to Israel, where she contributed to Holocaust commemoration efforts, including at Yad Vashem. She also published her memoirs, originally in Slovenian, which were translated and used as educational material. Through one-on-one in-depth interviews, transcript analysis, as well as examination of various texts, audio, and visual elements, my paper delves into Jewish, Balkan, and women’s identity, reconstructing how Steiner’s identity evolved over time. It also examines how narrative, self-attribution, and exclusion shape such identities, both in the Balkans and Israel (where Steiner still lives). The presentation critically reflects on the literary tradition that defines the national, ethnic, religious, cultural, and gendered identities of the region.

Narrating Humiliation. From Revenge to Gestures of Solidarity

Dr. Katarzyna Liszka University of Wrocław

Humiliation is one of the most severe harms experienced by human beings. The memory of humiliation leaves a deep mark on individuals, often enduring despite the passage of time (Margalit 2020). Reliving the emotion of humiliation can motivate individuals to seek revenge, pursue justice, preserve the memory of the injustice, bear witness, or, ultimately, forgive. My focus is on the ways individuals respond through narratives to the humiliation they have suffered; the utmost example of humiliation being the experience of the Holocaust. Drawing on Jewish and non-Jewish philosophical literature on humiliation (Margalit 1996; Rorty 1989; Frevent 2020; Nussbaum 2004; Taylor 2020; Fricker 2010; Krygier 2011; Ripstein 1997), I will highlight different responses to humiliation, including testimony, public parrhēsia, subversive strategies, and narratives focused on revenge, shame, despair, helplessness, or forgiveness. Drawing on Dianne Taylor’s Sexual Violence and Humiliation: A Foucauldian-Feminist Perspective, I will develop the concept of "gestures of solidarity," understood as acts of kindness and care toward those who may or may not be able to find words to describe what has happened to them.

"A Dark Night in Warsaw": Holocaust memory in contemporary Hasidic Yiddish plays for children

Dr. Wojciech Tworek University of Wrocław

How does the contemporary Hasidic community narrate the memory of the Holocaust for future generations. Decimated by the Nazi-orchestrated genocide in Europe, Hasidic communities reconstituted themselves in the post-war world, centering around two new hubs: the United States and Israel. Committed to preserving the Jewish East-European mystical-pietistic way of life, Hasidim created a vibrant, Yiddish-centered subculture that diverged from the mainstream Anglophone American-Jewish and Hebrew-speaking Israeli cultures. This dissent from mainstream commemorative practices led some scholars to believe that the Hasidim repressed Holocaust memory. However, recent scholarship by Michal Shaul, Naftali Loewenthal, and others has disproved this assumption, demonstrating that Holocaust memory has not only permeated post-war Hasidic culture but has also been in constant dialogue with non-Hasidic narratives. Building on their work, I examine a marginal yet increasingly popular form of Hasidic popular culture: Yiddish theatrical plays and their role in shaping Holocaust memory in predominantly North American Yiddish communities. The Hasidic Yiddish theatre evolved from a centuries-old tradition of carnival plays for the festival of Purim. As noted by Shifra Epstein, since the early post-war years, this theatre has helped Hasidic communities in the USA process the trauma of destruction. In my paper, I highlight recent theatrical productions staged for thousands of spectators in large venues across America, which are also available on DVD and through streaming services. By doing so, I explore contemporary Hasidic Holocaust memory, as narrated by mass-produced Yiddish popular culture.

Location | AUP: C-505

Session Chair | John Pier, University of Tours

Forging Narrative Possibilities: Fictional Responses to Disparate Historical Crimes against Humanity

Prof. Perry Wayne Myers Albion College

Simona Forti, New Demons (2014), rejects the simplistic duality of good and evil, and proposes instead a link between “docility and evil” (New Demons, 210), which Michael Rothberg builds on in The Implicated Subject (2019) to implore us to move beyond the strictures of the perpetrator-victim paradigm—though not discard it—to explore more comprehensively the complex nuances of human complicity and how implicated subjects are shaped by legacies of historical violence that continue to bolster and sustain pernicious ideologies and violent political regimes. Re-thinking evil and implication in this manner prompts questions about the formulation of ethical paradigms. In response, narrative fiction, or storytelling, provides one important “mode of exploration,” as Hanna Meretoja argues, “that can function as a form of ethical inquiry” (Ethics of Storytelling, 142). Yet, such ethical meaning-making does not occur in a temporal vacuum, rather it emerges in explicit contexts—localities—with linkages to the past through memories. Working through memory in narrative fiction, again Meretoja, “… is not merely a matter of representing and understanding the past; it also shapes how we perceive our possibilities in the present and for the future.” (Ethics of Storytelling, 95), and thus engenders the possibility for repair and reconciliation. My paper will explore several distinctive examples of more recent narrative fiction that grapple with disparate catastrophic historical crimes against humanity: Ferdinand von Schirach’s Der Fall Collini (German WWII atrocities); Percival Everett’s James (US slavery); and Amit Majmudar’s Partitions (India-Pakistan Partition). As I will argue, these heterogeneous texts forge a dialogic space in which new perspectives on complicity emerge and new ethical possibilities unfold—each model an alternative story—that can help re-create and shape our present ethical stance in the world.

Narratives in the Post-Conflict Era: A Path to Healing or Harming?

Maya Camargo-Vemuri Johns Hopkins University

How does the construction (and deconstruction) of narratives in the post-conflict era impact a society’s ability to heal? We know that narratives can play a strong role during, and even before, conflicts, to set the stage for violence and even foment or justify it, but it can have an equally powerful role in allowing victims and affected communities to get through conflict, marginalization, and loss. When propaganda and nationalist narratives are examined and deconstructed in the post-conflict eras, they can shed light on the dangerous tools used by states and societies to foment discrimination, targeting, and victimization. Conversely, when victims are allowed to tell their truth, share their personal experiences, and establish history in its entirety – however terrifying and difficult to witness – it can be validating and restorative. Additionally, the process of truth-telling in the post-conflict era is thought to be by some peace and conflict scholars to be an important step towards creating a more unified nation through the acceptance of an honest, if painful, portrait of the society’s prior, violent era. While the theoretical implications of truth-telling and post-conflict narrative construction are promising, in practice, the reality is more complicated. Some efforts at reconstructing wartime experiences and deconstructing narratives tied to violence are more successful than others, as some realities are more difficult to accept than others. This presentation uses two empirical cases to consider the theoretical and actual utility of narratives to heal societies in post-conflict eras. The first is the recent attempts at truth-telling and peace construction in Colombia; the second is the transitional justice process following the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Through an evaluation of internal politics and social dynamics, and external interpretation of results, this presentation identifies which methods of narrative-building succeed in healing society and which ones end up doing the opposite.

“There Are Places We Should Not Stand…” Understanding the Disparate Narratives of Women Mediators in Africa

Dr. Bianca Rochelle Parry University of Pretoria

In recent years, there has been an global escalation in humanitarian crises and threats such as violent extremism, human trafficking, and the global refugee crisis, which threaten the health, safety, and wellbeing of communities. It is during such tumultuous times that the needs and actions of relegated members of society, most often women and girls, receive significantly decreased of attention. Despite their relegation, women worldwide are bridging divides as leaders of movements for reconciliation and reconstruction in their communities. With Resolution 1325, the United Nations recognised the vital role women play in promoting the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda. Although there is much focus on women and peace in the architecture of the WPS agenda, its nature, composition, and focus points are often based on global North considerations. Regardless, recognition of women peacekeepers, relief workers and mediators is prevalent in the global South and has been championed in Africa. This article aims to contribute towards a holistic understanding of women mediators in Africa by explicating their narratives of being professional mediators while dealing with the traditional gender role expectations that encumber all women. Twelve women from Africa shared their stories of mediating conflict, demonstrating their knowledge of Western peace processes and their use of African communal peace practices. These disparate narratives and their reconciliation within the lived experiences of these women are explored through a decolonial feminist framework. The dearth of research on the topic in Africa, and the collaborative nature of this study, resulted in a narrative project that is the first of its kind and exploratory. Understanding African women mediators, their social circumstances and personal narratives, highlights not only the diverse ways in which African women mediate conflicts and their role in maintaining social cohesion, but also commonalities in experiences of women peacebuilders from across the globe.

Location | AUP: C-104
Session Chair | Alicia J Rouverol, University of Salford

Anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff, in Number Our Days (1979), where she explores aging through the lens of story, ritual and performance in a Jewish community centre in Venice, California, posits the concept of ‘Homo narrans‘ or ‘humankind as storyteller’ (p. 272). In her landmark study, Myerhoff argues for the role of story in developing continuity of identity, alongside other core features of storytelling, e.g. communication and meaning-making of human experience. Yet stories or narratives are rarely explored without contestation (indeed in Myerhoff’s own project, her narrators frequently contested each other’s accounts), often giving rise to disparate understandings. This is particularly true within marginalised communities, where the narrators themselves remain invisible and/or removed from the public eye or discourse. Narratives of the incarcerated, for instance (or ‘prison narratives’), have long been collected and analysed by criminologists, sociologists, documentarians, historians and folklorists with the aim, respectively, to seek understandings of criminality, or to document prison life, advocate for prison reform, and/or explore the systemic racism underlying contemporary (US/UK) systems of incarceration. Works by Danny Lyon (Conversations with the Dead, 1971), Bruce Jackson (In the Life: Versions of the Criminal Experience, 1972), and Howard Zehr (Doing Life: Reflections on Men and Women Serving Life Sentences, 1996), among others, sought to inspire social and structural change through bringing to light narratives of incarcerated men and women, e.g. first-hand accounts of lived experiences of prison, as well as circumstances prior to incarceration, lives shaped by the effects of systemic racism, which may have led to their imprisonment. This panel explores the question of disparate narrative worlds through the lens of four researchers currently engaged in studies of incarceration in the UK and US, as well as the death penalty in the US.

Disparate Narrative Worlds - Women’s Prison Writing as Narratives of Haunting

Dr. Rosa Whitecross Bath Spa University

Rosa Whitecross’ paper, “Disparate narrative worlds - Women’s prison writing as narratives of haunting”, builds on Presser and Sandberg’s charge (2015, p. 1) that ‘narratives are central to human existence’ because, through the construction of lives as stories, connections are forged ‘among experiences, actions, and aspirations’. The question follows of how can we forge connections—with the aim to inspire social and structural change—based on actions, experiences and aspirations when the narratives of incarcerated women and their prison writing do not feature in the wider cultural landscape of writing? She will theorise women’s prison writing as narratives of haunting. Kirss (2013, p. 21) writes that ‘what haunts is not subject to conscious memory’, but instead that it returns unbidden ‘personified or atmospheric’. The evocative writing of women in prison considers this question of ‘where is the “place” where the ghostly lies harboured, and from whence does it return?’ (Kirss, 2013, p. 21), particularly in relation to El Saadawi’s (2002) prison writing that muses on the experience of imprisonment as a death.

Disparate Narrative Worlds - The Racialised and Maternal Textures of Prison Time

Dr. Monica Thomas Birmingham City University

Monica Thomas’ research centres on the oral narratives of nine Black mothers during and after imprisonment in England. Her paper, “Disparate Narrative Worlds - The Racialised and Maternal Textures of Prison Time”, provides critical insight into how these women constructed, understood and navigated prison (and post-prison) ‘time’ from their positionality as Black mothers. As Flaherty (1999) argues, time is not an abstract or objective reality and ‘what feels like minutes to one person may feel like hours to another’. Our individual feelings and experiences as well as the situational and structural conditions that surround us thus shape how we perceive and experience the passing of time. Time is itself disparate. Therefore, by focusing on the intersections between ‘racialisation’ and ‘mothering’, this paper provides a new and specific insight into the racialised and maternal meanings of ‘prison time’. Specific acknowledgment is given to how time itself can be experienced as a site of ‘racial temporal disadvantage’ (Miles 2023, p. 5) and maternal oppression, particularly in contexts of imprisonment characterised by racial disparities and ‘Missed Time’ (Thomas 2023) with children.

Prison Narratives as Fragmentary Writing

Dr. Alicia J Rouverol University of Salford

Alicia Rouverol’s work explores a creative intervention through the co-creation of an oral history-based performance project with male inmates at Brown Creek Correctional Institution (NC, USA), aimed at at-risk youth, and culminating in a book more than 20 years after the original performances, featuring a collaboration again with the men, since released. She will consider her fragmentary approach to the book. The ‘spectre of fragmentary writing, of the text as fragment and the fragment as text’ has haunted literature for more than two hundred years (Hill, 2012, p. 197). Attention to the fragment is correlated to ‘break[s] in continuity’; this kind of writing ‘bears witness to the trials and tribulations, birth-pangs as well as death-throes, of literary, historical, and cultural upheaval’ (Hill, 2012, p. 27). It can be used to illustrate trauma, with fragments as illustrative of a whole that has been ruptured, therefore implying ‘an endured violence, an intolerable disintegration’ (Montandon, 1992, p. 22). Her book seeks to intervene in the discourse surrounding how we imprison our population; to use the men’s ‘lessons’ to reflect philosophically on incarceration; and to query and challenge systems of incarceration in Western nations like the US and the UK.

Location | Combes Gallery
Artist | Gabrielle Thierry

After numerous studies of forms and colors, my research as a painter led me to the representation of the rhythms of landscape. The question of the musicality of landscapes and its pictorial translation took form during the early stages of this work. I explored the interactions between colors/forms and notes/musical composition. I chose to paint while listening to music and created the colored partitions. The pictorial interpretation of musical composition is as spontaneous as possible and relies on cognitive mechanisms that create their own logic of a visual language. With this language, my paintings aim at the convergence of landscapes and music based on emotion and feelings.

Location | AUP: Q-801
Session Chair | Markku Lehtimäki, University of Turku

In this panel, which is the second part of a two-part panel “Authors of the Story Economy” (AUTOSTORY), we study authorial ethos, understood as the author’s ethical and experiential positioning both inside and outside literary works. Our panel corresponds to the thematics of the conference in its analysis of authority to narratives, experiences, and identities, and its exploration of the ways in which fictional or autofictional narratives aim at establishing facts, truths, and reality. We argue that a work of literature – its ethics of representation and tone of voice – is likened to its author in reception and marketing and that this development in the contemporary literary field exposes the author to moral and political debate within the public sphere, taking the form of ethos negotiation. In media, and especially in social media, the line between authorship and expertise by experience becomes indistinct as the predominant frames of reading give precedence to autobiographical interpretation and the didactic valuation of learning by experience. As contemporary ethical concerns are often tied with the questions of identity, representation, and story ownership, the contemporary perception of moral didacticism is connected to the increased relevance afforded to authorial ethos in the literary field.

Dis/continuity of Authorial Ethos: Lectures from Unreliable First-Person Narrators in Contemporary Fiction

Dr. Samuli Björninen University of Turku

The AUTOSTORY project builds on a hypothesis that the contemporary story economy rewards authors for building a continuous authorial ethos across platforms, from literary works to interviews and social media. I have previously discussed the use of lectures as part of fictional works and how they may (or may not) align with the ethos and didactic interests of the author expressed in non-literary contexts. In this paper I extend the inquiry to didactic performances given by unreliable first-person narrators in prose fiction. The paper asks how the instructive functions of the lecture are modified by the narrative technique of unreliability and the discontinuity between the narrator and the (implied) author that unreliability is assumed to produce. I use examples from three authors representing the AUTOSTORY corpus: Olga Tocarczuk (Poland), Antti Hurskainen (Finland), and Christina Hagen (Denmark).

“But It Hurts Like I Killed Someone”: Character Assassinations and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle

Dr. Rikke Andersen Kraglund Aarhus University

Imagine reading a novel that follows your life story and describes your worst defeats and biggest personal problems, featuring a character whose name, place of residence and background is identical to your own. This may sound like a nightmare; and yet it is not an uncommon scenario in contemporary Nordic literature, which is full of real- life events and personal narratives that are given away to the public. In recent years, an increasing number of individuals have recognized themselves in a literary work and have called for limits to the freedom of authors to appropriate stories from their personal acquaintances. These cases display the tension between freedom of expression and individual rights. In this paper, I reflect on the ethical dilemmas arising when novelists damage the images of family members and friends, leaving their targets with little opportunity to clear their names. I have chosen to study the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård’s autobiographical novel in six parts, My Struggle because the text itself goes into the ethical issues arising when authors draw on private lives in their fiction, leading to discussions about the writer’s social role and responsibility. Knausgård reflects on the ethical issues he encounters, and the last volume derives its dramatic drive and progress from the interplay of accusation and self-defense.

Lessons from a Gentle Author: Identity, Representation, and Didacticism in Contemporary Romance Fiction

Dr. Tero Eljas Vanhanen University of Turku

Like many of UK romance author Talia Hibbert’s novels, her bestselling romcom Get a Life, Chloe Brown (2019) begins with a note from the author. She warns sensitive readers that the novel will deal with “the reality of living with chronic pain.” While the tenor of the novel is sparkly and lighthearted, Chloe, the heroine, is indeed suffering from a painful case of fibroamylgia – but that doesn’t stop her from finding true love by the end. By featuring an unusual romance heroine Hibbert aims to change how people with chronic conditions are typecast. Not coincidentally, Hibbert has made it clear in interviews and on social media, that she suffers from the same condition as her character. Hibbert concludes her author’s note: “I hope I have treated the issue, my characters, and you, the reader, gently.” This paper examines how Hibbert uses her authorial ethos built around these ideas of gentleness and authenticity toward didactic and political goals.

“It’s a Shame to Ruin a Good Tale by Turning it into a Lesson.” Ian McEwan’s Lessons and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative

Prof. Markku Lehtimäki University of Turku

My paper discusses the renowned British author Ian McEwan’s recent novel Lessons (2022) as a surprisingly conventional narrative in the author’s oeuvre. It is argued that a new kind of authenticity and sincerity, which steers clear of postmodernist irony and metafiction of some of McEwan’s earlier work, may be a sign of the literary market’s expectation that even established authors should tell their “own” story. In my paper, I will explore, on the methodological basis of the rhetorical theory of narrative, the supposedly autobiographical character’s progression, as contemporary historical events are reflected through a white middle-class man’s personal story. “Lessons” in the novel’s title obviously refer to the character’s Bildung (with his childhood’s piano lessons with their motif of sexual abuse having been singled out as the most scandalous part of the narrative in the media), while the title also implies the age-old and recently re-established purpose of literature, that is moral didacticism.

Location | AUP: Q-604
Session Chair | Vera Caine, University of Victoria

World Making with Refugee Families: Thinking with Arendt in Narrative Inquiry.

Dr. Vera Caine University of Victoria, Dr. Elin Odegaard Western Norway University of Applied Science, Dr. Geir Aaserud Oslomet, Norway, Dr. Floor Verhaeghe University of Ghent,, Dr. Geert van Hove University of Ghent, Dr. Pamela Steeves University of Alberta, Dr. Heather Raymond Concordia University, Dr. Aiden Downey Emory University, Dr. D.Jean Clandinin University of Alberta

When waves of refugees arrive in countries fleeing from political instability and danger in their countries of origin, there is a tendency to create a dominant story. This dominant story is most often based on limited knowledge about the past, present, and possible future lives of people deemed refugees. Often the uniqueness of the lives of refugees is obscured and the stories told about them are set in alien and inhospitable cultural, political, institutional, familial, and linguistic narratives. As we worked on these ideas and concepts in our ongoing research with refugee families, we turned to Arendt’s ideas on world making. Drawing on these ideas, we understand social inclusion as part of a worldview that emanates from the ideas of ongoing world making that takes place in and across family, educational, and other social and cultural places. Arendt’s notions of world making speak to the co-creation of public spaces in which social inclusion is a kind of active everyday world making where people appear. Her notion of appearance is a more agentic understanding of inclusion than merely ‘being included’. Refugee families find themselves having to make a world in a world not made for, or chosen by, them. Arendt highlights that the world is made through action. We understand world making in the lives of refugee families as the co-creation of public spaces in which social inclusion is a kind of active everyday world making.

Shining a Light on Colonial Narratives in Aotearoa New Zealand: Immigrant Engagement with Indigenous Culture as a Catalyst for Transformation

Dr. Anne Bradley Toi Ohomai Institute of Technology

Our globalised world is characterised by transience. Narratives of displacement collide and mingle. Colonisation, war, and economic migration continue to uproot individuals, families and communities, disrupting connections with beloved people and places. I find myself part of one such narrative: a migrant, separated from my homeland. Unsettled. An outsider living in Aotearoa New Zealand - a land colonised by my ancestors. The pain of past injustice has deep roots and ongoing consequences in the present for colonised peoples. For Māori, deep metaphysical connections to ancestral people and places provide an overarching life matrix, collapsing Western concepts of time and space. This means that injustices perpetrated in the past are relived and experienced with vivid and traumatic immediacy. Colonisation, however, is not just a historical event, but an ongoing process that continues to dispossess, marginalise and subjugate indigenous peoples. Among the famously moderate settler population in Aotearoa New Zealand, systemic racism is barely acknowledged and historical amnesia is rife. A new centre-right government acting to remove policies designed to reinstate indigenous rights is a current source of unrest. This presentation tells the story of how connecting with the indigenous culture of Aotearoa New Zealand with its rich story-telling history, has profoundly impacted my life and work, and is the result of an autoethnographic narrative enquiry undertaken as part of my doctoral studies. My research highlights how narrative shapes and informs us, how experiences of displacement can be a catalyst for transformation, and how my engagement with te ao Māori (the Māori world) became a platform for reconciliation and a source of motivation to confront inequities and misconceptions. It reflects a story that is at once personal, national and global: A story of colonisation, immigration, transcultural integration and how a collision between worlds produced an explosion of creativity and connection.

“Mending with a String of Justice” Visual Stories of Human Rights Defenders: A Method for Redefining the Disparate Narratives on Migrant Human Rights

Faval Copedo University of the Sunshine Coast, Dr. Harriot Beazley University of the Sunshine Coast, Dr. Alice.M Nah Durham University

This paper presents a creative arts-based research project with human rights defenders (HRDs) who assist migrants and asylum seekers at the US/Mexican border. A Community Cultural Development (CCD) methodology was used to facilitate fifty-one HRDs in the creation of two public murals in Tijuana and Mexicali. CCD is a collaborative artistic approach to unite artists and communities for social transformation. The approach offers inclusive opportunities for individuals to creatively express and exchange their personal narratives, thereby fostering cultural understanding. Scholars propose that CCD functions as an essential tool for community empowerment by nurturing democratic decision-making processes, challenging established power structures and narratives, and promoting greater involvement from the community. This paper explores how the mural project at the US/Mexican border provided an opportunity for HRDs to visually express their identities, and to contest the negative narratives articulated by local authorities and mainstream society about migrants at the border. The paper reports on the CCD research process, including the planning workshops, the painting of the murals, and interviews with ten key human rights defenders after the two murals were completed. The research revealed how the HRDs’ mural project was able to raise awareness about the work of human rights defenders, and to challenge Mexican authorities and local communities to take responsibility for the protection of displaced individuals at the border. By exploring the notion of justicia abierta (open justice), the paper highlights the importance of using participatory arts in advancing human rights initiatives, by creating visual stories that aim to disrupt and transform the dominant discourses of the powerful.

Location | AUP: Q-A101
Session Chair | Friederike Windel, The American University of Paris

Amplifying Black Girls' Voices: Pioneering Change Through Youth-Led Research in the Southern U.S

Dr. Ayanna Carol-Monice Troutman UTHealth Houston

This paper explores the lived experiences of Black girls, ages 13 to 16, participating in the Black Girl Futures (BGF) Girl Talk! program at an alternative school in the southern United States. Through youth participatory action research (YPAR), the study aims to elevate Black girls’ voices, challenge systemic inequities, and make their intersectional experiences visible within both research and clinical practice. The qualitative methods used—reflective journaling, interviews, and observations—reveal how race, gender, and age shape these girls' educational experiences. In expressing a need for empowerment and affirming spaces, the girls provide narratives that counter the dominant realities perpetuated by racism and sexism in schools. The study emphasizes the importance of including Black girls as co-researchers, allowing them to reclaim their narratives and challenge educational discourses that often silence or overlook their experiences. This study aligns with the proposal's exploration of "disparate narrative worlds" by revealing how Black girls and the school system occupy different realities. The structural inequities in schools create distinct, competing versions of reality—those experienced by Black girls and those shaped by institutional norms. The study calls for culturally responsive methods that not only acknowledge but also resist these systemic biases, offering a pathway to bridging these narrative divides. Furthermore, by positioning facilitators of YPAR as reflexive participants, the study connects to the proposal’s goal of fostering novel alliances. The research advocates for inclusive educational and clinical spaces that unite disparate worlds, creating shared realities where Black girls’ voices influence broader societal discourse. In doing so, the study provides an actionable framework for addressing the unique challenges Black girls face in both alternative and traditional school settings.

Connection, Culture and Communication: Disparate Teacher Narratives from a Vietnamese Community Language School in a Monoglossic Context

Dr. Anne Reath Warren Uppsala University, Dr. Katrin Ahlgren Stockholm University

This study is based on interviews with teachers who work in a Vietnamese community language (CL) school in Australia. Providing language education complementary to the mainstream education system, CL schools are important places for identity development that aim to create senses of belonging and foster social cohesion and inclusiveness. Australia is a multicultural and multilingual society but has been identified as having a monolingual mindset (Clyne, 2008), which impacts on the use, learning and teaching of languages other than English. This study explores two teachers’ descriptions of how they came to teach at a CL-school and what they consider to be the purpose of teaching Vietnamese. The positioning analysis sheds light on how they situate themselves in relation to others in and beyond the school context. Excerpts are presented using poetic representation (Ahlgren, 2021) to bring out existential and emotional experiences in their narratives. Results reveal disparate narratives, where the teachers’ expressed experiences of isolation and disconnection in a broader context, contrast with their descriptions of involvement and connection with the local community after joining the CL-school. Social and ideological factors emerge as salient factors shaping the subject positions the teachers perform. This presentation sheds light on the complex identity work of language teachers, revealing their on-going commitment to developing communication, cultural knowledge and multilingual identity within families and communities in monoglossic contexts. As Clyne (2008) pointed out, it is possible to change the monolingual mindset but for this to happen, mainstream, monolingual Australians must reconsider the value of multilingualism for society and their own positioning of speakers with broader linguistic repertoires than themselves.

Ahlgren, K. (2021). Poetic representation: a process of writing nearby. Journal of sociolinguistics, 5:832–851.

Clyne, M. (2008). The monolingual mindset as an impediment to the development of plurilingual potential in Australia. Sociolinguistic Studies, 2(3), 347–366.

Disparate Narratives of Participation and Diversity in Danish Upper Secondary School

Anke Piekut University of Southern Denmark

In 2022-2023, a series of political decision in Denmark significantly impacted upper secondary schools with high diversity levels, reinforcing pre-existing questionable narratives (Piekut & Qvortrup, 2023). In my paper I will focus on how critical master-narratives about six upper secondary schools in the capital region of Denmark affect students’ patterns of participation in class, teachers’ attitude towards and actions regarding diversity in classroom, and the school principals respond to the critical master-narratives (Lundholdt et al, 2018; Bamberg, 2011). Data for this study consist of survey at six schools (n: 782), strategic documents, observations in class and interviews with students, teachers and principals (28 interviews), all collected in 2023 (Dybdal et al, 2010; Murphy &Jones, 2021). The analysis shows that participation in education is deeply influenced by the interplay of community values and diversity attitudes. A recurring and polarized narrative, especially amongst teachers, is diversity. Diversity is thematized as a positive aspect in the schools’ strategic papers, and as an explicit educational value, but despite the positive framing, the narrativization of it is frequently burdened with negative connotations amongst teachers and principals (Gurin et al, 2002; Banks, 2012). Community is a strong and prominent value on alle levels in the data and seems to be a positive pedagogical value, creating space for participation. Although the emphasis on community was widespread, the schools’ understanding of it was often challenged, leaving little room for students’ alternative notions (Wenger, 1999, Piekut, 2023. This lack of inclusion sometimes led to tensions, as students who did not fit into the predefined community framework felt excluded or marginalized. The paper focuses on the narratives of student and teachers regarding participation within the context of critical master- narratives about their schools. How these narratives influence participation patterns and navigation in disparate narrative educational worlds, will be at the fore.

Location | AUP: C-103
Session Chair | Eva Klusova, Institute of Psychology at the Czech Academy of Sciences

This panel brings together four experts to examine the complex dynamics of narrative intelligence in the Czech Republic, where Russia actively seeks to maintain its informational influence. The discussion will cover the evolution of disinformation narratives, their amplification mechanisms, and the psychological dimensions driving their spread, drawing on qualitative and quantitative research from the past three years.

From Pandemic to Propaganda: The Post-Invasion Evolution of Disinformation Networks in the Czech Republic and Their Role in Amplifying Pro-Russian Narratives

Eva Klusova Institute of Psychology at the Czech Academy of Sciences

This paper examines the post-invasion evolution of disinformation narratives in the Czech Republic, focusing on how influential disinformation groups on Facebook and Telegram seamlessly transitioned to support pro-Russian propaganda following the Russian Federation's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Prior research has shown that these disinformation networks, originally formed to spread COVID-19 misinformation, transformed almost immediately after the invasion to amplify Russian Federation narratives. These groups, which had previously focused on anti-vaccine rhetoric, redirected their efforts towards supporting Russia and targeting Ukraine and its citizens with long-standing hostile narratives. Moreover, these groups have demonstrated the ability to exploit real-time events to further amplify their messaging. Using a mixed-methods approach that integrates both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, this study tracks social media channels to assess the shift in narrative patterns before, during, and after the invasion. The research utilizes civic society reports and social media monitoring tools such as Gerulata Juno software to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the Czech disinformation ecosystem. The quantitative analysis focuses on key metrics such as engagement rates, and the viral spread of specific disinformation themes. Meanwhile, qualitative content and discourse analyses reveal how these groups have strategically repurposed domestic tragedies and ad hoc events to bolster pro-Russian narratives, destabilizing trust in the state and its institutions. A critical finding of this research is that another major narrative cluster involves attacks on the Czech government, democratic institutions, the European Union, and Western structures. The research underscores how internal crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, have been weaponized to fuel broader efforts to erode public trust in liberal democracy. This study thus offers valuable insights into the evolving role of social media infrastructures in propagating disinformation and emphasizes the need for resilient strategies to counter these sustained threats to democratic stability.

The Psychology of Disgust in Disinformation: Amplifying Hostile Narratives in the Wake of Russia's Invasion of Ukraine

Dr. Iva Polackova Solcova Institute of Psychology at the Czech Academy of Sciences

This paper explores the psychological aspects of disinformation manipulation, with a particular focus on the role of disgust psychology. The research demonstrates that both visual stimuli and specific terminology can significantly enhance and amplify disinformation messaging by eliciting a strong physiological sense of disgust in the recipient. Over time, exposure to such emotionally charged content can lead to the deeper embedding of hostile propaganda narratives, primarily due to the psychological impact of disgust-inducing elements.Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this tactic has been increasingly observed in disinformation campaigns targeting Ukraine, its citizens, and political leaders, as well as the European Union. One striking example involves the manipulation of the EU’s legislation on the use of insect protein in food. Disinformation groups have exploited this topic by using revolting imagery and language to stoke fear and disgust, creating a narrative that frames this legislation as harmful and unnatural. Through both quantitative and qualitative analyses, the research reveals that such tactics are not isolated, but part of a broader strategy that leverages disgust, along with other potent emotions like fear, as accelerators for disinformation narratives.The findings suggest that the use of disgust, in particular, is an effective tool for disinformation actors aiming to foster division and distrust. Disgust-inducing narratives not only trigger immediate emotional reactions but also reinforce long-term negative associations with the targeted groups, policies, or institutions. This psychological manipulation serves to solidify hostile propaganda, making it more resistant to debunking efforts and further entrenching divisive views within the public. By examining the intersections of psychology and disinformation, this study highlights the urgent need for understanding the emotional dynamics that underpin disinformation campaigns. Moreover, it underscores the importance of developing strategies that address not only the content of disinformation but also its psychological drivers.

AI and Algorithmic Amplification: The Role of Technology in Spreading Disinformation in the Czech Republic and Its Impact on Russian Hybrid Warfare

Josef Holy Institute of Psychology at the Czech Academy of Sciences

This paper examines the technological mechanisms behind the amplification of disinformation in the Czech Republic, focusing on how AI-driven tools and social media algorithms are leveraged to enhance the spread of misleading narratives. Utilizing Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) methodologies, the research analyzes the ways in which social networks artificially increase the visibility of disinformation, with particular attention to how these mechanisms support the broader objectives of Russian hybrid warfare. By applying a mixed-methods approach that includes AI-driven content analysis and network mapping, the study investigates how social media algorithms promote emotionally charged and sensational content, accelerating the dissemination of polarizing narratives. In the context of the Czech Republic, these narratives are shown to exploit existing social and political divisions, influencing broader media ecosystems, public perception and reinforcing disinformation strategies. The paper provides an analysis of the intersection between OSINT and AI technologies, identifying key factors that contribute to the virality of disinformation. Through the examination of case studies and empirical data, the study presents a comprehensive overview of the technological processes that underpin the spread of disinformation. Additionally, it explores the implications for developing effective countermeasures to mitigate the impact of these technologies on democratic societies. This paper contributes to a broader understanding of how AI and social media algorithms are utilized in modern disinformation campaigns, offering insights for scholars working on strategies to safeguard information integrity.

The Narrative Structure of Conspiracy Beliefs in Czech Society: Analyzing Core Narratives and Justifications Amid the War in Ukraine

Dr. Eva Dubovska Institute of Psychology at the Czech Academy of Sciences

Conspiracy narratives explain, evaluate, and justify important events through the lens of a secret plot by malevolent powerful forces within a relatively coherent framework, and at their core is a captivating, dramatic story. This paper focuses on the narrative structure of conspiracy beliefs among Czech citizens. The study is part of a broader project focused on researching the memory of Czech society in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. As part of the project, interviews were conducted with 60 participants, focusing on their experiences related to the nearby war in Ukraine, and based on a content analysis of these interviews, 15 participants with a stronger inclination toward conspiracy theories and spreading disinformation were selected. The subsequent narrative analysis works with the following categories: 1. core narratives; 2. modes of narrative evaluation; 3. narrative positioning; 4. typical figures and plots; 5. agency. Typical core narratives include claims of a "conspiracy of dark forces," a "secret plot," with a "powerful and malevolent group" behind it. In terms of narrative positions, prominent figures include "us" as those who know, versus "them," the obedient and uninformed citizens, as well as the othering of Ukrainian refugees. Typical modes of narrative justification include the legitimization and defense of Russian aggression, as well as blaming Ukraine and NATO. In terms of figures and plots, we will present salient figures, analogies, contrasts, and archetypal or mythical figures. In the category of agency, a notable type of "awakened" agency emerges, characterized by the need to have control and protect oneself, which is linked to a perceived threat to one's autonomy and associated with a strong sense of values. Conspiracy narrative construction can be an adaptive response to a complex and burdensome situation and also a means of self-realization and increasing self-worth.

Location | AUP: C-104
Session Chair and Discussant | Anna De Fina, Georgetown University

In a world increasingly defined by crisis and uncertainty, from climate change and pandemics to economic instability and political unrest, the narratives that emerge are as varied as the crises themselves. Our roundtable will explore the relationship between global and personal crises, focusing on how crisis narratives intersect, diverge, and shape an understanding of both the collective and individual experience. How do global crises and, more generally, the discourse of uncertainty impact personal identity and narrative construction? Conversely, how does personal crisis experience reflect and contribute to broader societal narratives and the construction of master and counter-narratives?

'I'm having an identity crisis rn': Formatted Stories of the Self-In-Crisis as a Tiktok Video Trend

Dr. Alexandra Georgakopoulou King’s College London

Short form videos on TikTok are currently a prevalent form of telling & making sense of self both in the mundane daily life and in ‘crises’, especially for Gen-Zers. Drawing on my longitudinal, technographic study of how storytelling facilities have evolved on social media, I treat short form videos as multi-modal, curated small stories, the scrutiny of which necessitates a reimagining of well-developed methods for analyzing stories & dentities, in particular positioning analysis (Georgakopoulou & Page, in prep). In this talk, I focus on a salient TikTok trend amongst (mainly female) Gen Z-ers of communicating an ‘identity crisis’: from having a hair-cut and getting a tattoo to questioning their sexuality or their role as ‘young mothers’, these are stories expliticly framed in the videos’ description, captions and annocaps as instances of ‘an identity crisis’. I show how the storying of the personal crisis reconfigures formatted (typified, replicable, normative) ways of telling that I collectively label as ‘sharing-life-in-the-moment’ (Georgakopoulou 2022, 2023). In their evolution, sharing-life-in-the-moment practices, favoured by algorithmic calculations of priority content, have been increasingly intermingling personal and collective storytelling resources. In this case, the memefication encouraged by TikTok affordances results in the construction of ‘relatable tales’ of crisis that mobilize rescripting resources (Georgakopoulou 2014, 2015), that is, borrowing voices, images, characters and plots from other stories. I also show how the recognition work done by the audiences in their comments is generative of further storying (poly-storying, Georgakopoulou & Giaxoglou 2018) that results in widely distributed shared stories (Georgakopoulou 2007, Page 2018). I discuss the implications for the narrative study of crisis of a) the personal crisis narrated as visually enacted moments; b) the destabilization between ‘small’ and ‘big’ crises; c) the tilt of the ‘who am I?” dilemmas (Bamberg 2012) toward recognizability of the self-in-crisis, vying for a place in the social media attention economy.

Navigating Crime Between Enchantment and Threat

Dr. Michael Bamberg Clark University

Law & Order has shaped public perceptions of crime and justice for over three decades, providing a dramatic window into moments of crisis—whether it’s the aftermath of a crime, the complexities of an investigation, or the tension of a courtroom trial. My presentation will explore the story of Law & Order through three critical phases. First, I examine the series’ evolution and its spin-offs—SVU, Criminal Intent, and Organized Crime—and how these shows have adapted to changing audiences and crises in the cultural landscape over the past 34 years. Second, I consider how the show mirrors ideological shifts in public attitudes toward crime and justice, particularly in moments of societal crisis that influence policy and public discourse, catapulting crime to the public threat #3 in US election discourse in 2024 (following ‘the economy’ and ‘immigration’). Finally, I will amplify the emerging field of Narrative Criminology in its role to critically interrogate—whether in the justice system or public life—how crises and threats are framed as factual and true-to-life in policing and justice policies, intensifying mainstream criminology’s core assumptions. Together, these elements illustrate how narrative both reflects and shapes our understanding of crisis and justice.

Location | AUP: C-101

Session Chair | Sylvie Patron, Université Paris Cité

Narrating Collective Trauma: The Desubjectivation of the Self in Jorge Semprun’s L'Écriture ou la Vie

Ioanna Kouki Université Paris Cité

Jorge Semprún, a writer and Holocaust survivor of Spanish origin who wrote primarily in French, offers a profound reflection on his traumatic experiences in L’Écriture ou la Vie (1994), his autobiographical work. In this text, Semprún confronts the tension between the necessity to testify to collective trauma and the impossibility of fully capturing the horror of his experience in the Buchenwald concentration camp. This proposal will examine how Semprún’s narrative constructs a fragmented self, reflecting the disintegration of identity under extreme suffering. Through the use of desubjectivized language and a fragmented narrative style, Semprún conveys the collective nature of trauma and questions the very possibility of representing it. Key passages reveal the deliberate erasure of the pronoun "I" and the frequent use of impersonal and atemporal forms. These stylistic choices de-emphasize individual subjectivity, transforming the narrator into a "survivor on duty," a figure stripped of personal agency. The fragmented narrative is further underscored by Semprún's treatment of sensory details, juxtaposing disconnected experiences, while the absence of verbs of perception also highlights the collapse of the narrator’s agency. As Semprún navigates a landscape dominated by death, he emerges as a "revenant," someone who has passed through death rather than avoided it, further complicating his relationship with his own sense of self. Ultimately, this proposal seeks to explore how narrative functions both as an act of survival and a tool for collective memory, while questioning the limits of representation in the face of unspeakable trauma.

Occupied France’s Narratives : Marcel Ophuls’ Critical Turn

Simon Paul Raymond Rozel Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

“From romantic, his memory becomes critical.” In The Years, Annie Ernaux’s collective autobiography shifts from idealism to skepticism. In a way, memorial narratives about Occupied France followed the same evolution from the 1960s to today. Under de Gaulle’s presidency, a public narrative dominates collective memory: French people were unanimously united in the Resistance movement, under de Gaulle’s leadership. Described as « resistancialist myth » by historian Henry Rousso, this narrative can be studied through cinema, television, literature, political discourse …. Nevertheless, this narrative reaches a critical turning point with The Sorrow and the Pity’s release (1971). As a four-hour documentary by German-French Marcel Ophuls, its aim is to attack the gaullist narrative. On the one hand, it shows that all French people were not involved in the Resistance, and that Resistance itself was divided – which is the sixties narrative’s diametrical opposite. On the other hand, the movie controversially focuses on subjects that were pure taboo until then: Vichy State headed by Pétain, France’s Collaboration with Nazi Germany, and the Jewish genocide. To sum it up, the film presents a very complex narrative about Occupied France, with a blurred line between good and evil. Lastly, what are the possible narratives about Occupied France after The Sorrow and the Pity’s outburst? Is there a dominant one? From 1971, the « retro era » focuses on the Collaboration with the idea that French people were on the wrong side of history. But, since the late 1970s, the public debate concentrates on Jewish people collective fate in Occupied France, and in Europe in general. Two remarks need to be emphasized here: the collective narrative about Occupied France seem to be in a fragmentation process; and the contemporary rise of far right (Eric Zemmour), revives some dangerous narratives that have been asleep.

Location | AUP: C-102 

Session Chair | Bishupal Limbu, Portland State University

Storytelling has long been valorized for its reparative or redemptive potential, from Aristotelian catharsis to more contemporary presentations of the healing power of testimony. These latter iterations include witness recounting (in the Nuremberg trials or in truth and reconciliation commissions); personal writings like the memoir or the journal (often heralded by their writers and readers alike as therapeutic); fictional accounts of traumatic experiences; and narratives about the experiences of the marginalized. Without discounting this reparative potential (or its real-world validation in the medical literature), this panel investigates works that forsake reparative narrative in favor of other approaches. How do writers and filmmakers construct narratives about crisis or conflict that do not rely on repair as an objective? What does non-reparative work look like and what does it achieve? Can there be hope without repair? The panel will focus specifically on contemporary French literature and film to address these questions and explore new narrative modes and sensibilities.

"A Camera Rather Than a Living Being": Seeing and Telling in Les Bienveillantes

Dr. Marina Davies New York University Paris

Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes sparked a great deal of controversy when it was published in 2006, particularly due to the main character Maximilien Aue, a Shoah perpetrator who narrates the Shoah. Some readers, like Claude Lanzmann, based their critique pragmatically on a lack of verisimilitude: an historical Shoah perpetrator would not plausibly bear witness, but instead deny or repress. Others, assuming specific ethical imperatives for fiction writing, asserted that the executioner cannot ontologically be a witness (recounting his own horrible actions). There is, moreover, a narratological issue at the heart of the backlash against the novel, namely that its storytelling does not play a reparative role. In historical Shoah testimonies and narratives, this repair is rarely a simple or triumphant matter; it is typically ambivalent and/or fractured. But the idea of storytelling as potential recuperation or redemption is consistently present. It can come in many forms, all absent in the case of Les Bienveillantes: no Shoah survivor (re)asserts his humanness through mere survival (like in Antelme’s The Human Species), no Shoah survivor undermines the engineering of the concentration-camp grey zone by naming it (like in Levi’s The Damned and the Saved), and no justice is served to Aue (like in the Nuremberg trials). In this paper, I will first examine the ways in which the novel’s narrative structure forecloses these possibilities. I will then analyze how the novel attempts to create certain distinctions between storytelling and witnessing and whether these distinctions can inform our thinking about the voice (or silencing) of real-world oppressors.

Impotence and the Disrepair in Contemporary French Women’s Writings

Dr. Catherine Gaughan University of Toronto Scarborough

Personal writing has often been used to process trauma and create spaces for healing and reconciliation, but what happens when the starting point of these representations is the impotence of literature to fully convey such crises? In recent works by predominantly French women authors, the narrative processes of establishing fact, truth, and reality confront this very impossibility, especially when addressing dynamics of abuse and questions of shame in writings about traumatic and abusive experiences. In Édouard Louis’ Monique s’évade (2024), Neige Sinno’s Triste tigre (2023), Camille Kouchner’s La Familia Grande (2021), and Vanessa Springora’s Le Consentement (2020), we see examples of narrative worlds that function as a form of social alert and play out in the public sphere through social media movements such as TikTok and #MeTooIncest. This new literary horizon not only lends itself to reflections on the reality of social roles, classes, and the challenges that confront our shared world, but also on how fragmented narratives intersect across social, justice, and familial systems, which often prioritize resilience over repair. In this paper, I will explore how personal writings articulate the unspeakable through largely first-person narration and the use of intertextuality, in particular newspaper articles, interviews, manuscripts including “love letters” by abusers as well as theatrical productions, to convey the inexplicable and oftentimes irreparable intersections within these competing narrative authorities over who tells the story and how.

Migrants and Migration in Contemporary French Film: Narratives Beyond Repair

Dr. Bishupal Limbu Portland State University

Aesthetic representations of migration often take on the role of balancing or displacing mainstream media reports that routinely portray migrants as undesirable trespassers or desperate victims. Contemporary French-language films such as Philippe Lioret’s Welcome (2009) or Boris Lojkine’s L’Histoire de Souleymane (2024), for instance, attempt to “humanize” migrants as a way to counter negative stereotypes and argue for their inclusion in an imagined community of rights-bearing humans. These more sympathetic representations operate in the mode of repair, offering a type of ethical solution to the problem of marginalization and otherness faced by migrants, but they also, intentionally or inadvertently, construct migrants as objects of humanitarian rescue and thus perpetuate the persistent trope of the helpless third- world subject who finds salvation in the metropolitan center. In other words, although motivated by laudable aspirations to provide sympathetic depictions and repair the state of the world, aesthetic representations of migrants can easily fall into a humanitarian logic (associated with the civilizing mission) and function as a type of anti-politics. This paper examines contemporary French-language films on migration and the migrant experience in order to excavate and analyze an alternative archive that is more diffident about repair as an aesthetic mode and objective. In addition to the films already mentioned, I will consider Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre (2011), Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan (2015), and Michael Haneke’s Happy End (2017). How do these films attempt to transform the viewer’s relationship to migrants at a moment when migration has become such a politically controversial topic, in France and elsewhere in Europe? How do they construct narrative worlds that express the desire for social repair and/or indicate the importance of exposing its limits?

Location | AUP: Q-704
Session Chair | Sharon Kangisser, Yad Vashem

Countering the Status Quo: How Children from Marginalized Groups Negate Systematic Oppression in Respect Narratives

Dr. Shannon Audley Smith College

Children co-construct their understandings of respect by interacting with master narratives, which often reflect societal power structures, such as white supremacy and patriarchy (McLean & Syed, 2015) in their classrooms. Children from dominant power groups, like white males, likely adopt these views of respect. However, children from marginalized groups, including girls and children of color, may find their experiences of respect conflict with these master narratives, leaving their respect unrecognized. How do children negate these worlds of systematic master narrative oppression? This study uses a structural psychological approach considering individuals and social interactions (Syed & McLean, 2021) to explore respect master narratives and counter-narratives to understand how children internalize, reproduce, reject, or negate master respect narratives. (Hammock & Toolis, 2015). We analyzed 198 elementary school students' narratives (52% female; 63.1% White) from third to sixth grade, identifying content and process. We deductively coded social role recognition, directed, and conditional respect (Darwall, 2007), and inductively coded caring respect. For master narrative process, we examined ten narratives describing situations where students felt they received "no respect" from classmates. Students' narratives frequently reflected dominant master narratives of respect, such as directed and conditional respect. Significant differences were found by gender and ethnicity, with female students of color endorsing caring respect more than male students of color and students of color endorsing conditional respect more than white students. Master narratives reflected classroom conventions aligned with a white, middle-class lens (Castagno, 2019). Notably, all students who wrote about "no respect" were from non-dominant social identities and sometimes conformed and negotiated, master content. Children from marginalized groups may adopt master narratives, but they also negate them and endorse counter-narratives when their experiences of respect are excluded from dominant frameworks, highlighting how children negate narrative worlds of systematic discrimination.

Building Resilience Through Disparate Narratives of Precarious Lives in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives

Prof. Carmen Zamorano Llena Dalarna University

The 2004 centenary commemoration of the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples by the German Schutztruppe, known as the first German genocide, was the “spark that kindle[d] forgotten memories” (Assmann 2011: 162) concerning the German colonial empire and forced a re-examination of the German public imagination and its collective memory. Since then, much of the research on these events has focused on resisting the German “colonial amnesia” by unveiling the injustices committed in the German colonies in Africa, as well as on how this re-awakened past came to intensify and deepen the sense of shame at the heinousness of the Holocaust that is at the core of contemporary German collective memory. Unlike German’s colonial amnesia, postcolonial nation-building processes of countries in former German East Africa, such as contemporary Tanzania, were imbued with a complicated memorialisation of the German colonial past vis-à-vis British colonial remnants. Thus, disparate narratives of the German colonial past emerged depending on their different spatio-temporal contexts of remembrance. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel Afterlives (2020) critically engages with the complexities of these disparate narratives. This is done, as argued in this paper, by articulating a narrative that foregrounds stories of resilience as resistance (Bracke 2016) through the focus on the complex precariousness of diverse lives (Butler 2006) in colonial German East Africa and their reverberations up to the present. Drawing from Michael Rothberg’s work on multidirectional memory (2009), this paper will also examine how, by situating this text in the contemporary European context as a framework of remembrance, the novel interrogates echoes of colonial imaginaries in the contemporary public discourse on international migration.

Location | AUP: C-505
Session Chair | Miranda Spieler, The American University of Paris

"If I Had My Justice:" Narratives of Sexual Exploitation and Justice in the Post-Emancipation United States South

Dr. Ashley Towle University of Southern Maine

This paper examines the actions of formerly enslaved women who sought child support for the children they had been forced to have with their enslavers while they were enslaved. Drawing on sixteen cases from the records of the Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency tasked with assisting former slaves in the transition to freedom, this paper argues that freedwomen sought child support not only to provide a modicum of economic support for themselves and their families but also as an affirmation of their rights as women and as mothers–something that had been denied to them while enslaved. In seeking support, freedwomen attacked the basis of the antebellum patriarchal household, affirmed their freedom, and demanded justice for the indignities they had suffered while enslaved. Surprisingly, these women were often successful in securing some support. This paper interrogates the narratives these women constructed about their sexual exploitation and how they framed themselves as worthy of support to Freedmen’s Bureau agents. It argues that the background of individual Bureau agents shaped their interactions with these women and their willingness to assist them. As the cases in this paper make clear, individuals’ backgrounds and the relationships freedwomen and Bureau agents forged in the post-emancipation South were paramount to successfully achieving justice. The success these mothers had in securing child support for their children had lasting economic and social ramifications as they embarked on new lives in freedom. Ultimately, the narratives these women, Bureau agents, and former enslavers constructed during these cases highlight the ways that issues of gender, sexuality, power, and justice coalesced in the post-emancipation South. These narratives provide crucial insights into larger debates about the rights of freed women and the extent to which the federal government was willing to reckon with the evils of slavery.

On Some “Ghost Ships”: Configurations and Reconfigurations of the Visual Narratives of the Slave Trade

Dr. Paul Bernard-Nouraud Aix-Marseille University

In The Slave Ship: A Human History, in 2007, Marcus Rediker refers to Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic to state that “the slave ships are ghost ships still sailing around the edges of our modern consciousness.” The same year, by recounting her “journey along the Atlantic slave route”, Saidiya Hartman completed Rediker’s “human history” with her individual experience of reweaving the disparity of times and spaces in the aftermaths of the slave trade. A decade later, the art historian Cheryl Finley confirmed, in Committed to Memory, the centrality the “slave ship icon” acquired in contemporary art, and within the visual narratives’ configurations and reconfigurations of this memory. This paper proposal aims to analyze how the disparate image of the slave ship has been reinvested by writers and artists to build new bridges between past and present. This reinvestment can be understood in Hans Blumenberg’s terms in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, as “an implication through which a minimum of identity can still be found, or at least presumed or searched in the middle of the highest historical agitation.” Contiguously, it should also be regarded as a result of a “multidirectional memory” process, as Michael Rothberg analyzed it: to actualize the image of the slave ship implicates reevaluating past artworks and narratives, and conversely, such an actualization may be implicated by the present crisis that leads migrants to risk their lives on boats. The comparison can lead to new disparities, as it happened when Tsedaye Mahonnen performed around the shipwreck Christoph Büchel installed in Venice in 2019 comparing it to a slave ship. But it can also conduct to more intersectional and more comprehensive representations of “our modern consciousness,” and to a renewed attention paid to configurations that aim to elaborate new forms of narrativity.

How Narrative Matters in African American Literature of the 21st Century: Echoes of the Past

Jennefer York Cole Nantes Université

In the last decade, many new female African American authors have been highlighting how narrative voice is more than ever a pertinent angle to consider, where literature can offer responses to current conflicts in the world and perhaps even attempt reconciliation or at least establish a true reality for others to see, understand, and empathize with. In the works of recently celebrated authors, Raven Leilani, Brit Bennett, and Kiley Reid, there has been a shift in the way social gaze, internalized racism, and identity, were narrated in the canon of works of the 20th century. Analyzing how race and gender are voiced, is the angle of this research in African American Literature with a focus on the narratives which can not only echo past slave narratives but offer a new voice using internet and social media or play with a modern version of a Greek chorus to mirror the voice of the Black community. This research also focuses on some new perspectives through a study of moments of crisis, when there is a transformation in the female characters, often in link with the “third pair of unseen eyes” of internet. These moments of crisis are ways for authors to introduce a point of view on society and reveal a train of thought leading the reader to reflect on identity formation methods and theories such as imagology, or subject formation, or even the more recent question of digital identities, termed “BGA”, and presented in the recent study Black Girl Autopoetics (BGA) by Ashleigh Greene Wade (2024). This research takes examples of Black female authors’ resistance to an imposed narrative to underline the importance of their fight to retain their own voice, fitting in perfectly with the theme of “Disparate Narrative Worlds: Crisis, Conflict, and the Possibility of Hope”.

Location | AUP: C-102

With co-authors Corinne Squire, Aura Lounasmaa and Molly Andrews and commentators Mark Freeman, Hanna Meretoja, Winnie Ssanyu-Sseruma and Angelina Namiba

Narrative research has become a catchword in the social sciences today, promising new fields of inquiry and creative solutions to persistent problems. This book brings together ideas about narrative from a variety of contexts across the social sciences and synthesizes understandings of the field. Rather than focusing on theory, it examines how narrative research is conducted and applied. It operates as a practical introductory guide, basic enough for first-time researchers, but also as a window onto the more complex questions and difficulties that all researchers in this area face. The authors guide readers through current debates about how to obtain and analyse narrative data, about the nature of narrative, the place of the researcher, the limits of researcher interpretations, and the significance of narrative work in applied and in broader political contexts.

Location | AUP: C-104
Session Chair | Emilie Garrigou-Kempton, Pasadena City College

Constructing Reluctant Combatants: Former Enemy Alsatian Veterans and National Belonging in the Franco-German Borderland, 1871-1945

Prof. Devlin M Scofield Northwest Missouri State University

Alsace changed hands between France and Germany four times in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Newly empowered authorities faced the challenge of integrating the borderland population into their national community with each sovereignty transfer. From 1871 to 1945, the parameters of national belonging evolved from an agreement to accept the sovereignty of the new government to a model that, at different times, prioritized ethnocultural background, previous nationality, residency, birthplace, race, and individual wartime actions. Connecting these disparate citizenship considerations were state-promulgated narratives that characterized Alsatians as reluctant collaborators with the previous regime.This paper explores how postwar narratives integrated Alsatian veterans who had served the opposing power into the new sovereign state. French and German authorities reconciled most ex-soldiers by portraying them as unwilling conscripts, reinforcing the idea that no “true” Alsatian had fought willingly for the other side. This narrative emerged in 1918 when French officials depicted Alsatians as tortured soldiers forced to wear a field-grey uniform despite their tricolor hearts, an account mirrored by synonymous Nazi constructions in 1940. The population’s public acceptance and tacit endorsement of this experience fundamentally justified the victor’s claims to Alsace. The paper argues that former-enemy Alsatian veterans’ inclusion in the new national community depended on successfully conforming their wartime experiences to these official expectations. Those who contradicted the state’s narrative faced exclusion and discrimination. The post-1945 period, shaped by the trauma of Nazi occupation, marked the first time that the official victimization narrative aligned with the lived experience of the mass of the borderland population. This study highlights how conflicting national narratives imposed upon veterans bridged the disparate narrative worlds of Alsace but also shaped the broader contours of national belonging in the region.

Peace Through Schools: Using Classics Education to Deconstruct Nationalistic Rhetoric

Laura Aitken-Burt Birkbeck, University of London

In 1919 the newly formed League of Nations set up a commission to attempt to avoid the border disputes that partly contributed to the First World War by cultivating an ‘international mindset’. Countries would mutually review each other’s history textbooks for schools in order to ensure that multiple perspectives were displayed. In this way, students across Europe aimed to achieve a better understanding of the stories, memories and nostalgia that had fuelled both imperialism and the formation of new nation states to devastating effect during the early 20th century. These attempts to find common ground after a mutual disaster had some success, though were swept up in the power of populism once again. In order to achieve reconciliation between divided societies and nations, the way in which history is taught in schools is crucial so that interpretations of events can be seen from different angles rather than from one dominant nation state perspective. My analysis of school history materials and curriculum in Britain from 1870 and after the 1919 commission shows some of the successes and failures of previous attempts and what the future may hold when the nature of history itself is currently disputed. Using classics education, students may be better equipped to recognise populist rhetorical techniques and triumphalist invocations of antiquity. Focusing on ‘solutions not sides’, a curriculum that is perhaps overseen by the United Nations could be a way for the world to work towards greater mutual goals of peace when facing future global issues such as climate change and pandemics.

Disparate Narratives and Political Reconciliation

Prof. Michael Keren University of Calgary, Prof. Thomas Flanagan University of Calgary

Our paper highlights the emergence of disparate narratives in ‎two cases of missing children in Canada and Israel, and the ‎difficulties faced by the governments in both countries when ‎trying to cope with such narratives held firmly amidst factual ‎uncertainty. ‎The first case concerns the unmarked graves allegedly ‎discovered in Canada in 2021 on the grounds of an Indian ‎residential school run by the Catholic Church. The dominant ‎narrative that emerged in media reports, scholarly works, and ‎cultural productions claimed that the Canadian system was ‎designed to destroy Indigenous communities in what amounted ‎to genocide. A conflicting narrative denied that thousands of ‎missing children were buried in such unmarked graves after ‎being murdered by school personnel. ‎The second case concerns the disappearance of Yemenite ‎children during the mass immigration to Israel in the early ‎fifties. Children of large Yemenite families were announced ‎dead after being hospitalized and a narrative emerged that they ‎were sold for adoption. A conflicting narrative suggested that ‎the disappearance of the children merely stemmed from ‎disorderly registration of death certificates.‎ Our paper includes a comparative analysis of the various truth ‎and reconciliation commissions established by the Canadian and ‎Israeli governments in order to bridge over the disparate ‎narratives. We demonstrate how little the search for factual ‎evidence has affected the disparate narratives held by ‎community activists and the media in both cases.

Location | AUP: Q-604
Session Chair | Friederike Windel, The American University of Paris

Migration and the Narrative (In)coherence of the Self in Nina Bouraoui’s Mes Mauvaises Pensées

Dr. Niclas Johansson Mälardalen University

It is common in scholarship on Nina Bouraoui to regard her œuvre as a continuous quest for identity where she textually forges an uneasy selfhood across the dichotomies of Frenchness and Algerianness and of femininity and masculinity. Her construction of selfhood is thus regarded in terms of a hybridity which stands against – and struggles to undo – paradigmatically binary identity positions that are produced through subjectivizing discourses. However, while the paradigmatic rifts French/Algerian and Female/Male are a core concern for Bouraoui, the selfhood that is constructed through her works is at least as much focused on bridging a rift in the other – longitudinal and temporal – dimension: namely the rift opened through her involuntary migration from Algeria to France at the age of 14. The hybridity of selfhood in Nina Bouraoui is always also an attempt to construct a coherent narrative identity that connects her Algerian childhood with her French adulthood and her works employ different narrative devices to represent, and thereby also to cope with the temporal/geographical split. In this paper I will examine how the rift of migration is treated in Mes mauvaises pensées (2005). In this “novel” the entire text is addressed to the narrator’s therapist, to whom she has come for help with her obsessive-compulsive disorder. As the monologue develops, the etiology of the condition is successively laid bare as a complex reaction to the trauma of being uprooted from her Algerian life, through which, I will argue, Algeria and France remain connected through superposition – a superposition, however, which occludes the Algerian past which therefore haunts the French present. The work of therapy turns out to consist in a disentangling of the overlayered images and the location of a “vanishing point”, which allows for a narrative-architectural restructuring of the perspective on the self.

Narrativisation of ‘Bangladesh’ in Pacific Diaspora: Conflicting Construction of Bangladeshi Nationhood through Texts, Histories and Memories in Australia and Japan

Prof. Zakir Hossain Raju Independent University

Bangladeshi transnational diaspora is a large, complex and dynamic population that has had a significant impact on both Bangladesh and the host countries. This paper aims to unearth how this varied and disparate population construct the idea of ‘Bangladesh’ in two different locations in the Pacific. While the Bangladeshi Diaspora in USA, UK and Europe have been well studied, the Bangladeshi communities in the Pacific locations such as Australia and Japan have never been researched with due rigour. In this way, this paper is a the first step to analyse the narrativisation attempts of Bangladeshi diaspora towards contemporary and historical notions of Bangladesh nationhood in two far-fetched parts of the Pacific. I will investigate here the public and private narrativisation processes through which Bangladeshi migrants construct and imagine ‘Bangladesh’ and how these affect their identity formation in the diaspora of Australia and Japan. While the Bengali/Bangladeshi diaspora in Japan is a well-knit long-established community, the Australian-Bangladeshi community represents a new, younger looking ‘Bangladesh’ outside Bangladesh. Despite the differences, the Bangladeshi diaspora in these two different locations definitely represent a larger ‘Bangladesh’ that is a transnational, bi-lingual and largely middle class community. While public historicisation and textualisations have been the major means to resurrect the 1971 liberation war of Bangladesh in Australia and Japan, a host of personal narratives such as memoirs and literary writings produced in/by the Diasporic Bangladeshis also became ways to imagine and present ‘Bangladesh’ in these two diaspora settings. I will thus investigate how the first or second generation of Bangladeshi migrants are remembering and textualising Bangladesh for themselves. Through these public and private modes of narrativisation of/by the Bangladeshi communities in the Pacific, I shall unpack the contentions as well as commitments of the diasporic Bangladeshis towards the nationhood of Bangladesh.

The Double Bind of Difference in Digital Storytelling

Dr. Bryn Ludlow OCAD University

Grounded in the assertion that stories possess the power to evoke a spectrum of emotions, this dissertation found that there is a necessity of authentic representation in digital storytelling production, especially for marginalized voices. Through references to Toni Morrison and Rebecca Solnit, it critiques the distortion of narratives in mainstream media and emphasizes the importance of agency in storytelling. Affective theory, explored through the lenses of scholars like Sara Ahmed and Brian Massumi, frames the discussion of how emotional experiences shape narratives. The study further delves into the complexities of identity, particularly in the context of race, illustrating how stories can reflect painful truths and facilitate understanding. It also addresses the dual nature of affect—transformative yet potentially destructive—especially in stories of loss and grief. Through case studies, including personal testimonials and cinematic examples like Douglas Sirk’s "Imitation of Life," (1959) the dissertation underscores the need for sensitive engagement with difficult themes. Ultimately, it advocates for storytelling as a method that can disrupt societal norms, offering pathways for healing and change, while acknowledging the inherent challenges in representing authentic experiences.

Location | AUP: Q-A101
Session Chair | Sharon Kangisser, Yad Vashem

This panel addresses narratives of the Holocaust in Israel from a collectives and individual perspective. In this way we will be able to explore the interaction between history, collective memory and personal memory. Two of the papers will examine narratives from the personal perspective of survivors of the Holocaust and the third will look at the development of collective memory of the Holocaust in Israel.

Conflicting and Complementing Narratives of the Holocaust in Israel in Times of Crisis

Prof. Dalia Ofer Hebrew University of Jerusalem

The narratives about the Holocaust follow Israel memory since its establishment. The form and content of the narratives were shaped and reshaped during the decades to become a focal point of Israel’s identity. In times of crisis and wars the Holocaust was recalled constantly. It often reflected the abuse of memory as an instrument to shape public opinions for political goals. However, at the same time it was an accurate expression of feelings and fears of many Israelis. To put it a most crude way it related to the similarity and the differences between European Jews and the Jews in the State of Israel. Playing around these mottos narratives of heroism and helplessness, was often manipulated. One may describe the movement of the narratives moving from the top (government and state agencies – the educational system and institution of memory), to the bottom –public and personal talks and writings and vice versa. It involved survivors and their families, writers, artists and more. These narratives complemented and conflicted with the political ones and each had its contribution to the shaping the memory of the Holocaust. I will follow the complex narratives and their roots in times of crisis centering on weeks just before the six-day war, the reflections during and after the 1973 war. I will comment shortly on the many references during the war in Gaza on what and what is it telling on the knowledge about the Holocaust and its place in Israeli Psyche the teaching in Israeli school system.

“Fighting Spearheads”: Female Couriers at the Frontlines of Ghetto Resistance

Dr. Sharon Geva Kibbutzim College, Israel

Among the members of the Jewish underground in the ghettos of Poland during the Holocaust were female couriers (Kashariyot). Their role was to maintain communication between ghettos, smuggling information, equipment, money, and weapons. Often traveling alone under false identities, they relied on their ability to pass as Aryan and blend into Polish society. This position demanded resourcefulness, intelligence, and strong navigational skills. Although they did not hold formal senior roles within the underground, the women couriers were, in reality, at the forefront of the resistance. Despite their critical contributions, these women were often depicted as supporters rather than central figures in narratives of Jewish heroism and armed resistance during the Holocaust, particularly in Israel. The proposed talk will explore the reasons for the gap between their actual role and their portrayal, focusing on their gender, the inherently female nature of the position, and the title “Kashariyot,” which implied a junior status. In the light of this, I will propose an alternative term, “Fighting Spearheads”, which more accurately reflects their role in the ghetto underground.

"I’ve Been Here a Year. And I’m Still an Alien, Still the Same Crazy Person Who Is Looking for the Peace and Quiet of a Home." Yehuda Bacon, 1947

Dr. Sharon Kangisser Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Yad Vashem

During the summer of 1945, the French politician Justin Godard estimated that of the “1,200,000 Jewish children of pre-war Continental Europe, outside of the U.S.S.R., no more than 150,000” had survived.[1] A further 30,000 Jewish children and adolescents—aged under sixteen years old—had survived in exile in the U.S.S.R. This paper focuses on the post-war rehabilitation of an individual child survivor, Yehuda Bacon who was orphaned during the war and in the immediate post war period was placed in the care of a Pitter Přemysl, in Prague and then made his way to Mandatory Palestine. Through an exploration of some of his post-war diaries, this paper will discuss Bacon’s experience of his new home as a young survivor of the Holocaust. Specifically, this paper will examine how Bacon responded to the fraught political period, as the British Mandate neared its close. This paper will question how did his traumatic past impact on the way he viewed the volatile political reality and if the uncertainly of the period trigger traumatic memories of the past?

[1] Leon Shapiro, “Jewish Children in Liberated Europe: Their Needs and the J.D.C. Child Care Work,” January 1946, p. 1. American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives, JER44-52_029_0583.

Location | AUP: Q-704
Session Chair | Corinne Squire, University of Bristol

Who gets the Final Word? – Narrating Stories of Harm and Justice

Monica Sanchez Hernandez University of Bristol

Researching “The Oppressed” is being questioned in wider arenas of study, resulting in well-welcomed debate for those interested about ethical studies. Nonetheless, I am concerned that the suggestion to use collaborative practices is sometimes presented as a “magical” solution without further instigation. Within a world of unbalanced relations of power, the path to reproducing academic extractivism is slippery, and research may perpetuate or even replicate existing oppressions. More so, when the distinctions of “they” the participants and “us” the researchers are imbricated within research design. Following feminist theorists who sustain that in patriarchal societies no female-male relations could be equal, I argue that when entering lop-sided relationships in “fieldwork”, the bare minimum is to acknowledge such disparities and to later act upon balancing them as much as possible. As decolonising methodologies suggest, there is an urgent need for further accountability to aspire for respectful collaborations, and I propose to embrace “passing the microphone” to those structurally silenced but wanting to speak and to be heard, as a first step to challenge the narratives of those “The Oppressed”. In this paper, I will be presenting a research design that tried to address some of the issues of an unbalanced relationship between “the Other” participants and “Us” the researchers of a study in an “Indigenous” region in Oaxaca, Mexico of rather controversial participants: males accused of Domestic Violence. Using art-based methods as elicitors of conversation, the study inquired empathetically about the meanings and aspirations of -being a man- of males who have been criminalized upon Intimate Partner Violence in a region marked by homicides, femicides, and feminicides.

The Importance of African People Shaping, Telling and Owning Our Narratives

Winnie Ssanyu Sseruma Our Stories Told By Us, United Kingdom

In this paper, Winnie will reflect on the importance of African people telling our stories in our words, and who owns our narratives. There are plenty of HIV epidemiological data on African communities in the UK, and most of it makes for challenging reading, showing that there is still a lot of work to do. But improvements also continue, thanks to people from African communities, allies, health personnel and support from the government and charity sectors. What this book aims to reflect on are the individual stories of recovery, resilience and leadership in the HIV response in the UK – stories we don’t normally read about. This is the first book of its kind to explore the contribution African individuals and communities have made to the fight against HIV. She will also focus on our friendship, and why it was pivotal for Africans living with HIV to lead on this project and to tell our stories in our own words. And the importance of nurturing the leadership of African women. Winnie will also talk about what we hoped the book to achieve, progress two years on and next steps.

Our Stories Told By Us: Celebrating the African Contribution to the UK HIV Response

Angelina Namiba 4M Network of Mentor Mothers Living with HIV

In this paper, Angelina will discuss why and how the book Our Stories Told By Us: Celebrating the African Contribution to the UK HIV Response came about, and the place of narratives within the book. Why the co-authors/editors felt it was important to write it, particularly in this important period of reflection on over 40 years of the UK’s HIV response, why we felt it was critical to tell these stories. She will reflect on the process of creating the book, the varied contributors within the book, and the incorporated artwork and its meaning. The book is the first to describe and celebrate the experiences and responses of African communities to the HIV epidemic in the UK. It achieves this through individual stories and reflections rather than HIV statistics. The book was made possible through the efforts of five Black African women living with HIV and residing in the UK.

Location | AUP: C-103
Session Chair | Constance Pâris de Bollardière, The American University of Paris

Competitive Practices and Narratives in Post-Earthquake Crisis Management in Samandağ, Hatay (Turkey)

Verda Asya Kimyonok EHESS, IRIS

While the earthquakes of February 2023 largely destroyed what was visible of the identity and collective memory of the Arabic-speaking populations of Antakya- Samandağ, they also acted as a catalyst, disseminating issues and challenges that had previously been circumvented by people. ‘By losing their worlds (and their heritages), locals lose their ability to compose their future world and worlds in general’ (Descola, 2020). For this paper I propose to look into Samandağ, a city located in Turkey’s southern, peripheral and ethno-religiously diverse province of Hatay where the majority Arab population composed of Alawi and Christian communities perpetuates native memory and defies competing narratives emanating from ‘Turkish authorities and institutions’. I will draw from an extensive and intimate field research that resonates on a personal level, during which I collected data and conducted interviews, in a situation of crisis, vulnerability and large-scale destruction, to give an overview of plural narratives, their shaping and their effects on daily lives. The re-mobilisation of inhabitants around a range of issues linked to post-earthquake reconfigurations highlights competing conceptions and realities of citizenship, belonging, together-living, when it comes to perspectives of future and survival as a community and as complex, political individuals. Through the following of this crisis’ management, I will dig into dissonances and chaos between a diverse range of actors at the national and local levels.

The Holocaust and First Nations in Canada: Examining the Paradigmatic Use of Holocaust Memory

Anna-Mae Wiesenthal Gratz College

The Holocaust is often recognized as the paradigm by which all genocides are measured and understood. Most people intuitively realize the gravitas of the Holocaust: the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews and others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. The Holocaust as a paradigm for the concept of genocide is often used by victims of mass violence as a means to articulate their social suffering. The primary goal of this study is to determine through an analysis of 185 testimonies of Indian Residential School Survivors if and in what ways the Holocaust paradigm is applied to Canada's Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) process to either reveal or conceal the genocide inflicted upon First Nations by the Indian Residential School (IRS) system in Canada. What is the impact of Holocaust memory on IRS testimony? The IRS is understood by many as a crucial mechanism of a genocide perpetrated on Canada's First Nations. The research brings together Canada's IRS system, the TRC process, and Holocaust memory. It seeks what new understandings can be achieved by using the Holocaust as both a normative and epistemological framework in order to reveal otherwise hidden aspects of colonization, specifically within the IRS system and throughout the TRC process. At the same time, a hegemonic understanding of genocide based on a popular imagination of the Holocaust can also silence or block a more expansive and inclusive discourse with which to articulate the enduring harms of colonialism in Indigenous communities. There are benefits and costs to appealing to the Holocaust as a paradigm. Doing so has the potential to reveal and conceal genocide and can do both simultaneously.

The Agonistic Memory of the Algerian Black Decade on Screen: The Repentant and The Blessed

Dr. Nicole Wallenbrock The City University of New York

After the harrowing Algerian Civil War of the 1990s (also called The Black Years) in which by some accounts 200,000 died and 20,000 disappeared, Algerians voted overwhelmingly in favor of a charte pour la paix and reconciliation. This 2005 law granted amnesty to most members of the FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) and allowed the government to avoid an investigation of their own role in the violence. Despite this attempt to render the atrocity an amnesia, the post-trauma of the Black Decade weighs heavily on the national psyche. In fact, Guy Austin finds agonistic memory in post-Civil War Algeria , a term coined by Bulls and Hansen to describe a memory that “brings to the forefront the complex subjective dimension of social representations and the adversarial character of the political processes to which they are connected. ” This presentation locates agonistic memory in two outlier Algerian films. The Repentant (Allouache, 2012) and The Blessed (Djama, 2017) uniquely narrativize the Civil War’s lingering presence in the early aughts without relying on the flashback. The depicted perspectives of post-trauma extend and alter cinema’s understanding of the Black Decade, which film previously painted in media-res. These two films’ distance and proximity to the 90s violence and the 2005 law reveal an awareness of a conflicted post-Civil-War Algeria.

Location | AUP: C-505
Session Chair | Brian Schiff, The American University of Paris

Reconstructing Narratives of Conflict: Forensic Archaeology as an Act of Narrative Resistance

Kaylee Altimore Cranfield University

Mass graves are among the most literal manifestations of hermeneutical death—an imposed silencing of the victims of mass violence and deliberate attempt to erase their lives, identities and stories. Yet, through the interpretation of material traces, forensic archaeologists are able to resist this erasure. Working in reverse, they uncover the end points of violence to engage in a process of narrative reconstruction, a search for truth that restores not only the identities but the testimonies of victims through excavation and analysis. In this light, forensic archaeology is much more than a technical discipline, but a narrative response to mass violence—an effort to reclaim truth in the aftermath of atrocity. This presentation will explore forensic archaeology as an act of storytelling where the evidence of atrocity crimes is uncovered, made present, and pieced together to establish the who, when and where that perpetrator had sought to obscure. Serving as a corrective force, forensic archaeologists provide crucial material evidence that can either corroborate or challenge competing stories. In doing so, forensic archaeologists challenge the silence that has been imposed on victims, a silence that often seeks to control historical memory and deny the truth. Drawing from theoretical frameworks of narrative and hermeneutics, case studies of mass grave investigations and war crime trials, and insights from interviews with forensic practitioners, this presentation argues that forensic archaeology is an act of narrative resistance—one that restores identities and historical truths, reinforces the rights of victims, and facilitates justice and reconciliation. By reconstructing what perpetrators originally hoped would be lost, forensic archaeologists ensure that the voices of those silenced are not only heard but woven into the fabric of our history and collective memory.

Narrative Snapshots Extracted from Conversations with a Syrian Family: Hanna Ahrendt's ‘World Making’ Touches Billie Wong's ‘Spatial Belonging’

Prof. Geert Van Hove Ghent University, Dr. Floor Verhaeghe Ghent University

As part of an international research collaboration, this study explores the lived experiences of one Syrian refugee family - a father, a mother and two children with disabilities - now residing in Belgium. Through long conversations stretched over a year, we gathered narrative "snapshots" of the family’s daily struggles and aspirations. Employing retroduction, we navigate between these snapshots and the theoretical frameworks of world making by Hannah Arendt and spatial belonging by Billie Wong, to create a dialogue between lived experiences and concepts. The snapshots include the family’s pursuit of ‘a quality school,’ ‘securing a driver’s license,’ ‘imagining future employment opportunities,’ and facing ‘language and cultural barriers.’ These snapshots illustrate their acts of world-making amid a dominant narrative of racism and ableism, while also revealing the complexities of belonging (as elaborated by Wong) as a day-to-day construction site. This intersection of Migration Studies and Disability Studies offers a unique perspective on the additional challenges faced by (Syrian) refugee families with children with disabilities. The narrative snapshots are not merely anecdotes but provide rich, textured descriptions that challenge silenced topics and offer alternative representations of refugees and people with disabilities. By presenting these narratives, we aim to illuminate how narrative analysis can bridge disparate worlds, offering insights into both the experiences of displaced families and broader possibilities for solidarity and understanding within diverse societal contexts.

Visual Testimonies: Yazidi Sexual Violence Survivors Using Photovoice and Concept Mapping to Narrate Their Experiences

Nishtiman Khalaf Awsman The University of Tennessee

An important aspect of recovering from trauma is the telling of stories. This paper reports on findings of a study involving photovoice and concept mapping with 25 Yezidi women in Sinjar, Iraq who survived sexual slavery of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and had never shared their stories. Participants were recruited through the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR), whose researchers worked online in collaboration with the Global Survivors Fund (GSF), and Nadia Murad’s Initiative (NI), whose researchers worked on the ground. The purpose of the study was to assess the impact of storytelling on victims’ sense of repair and justice. Participants were asked to take 32 photographs on their cell phones on two different occasions where 16 pictures represented their past and current challenges in surviving and coping, and 16 pictures represented the way they want to achieve recognition and justice. At two face-to-face group meetings in a social center in Sinjar in northern Iraq, participants were presented with print copies of the photos (from files they previously shared) and asked to write down on a sticky note what their photos meant. They affixed the sticky note to photos hung on a wall to create a concept map that connected all the photos. Conversational storytelling was then elicited, and every participant was given approximately fifteen minutes to tell what their photos and map say. The women discussed the feeling of freedom to share without judgement. They also found solidarity with fellow storytellers in light of the common elements across stories. Ethical considerations of photo-elicited storytelling with a highly traumatized and stigmatized population are discussed.

Location | AUP: C-101
Session Chair | Anna Ovaska, Tampere University

Healthcare and social care professionals need to have advanced skills of reading, listening, and expressing themselves, as well as the ability to acknowledge different perspectives and understand cultural and societal contexts, including structures of power. As global crises impact healthcare and healthcare systems worldwide and as more and more social and healthcare professionals work in languages other than their first language, the importance of these skills is further emphasized. Additionally, there is a need to think beyond the skills of an individual, such as narrative competence (Charon 2006), to investigate productive encounters between individuals and groups and to focus on how social structures shape healthcare systems on the one hand and the experiences and narratives of illness and health on the other (Metzl & Hansen 2014; Ovaska 2024).

This panel presents four recent applications of narrative medicine, focused on bridging different cultural and language contexts, the perspectives of patients and carers, and the perspectives of individuals and complex social structures. It showcases the second, global wave of narrative medicine and demonstrates how the field has developed outside the anglophone world and the Global North (see also Wilson 2023). The learning modules discussed in the presentations are the result of years of work in the field of medical and health humanities. The presenters discuss the kinds of learning that take place through such communal engagement with narratives. There are studies about the effectiveness of narrative medicine approaches in medical education (Milota et al. 2019), but qualitative studies of specific classroom applications are still needed.

References:

Charon, R. (2006). Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. Oxford University Press.

Metzl, J. M., & Hansen, H. (2014). Structural competency: Theorizing a new medical engagement with stigma and inequality. Social Science & Medicine, 103, 126-133.

Milota, M.M., van Thiel, J. M. W. & van Delden, J. J. M. (2019). Narrative medicine as a medical education tool: A systematic review. Medical Teacher, 41(7), 802-810

Ovaska, A. (2024). Toward Engaged Narratology: Critical and Embodied Close Reading and Social Justice in a Narrative Medicine Classroom. Narrative Inquiry Vol. 34, No. 2, 2024.

Wilson, S. (2023). Manifesto for a Multilingual Medical Humanities. The Polyphony. 30 May 2023.

Healthcare Students’ Experiences of Participating in Narrative Medicine Groups in South Africa and Finland

Dr. Elina Renko University of Arts, Helsinki, Dr. Sonja Sulkava University of Helsinki

This presentation explores the experiences of healthcare students participating in narrative medicine groups in two distinct cultural contexts: The University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the University of Helsinki in Finland. The international collaboration allows for the examination of a range of voices and global perspectives on the experiences of future healthcare professionals in using shared reading and writing of narratives to foster patient-centred practice. The two narrative medicine groups were carried out with similar literary texts and writing prompts. The results shed light on how participants make sense of the course content in relation to their work; how they reflect on their experiences and values through writing; and how the participants' learning experiences differ from and resemble each other in two different cultural contexts. Among other aspects, we will discuss the meaning of silences during group discussions, which emerged as an important theme of discovery among participants. Also, the experiences of facilitators/teachers in the two courses are discussed.

Experimenting with Perspective-Taking, Embodiment, and Collaborative Design in the Medical Humanities Classroom

Dr. Megan Milota UMC Utrecht

One could argue that perspective-taking, or “the tendency to spontaneously adopt the psychological view of others” (Davis 1983) is an essential skill in healthcare settings. Being able to imagine a situation from the other’s point of view can lead to better intergroup understanding, empathic communication, and multidisciplinary collaboration (Cooke 2018; Chapman 2013; Slim 202). Perspective-taking has also been linked to reduced stereotyping behavior (Galinsky 2000) and increased patient satisfaction (Blatt 2010). In this presentation, I will describe an innovative perspective-taking module for bachelor students at the University Medical Center Utrecht. This module, co-designed and co-taught with patient-teachers, challenges students to consider—and experience—what it is like to live with a chronic condition. During the module, students read first-person experience narratives about a chronic condition and meet with the authors of these published texts. Together with these patient-teachers, the students create a ‘treatment protocol’ that simulates the experiences described in the books. The students then follow the protocol for 2 weeks. The patient-authors act as mentors and teachers during the whole process. We’ve found that this activity has a profound impact on both the patients and students. As this talk will illustrate, the combination of active perspective-taking and mentorship facilitates meaningful reflection, which helps students move past superficial learning to deeper, or transformative learning experiences (Murdoch-Eaton 2014).

Blatt B. et al. (2010). Does perspective-taking increase patient satisfaction in medical encounters?

Chapman, E. N. et al. (2013). Physicians and implicit bias.

Cooke, A. N. et al. (2018). Empathic Understanding.

Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy.

Galinsky, A. D. et al. (2000). Perspective-taking: decreasing stereotype expression, stereotype accessibility, and in-group favoritism.

Murdoch-Eaton D. et al. (2014). Reflection: moving from a mandatory ritual to meaningful professional development.

Slim, L., et al. (2021). A Behavior-Analytic Perspective on Interprofessional Collaboration.

How Do Medical Students Rewrite James Joyce’s “A Painful Case”? Defining Perspective Taking as a Key Component of Narrative Competence

Dr. Laura Karttunen Tampere University

One assignment popular in Literature and Medicine classes involves rewriting a story from a different character’s point of view (see Pope 1995). In medical education, such as the Literature and Medicine elective I teach at Tampere University, the goal of the exercise is to enhance the students’ perspective taking ability, which is thought to contribute to a more sympathetic attitude to people (see Davis 1996). In this talk I discuss the results of my analysis of stories written by Finnish medical students on the basis of James Joyce’s “A Painful Case” (1914) after attending lessons on narrative theory and narrative medicine. I analyze the changes they make to Joyce’s text in order to assess their understanding of point of view as a theoretical concept and their capacity for perspective taking, defined in the context of literature as sharing the evaluations of a character (Bortolussi et al. 2018). In this way I want to achieve a more nuanced view of perspective taking as a key component of doctors’ narrative competence and to evaluate the learning outcomes of this elective course.

Bortolussi, M., Dixon P. & Linden C. (2018). Putting perspective taking in perspective. Review of General Psychology, 22(2), 178–187.

Davis, M.H. (1996). Empathy: A Social psychological approach. Boulder & Oxford: Westview Press.

Pope, R. (1995). Textual intervention: Creative and critical strategies for literary studies. London: Routledge.

Enhancing Social and Cultural Belonging in Narrative Medicine Groups for L2 Speakers

Prof. Viola Parente-Čapková University of Turku, Dr. Riitta Jytilä University of Turku, Alexandra Salmela University of Turku

This talk investigates a multilingual narrative medicine reading group for L2 speakers which aims to support participants’ narrative, cultural, and linguistic competencies, as well as their sense of professional and societal belonging. In the group, narrative medicine (Charon 2006) and cultural language learning (Parente-Čapková et al. 2023)—i.e., learning cultural and linguistic skills through reading fiction—were combined for the first time. The talk illustrates how the second language context impacts close reading and shared reading of literary narratives and offers preliminary findings about the participants’ and facilitators’ experiences. It discusses how the multilingual context enriches, but also complicates, the approaches of narrative medicine, drawing attention both to structural and linguistic levels.

Charon, R. (2006). Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. Oxford University Press.

Parente-Čapková, V., Jytilä, R. & Kekki, N. (2023) Lähilukeminen aikuisten maahan muuttaneiden lukupiirissä. Lukemisen kulttuurit. Edit. I. Lindh et al. Gaudeamus.

Location | AUP: C-102
Session Chair | Ioanna Kouki, Université Paris Cite

Actual, Possible, and Impossible Worlds: Poetics and Ideology

Dr. Brian Richardson University of Maryland

This paper begins with an account of the explicit creation of a fictional world in a story by John Updike, noting his interweaving of geographical and invented space in “How to Love America and Leave it at the Same Time”: “Say the town is in California, on the dry side of the Sierras; though it could be in Iowa, or Kentucky, or Connecticut. Out of nowhere, here it has arrived. Listen” (53-54). The talk next focuses on geographically fabricated spaces that are ideologically charged, such as the impossible peripheries of Prague in Michal Ajvaz’s The Other City and the historically inverted world of Bernardine Evaristo’s White Roots, in which historical nineteenth-century slavery is defamiliarized by being rewritten with the races reversed, as poor, uneducated Europeans are enslaved and demeaned by rich, powerful Africans and sent off to work in the sugar plantations of the West Japanese islands (i.e., the West Indies). The talk explores issues such as the question of ontological consistency within a narrative world, the degrees of divergence from representations of the actual world, and the ideological implications of fictional world creation and denarrated: as the quotation from Updike suggests, the self-conscious fabrication of a world can readily imply a critique of the stultifying homogeneity of middle-class America. The paper goes on to examine the theoretical status of impossible fictional worlds and weighs debates in existing accounts between the position set forth by Lubomir Dolezel and David Herman against that of Thomas Pavel and Marie-Laure Ryan. It concludes by indicating the necessary parameters that an expansive model requires if it is to encompass and clarify representations of the actual world, possible worlds, and impossible worlds and their ideological consequences.

“[…] Forced To Reflect That World in Fragments of Broken Mirrors” – Violent Dispersion in Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983)

Dr. André Schwarck Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel

In Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame (1983), the narrating voice remarks on the world it is creating that “I am forced to reflect that world in fragments of broken mirrors […] I must reconcile myself to the inevitability of the missing bits” (69). Accordingly, characters disperse throughout this narrative world, often finding themselves trapped in one of its multiple fragmented, hostile and disparate spaces. My point of departure is Rob Nixon’s work (2011) on the representation of what he calls “slow violence” and especially his proposal to turn the attention away from narrative’s affinity to realize representation via single and transformational events. Instead, Nixon tries to explore how narratives can accomodate “the temporal dispersion of slow violence” (3). I argue that dispersion may not only be a regarded as a temporal phenomenon but also as a fictional one. Readers constantly assess, in an apophantic sense (Martínez-Bonati [1981]), what is and what is not the case within a fictional world. The narrative process need not be viewed as primarily establishing reality within fiction via histoire changing events. Instead, I suggest that the impression of what is real within a narrative may also emerge against the backdrop of readers’ apophantic assessments. In the magic-realist world of Shame, however, readers are profoundly challenged in carrying out such assessements. The result is not only that readers are disorientedly promped, time and again, to assert that something is the case in a dispersing and pervasive manner, but also the construction of multiple disparate and often irreconcilable spaces. The novel’s characters, eventually, become fictionally ‘uprooted’ entities either strictly tied to or shifting between these disparate places. At last, this is how Rushdie’s Shame achieves to represent the collective experience of historical violence.

Reclaiming and Renegotiating Authenticity Through Autofiction: Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You

Dr. Mengchen Lang Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Autofiction, often regarded as an innovative means of self-exploration and self-presentation, invites discussions of authenticity. Highlighting the complexity, flexibility, and social value of the notion, I suggest that authenticity is not an outdated ideal that autofiction seeks to transcend; rather, autofiction opens up multiple ways to critically engage with this notion: it provides occasions for authors to renegotiate what authenticity means for specific individual or groups, reexamine conventional associations between authenticity and specific narrative practices, and put authenticity in relation to other values such as creativity, justice, and respect. This potential is realized in Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You (2017), a work of “biographical autofiction” that proclaims to be “fiction” in paratext but does not contain any perceivable traces of invention. Critiquing Genette’s dismissal of biographical autofiction as “veiled autobiography,” I argue that the paratextual label of “fiction” is not a gesture of evasion but a liberating leap that makes space for the author to renegotiate authenticity, a notion that is highly at stake in the narration of domestic violence but systematically denied to female survivors. A close analysis of the work informed by this new metaphor shows that Kandasamy negotiates four forms of authenticity with her autofictional performances: a partial authenticity that recognizes female survivors’ need for self-protection and advocates an ethics of respectful distance, an emotional authenticity that questions the ideal of detached objectivity and registers the psychological repercussions of domestic violence, an emergent authenticity that liberates female survivors from the victim’s role and gives them the space to heal and grow, and a collective authenticity that highlights the importance of culturally sanctioned narrative templates for individual storytelling. Kandasamy’s work highlights the need to continually scrutinize and renew our ideas of authenticity and shows the constructive role autofiction can play in this process.

Location | AUP: C-505
Session Chair | Jens Brockmeier, The American University of Paris

Emotions of a Care Crisis and Ageing in Post-War British Fiction

Dr. Jade Elizabeth French Loughborough University

In contemporary British culture, care homes for older adults are depicted largely as institutions in crisis. Treated as a ‘last resort’ and viewed as ‘unloved, even feared’ (The Commission of Residential Care, 2014) the care home incites powerful feelings. But an emotional tension has long existed at the heart of the ‘care crisis’: where crisis produce fear, anxiety and confusion, care is associated with love, empathy and compassion (Pulcini, 2017). In this paper, I examine two post-war British novels – At the Jerusalem by Paul Bailey (1969) and Boy Sandwich by Beryl Gilroy (1989) – to suggest that fictional narratives can provide emotional insights into how a care crisis is imagined, felt, and responded to. In Bailey’s novel, the white, working-class residents at the Jerusalem have their emotions monitored as family histories resurface. Twenty years later, Gilroy’s novel examines feelings of guilt and abandonment by following three generations of a West Indian family and the adjustment to life in a British care home. Both novels portray the care home as tyrannical institutions that produce complex feelings. I draw on the concept of ‘emotional communities’ (Rosenwein, 2006) to examine how disparate narrative worlds are portrayed, as intergenerational characters interact and portray the emotional tensions embodied in care. Literary age studies scholars argue that fictional narratives can imaginatively demonstrate ‘care in action’ (DeFalco, 2016) via literary experiments. Drawing on this, the paper ends by addressing form and how fictional narratives can help create more common spaces, where the emotions of a ‘care crisis’ can be analysed and shared. Overall, I argue post-war novels can offer new ways of imagining attitudes to care and ageing in the present by presenting the emotional histories embedded in cultural narratives.

Emotions Narrating Food Insecurity: Unfolding Sociopolitical Change

Vikki Oriane de Jong KU Leuven

Global food crises are increasingly driven by conflict, economic shocks, and unequal resource distribution, forcing more people into food insecurity and creating conditions ripe for food riots. To break this violent, cyclical pattern, more research is needed to examine food insecurity beyond its material dimensions. While numerous studies offer valuable insights into household consumption, food access, and adaptive strategies, they often overlook that food insecurity is an inherently emotional experience, deeply connected to—and continuously interacting with—broader sociopolitical dynamics. As a result, there has been insufficient scholarly attention to how emotional responses to food insecurity can reshape space, place, and potentially drive societal change that goes beyond spontaneous unrest. This paper addresses this gap by exploring the emotional dimension of food insecurity. Drawing on emotional geography theory, the study highlights how food insecurity experiences are shaped by cultural and social relations, perceptions of inequality, and narratives of injustice. Focusing on the food crisis in urban Havana, Cuba, this study employs an ethnographic approach, drawing from 450 hours of participant observation and 20 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with Cuban households of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. The findings reveal that emotions narrate food insecurity, influencing both the internal experiences of individuals and the external discourse around food access, leading to significant sociopolitical and spatial transformations at the household, urban, and national levels. Specifically, these emotional narratives impact (1) individual and collective perceptions of identity, (2) how public space is perceived, experienced, and utilized, and (3) the dynamics of power and perceived government legitimacy. This paper argues that an emotional lens provides essential insights into how personal, yet societally shaped, emotional responses to food insecurity can catalyze broader sociopolitical change, influencing pathways to political contestation.

“I am what I believe“: Dynamic Emotional States, Cultural Values and the Power of Narrative in a Semiotic Perspective

Dr. Inna Livytska Justus Liebig University

Recent research on subjectivity shares a common interest in narrative as a set of “make-believe” practice of values production (Iversen, 2024). Advancements in cognitive narratology, the corporeal nature of the human perception, placed the experiencing body into the center of the narrative research, with a focus on emotions (Colombetti, 2024). Modern self-theory sees emotions as a motivational basis for the human agency and bounds them with moral and personal values (Goodwin et al. 2013). Strong emotions of “fear” or “shame” serve as the factors regulating the “inappropriate” behavior of the social groups via emotions imbued in “master narraives” and deeply embedded in particular culture (Halverson, 2011). Guided by the critique of the affective brainocentrism, this presentation will attempt to represent emotions as a dynamic semantic category, determining the reader´s perception and underlying narrative discursively. using Peircean sign model of the interpretation set in a triadic nature of the emotional, energetic, and dynamic interpretants, we will look into the dynamic semiotic processes, governing the narrative dynamics through affective narrative scaffolding and abduction, eliciting corresponding affective response on the side of the reader.

Conflict, Trauma and Narratives: Exploring the Dynamics of Social Relations in Assam since the Assam Movement

Dr. Debajyoti Biswas Bodoland University, Dr. Jahnu Bharadwaj Tihu College, Gauhati University

"I fail to comprehend why they persist in tormenting us. We harbour no ill will towards anyone, including those who burned-down our home. All we desire is to live in peace," says one of our respondents in his 60s who has endured multiple instances of violence. Although the man seemed reserved about his past, his mother and daughter fearlessly conveyed the sense of humiliation and grief, forming a narrative of intergenerational trauma. During the Assam Agitation of the 1980s, approximately thirty-six thousand individuals residing in eight villages straddling the Kamrup and Darrang districts of Assam were compelled to seek shelter in refugee camps due to the widespread arson of their residences. As we engaged with the affected individuals and navigated their narratives, depending on their willingness to narrate their stories, we realized that we were taking the victims through their memory lane back to the 1980s, thereby letting them to reconstruct the present-day social reality vis-à-vis their past experiences. Notably, fictional literary works in Assamese and English have also provided insightful perspectives on these events, unequivocally denouncing the senseless violence that beset Assam from 1979 onwards. Furthermore, words like ‘aabeg’ (emotion/sentiment) and ‘maanobotaa’ (humanitarianism) are found to reverberate in both literary texts and the respondents' accounts. Through a comprehensive analysis of specific literary texts and the feedback of 450-respondents, we endeavour to examine the role of political rhetoric in fomenting violence and the lasting scars it leaves on people. We argue, within the framework of Affect Theory, that political rhetoric engenders a spectrum of emotions, thereby shaping community sentiments, underscoring the imperative of understanding, and addressing these intricate dynamics to avert future calamities. Our presentation will be divided into four sections explaining the effects of political rhetoric, response of people in post-conflict society, literary representation, and the function of hegemony.

Location | AUP: C-104
Session Chair | Olena Kovalchuk, Ukrainian Science Diaspora in France

Focus | This panel would examine how narratives of hope and resilience are emerging from displaced Ukrainian communities. It would look at how storytelling, media, fake propaganda and personal accounts can shape the future of these refugees, focusing on potential pathways for return, reconstruction, and recovery in post-war Ukraine.

Particularly, we will present the narratives focused on native language crisis and the challenges of integration or assimilation of displaced Ukrainians.

Special attention will be given to the resistance of disinformation and fake news, and thus contributing to the formation of a cohesive initiative to fight the aggressor and national unity.

The panel will provide a deeper insight into the philosophical, cultural, social and multimodal semiotic peculiarities as the factors that influence the transformation of refugees’ human capital, including shifts in skills, education, and professional experience

Each topic is designed to capture the complexity of media, migration, and labor issues in the context of the ongoing war, while also addressing the potential for positive transformation and resolution.

Crisis of a Language Study and Usage or the Move to Assimilation

Nadiya Golizdra Independent Researcher

The concept of a "native language" is often difficult to define, especially in the context of forced displacement. In the case of Ukrainian refugees, particularly children and youth, preserving their native language has emerged as a crucial issue. Drawing on reports from the UNHCR, including Lives on Hold and Education on Hold, this presentation will assess the challenges of maintaining Ukrainian language and cultural identity in displacement. The findings will be discussed in relation to initiatives undertaken by both the EU and Ukraine, highlighting the different approaches to addressing this issue. Special attention will be given to recommendations from the International Expert Council on Displacement and Refugee Rights (IECDR), which underscore the need for Ukrainian authorities to prioritize the preservation of cultural belonging among refugees. By examining these efforts, this presentation will explore how narratives of language and identity contribute to shaping post-conflict futures for displaced Ukrainians, especially the younger generation.

Freedom of Speech and Self-Censorship of the Media in War Conditions. Current Situation and Prospects for Transformations in Ukraine

Oksana Zorych Department of Theory and History of Political Science

As a response to the full-scale invasion of Russia, a narrative of victory and the unification of Ukrainians with the aim of achieving sustainable peace has become dominant in public discourse and collective expectations. At the same time the provided approach of "unification of news" allowed the resistance of disinformation and fake news, and thus contributing to the formation of a cohesive initiative to fight the aggressor and national unity. Undoubted advantage of this approach was the fact that it allowed the expansion of official and verified information. The accuracy of data counteracted the destructive intentions of the Russian propaganda machine, and at the same time, a single information flow and unified content obviously blocked the possibility for pluralism of thoughts in the media space in Ukraine. In the same time from the point of view of democratic stability, it is important to maintain a balance between centralized information and ensuring free access for citizens to independent and unforeseen thoughts and positions. So, the key question in this disposition is how is it possible to balance the interests of society and the state in matters of ensuring the country’s information security, on the one hand, and guaranteeing the quality parameters of the work of journalists, primarily freedom of speech and the right to critical judgments in war conditions, on the other?

Integration of Ukrainian Refugees in France, Poland and Germany: The Transformation of Human Capital in the Conditions of Forced Migration and Ways of its Effective Use

Kateryna Hannouf Generali France, Dr. Liudmyla Golovkova Ukrainian Science Diaspora in France, Dr. Svitlana Chugaievska Andrzej Frycz Możawski Academy of Sciences in Krakow

The study aims to analyze the key factors that influence the transformation of refugees’ human capital, including shifts in skills, education, and professional experience. Additionally, it will explore how these changes affect refugees' opportunities for integration into the labor market and how they navigate social, cultural, and economic challenges in their host country. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative data, this presentation will propose strategies for optimizing the use of refugee human capital in France. These strategies will include policy recommendations for local and national governments, as well as initiatives to facilitate skills recognition, professional retraining, and employment matching. Moreover, the research will highlight best practices for fostering integration, with a particular focus on enhancing social cohesion and promoting economic inclusion. Ultimately, this presentation seeks to provide insights into how the effective management of Ukrainian refugees' human capital can benefit not only the displaced individuals themselves but also contribute to the sustainable development of the French economy and society

Narratives as Recreation of the First Nations in Canada

Dr. Oksana Shostak Université Paris Cité

The historical novel genre is considered to be the most dependent upon the official and literary ideology. Historiosophy is usually tasked with comprehending the empirical knowledge gained from historiographical national sources. The historiographical novel breaks free from the history of the dominant race, class, or culture and draws attention to the unwritten histories of minorities, thus the writer seeks to break away from a limited understanding of history. These are the tasks outlined in Orenda (2013) by Joseph Boyden, one of the most read novel in Canada in 2014. Using the literary images the writer created an explination for historiosophical basis of modern Canada, which confirmed that narrativity was weakened in official history, but nowadays it becomes a powerful tool in the historiographical truth searching. In Boyden’s narrative the confrontation and mutual reflection of two different worlds - the indigenous and European ones are presented in the historical retrospective of 17th century. The standpoints are submitted from the perspective of a modern ethnic minority. The author seeks to reveal the civilization place as well as the space of the First Nations (in the specific case of the Mohawk and Huron) in the history of the formation of statehood in Canada. The purpose of the novel is not tuned for creation of a romanticized past, a kind of home for the ‘noble savage’. J. Boyden recreates the complex moments of Indian history associated with the territory to the north of modern Toronto, exploring the preconditions for modern Quebec.

Location | AUP: C-103
Session Chair | Bianca Rochelle Parry, University of Pretoria

Disparate Childhood Worlds of Illness and Care in Times of Pandemic Crises

Dr. Kjersti Røsvik University of South-Eastern-Norway, Prof. Ellen Schrumpf University of South-Eastern-Norway

In this proposal, we discuss how children memorize and narrate noteworthy events about sickness and health to create and negotiate worlds of belonging in different times of social crisis and conflict. By comparing the tuberculosis pandemic after World War II and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2022 in Norway, we are investigating the following questions: How do dominant childhood narratives influence pandemic management and medical knowledge regimes, and how are treatment methods for children affected and experienced? The study compares two historically different childhood narratives, first, the “autonomous and independent child” in the postwar era and second, the “protected and shielded child” of the 21st century. The aim is to explore and challenge medical narratives appearing as undisputed and definite truths at different times. Childhood holds significant meaning for people. When people recall their childhood, they develop personal stories and connect to the world. For this study, empirical data is gathered from individuals who reconstruct and narrate experiences from their everyday lives during the two pandemics. Childhood memories about sickness, medical treatment, and isolation are interpreted and analyzed as texts and narratives, thereby comprehending memories as combinations of factual past events and the way these events have been chosen, interpreted, and narrated in the present.

Lorås, J. (2007). Oral sources – factual or narrative readings? Historical Journal, 86 (3).

Foucault, M. (2020). The will to knowledge (E. Schaanning, Trans.; Vol. 1). Pax publishing house A/S.

White, H. (1987), The Content of the Form. Narrative Discourse and ahistorical representation. The John Hopkins University Press.

Bridging Disparate Narrative Worlds in Women’s Midlife Experiences of Loss and Trauma

Robert Mundle Robert Mundle Productions Inc.

This paper will present excerpts from the author’s new documentary short film currently in production that illuminates women’s stories of aging and the creative challenges of narrative self-expression through experiences of loss and trauma. Aufbrüche [New Beginnings], explores themes of narrative identity, personal growth, and transformation through the perspectives of two older women—Ulrike Draesner, novelist, essayist, poet and translator, and one of the most important writers in modern German literature; and Tanja Dreyer, whose personal story of healing from trauma forms the emotional heart of the film. Interviews with Ulrike Draesner focus on her memoir Eine Frau wird älter: Ein Aufbruch [A Woman Grows Older: A New Beginning] (Penguin 2018), and her new semi-autobiographical novel, Zu Liebe [To Love] (Penguin 2024). “From marriage to divorce, through a series of miscarriages, to raising an adopted daughter as a single mother and going through menopause, I have shaped my identity as a woman against unrealistic societal norms and expectations,” Draesner says.The film features an innovative drop-in listening booth on a subway platform in Hamburg, Germany, where a free listening service is offered by trained volunteers to all passersby. Its sign reads: “I hear you! Whether a story or a single sentence; experiences or wishes; happy or sad,” and it’s here where Tanja tells her story of hope and narrative possibilities in her complex journey to find herself, symbolized in a photograph that has become for her a sacred, story-laden companion and deeply personal object of healing, meaning and resilience, consistent with Randall and Robinson (eds) Things That Matter: Special Objects in Our Stories as We Age (UTP 2024).

Vicarious Ageing: How Understanding the Later Lives of Others Shapes the Narratives of Middle-Aged Persons on Growing Older

Adriana Georgia Teodorescu Babes-Bolyai University

Based on findings from over twenty narrative interviews with middle-aged individuals, this presentation explores the complex ways in which middle-aged people’s narratives about ageing and later life are shaped by their perceptions of the later lives of others. Three categories of ‘older alterity’ will be examined as catalysts for shaping these narratives: 1) proximal alterity (e.g., parents, family members, neighbours, older friends), 2) distant but significant alterity (e.g., film and television stars, writers, politicians, and cultural role models), and 3) ‘abstract alterity’ – a concept that will be further developed in the presentation, reflecting how contemporary socio-cultural contexts construct representations and meanings of old age (e.g., the successful older person, active senior, or positive/healthy grandparent). Being witness – sitting on the tectonic ground of the middle age where one no longer benefits from the certainties and advantages of youthfulness – to how parents, loved ones and acquaintances navigate later life, with its multiple challenges (retirement, social isolation, chronic illnesses, grief and bereavement, changes of different social roles) and opportunities (more free time, travelling, self-confidence and life experience, etc.), observing how cinema actors and other public figures are portrayed in media, with myriads of social commentaries on their passage through time, with the continuous repositioning of their identities between continuities and drastic changes can prompt middle-aged individuals to anticipate their own experience of ageing. This research introduces the concept of ‘vicarious ageing’ to describe the process of experiencing ageing indirectly, through others. Also, it discusses the relevance of this concept for both social and narrative gerontology, examining, among others, how middle-aged people define their ideal, most probable, and most feared versions of later life based on their interpretations of others' ageing experiences.

Location | AUP: C-102
Session Chair | Dafna Zur, Stanford University

Narrating Palestine: Persuasion and the Politics of Form

Prof. Susan S. Lanser Brandeis University

What does it mean to "narrate Palestine"? What narrative subjects, forms, and strategies seem to have worked persuasively to convey the tragic history and current realities of Palestinian experience to non-Palestinian readers, especially those for whom the situation of Palestine and Palestinians is vague or new? My contribution to exploring these questions sits at the intersection of theory, textuality, and reader response. I will explore the narrative practices of three or four works in different genres that have been widely recognized for transforming their (Western) readers’ understandings of the history of Palestine and its people from 1948 into the present. My chosen texts, which encompass history, memoir, fiction, and liminal genres, will include Nasser Abu Srour's *The Tale of a Wall* (2022/trans2024), Suad Amiry's *Mother of Strangers* (2022), Linda Dittmar's *Tracing Homelands: Israel, Palestine, and the Claims of Belonging* (2023), Adania Shibley's *Minor Detail* (2017/trans.2020), and Nathan Thrall's *A Day in the Life of Abed Salama* (2023). My goal will be to explore the narrative strategies that these texts deploy as they strive not only to represent lives and experiences unfamiliar or even suspect to their readers, but also to persuade readers into new ideological positions. In addition to a deep exploration of narrative practices deployed in these successful works, I will look for the implications about narrative from implicit in the testimonies of readers and reviewers. My overarching goal is to foster an understanding of the persuasive potential of particular narrative practices and the ways in which textual politics are a matter of textual form.

Complicity Literature in Israel/Palestine: Bridging the Narrative Gap Between Academic Thinkers and Feeling Bodies

Dr. Nitzan Tal Bar Ilan University

This conference paper will address two sets of disparate narrative worlds: Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian narratives of the Western Galilee; and academic versus experience-generated narratives of violence, with the “academic” side represented by literary scholars who work in the field of affect theory. First, I will suggest that affect theory has been using a different narrative of violence to the one used by authors enmeshed in violent conflict. Affect scholars recognized the need to politicize the tensions of the dinner table or the boardroom and identify the violence latent therein, leaving at the wayside instances of “paradigmatic” violence. This habit both runs the risk of flattening the difference between reversible coercive paradigms and irredeemable physical harm; and reveals the outsized place given in academic discourse to the voices of those of us who may suffer systemic repression daily but are less vulnerable to the threat of bodily rupture. Similarly, Anglophone academic discussion has tended to focus more on how its members may be implicated in the epistemological constraining of others than in our imbrication in the laying waste to other’s bodies. Second, I will argue that fiction is especially suited to address this theoretical gap, particularly fictions that constitute a sub-genre of their own which I call “complicity literature.” Analyzing Ronnie Brodetzky’s 2016 novel An Almost Olympic Pool as a case of such complicity literature, I will show how works in this genre materialize the moment of bodily rupture which affect theory tends to abstract. Finally, I will offer a reading of complicity as a cluster of affects, and articulate an affect theory for a narrative of violence in between the “major” war and the “minor” microaggression.

Disparate Narratives about the Hamas Attack and the War in Gaza in Jewish-Christian Dialogue

Dr. Magdalena Dziaczkowska Centre for Theology and Religious Studies, Lund University

We must move beyond binary narratives to do justice to the complexity of the surrounding reality. How can we achieve this in the context of war? How do we include the polyphony of voices and experiences without committing discursive violence, thereby multiplying injustice? The failure of interreligious dialogue in the face of the current escalation in Israel and Palestine forces us to examine the narratives surrounding the state of Israel, Palestine, and the concepts of peace and justice. Not only do Israelis and Palestinians appear to inhabit completely different realities, supported by competing narratives, but millions around the world also replicate these narratives and the resulting polarization within their own environments (universities, workplaces, families, etc.), seemingly distant from and unrelated to the conflict. This paper focuses on the narratives surrounding the Hamas attack and the war in Gaza within the context of interreligious dialogue between Jews and Christians, paying particular attention to the diverse historical, social and political framings of these events and the varying narratives of peace and justice. These disparate narratives reveal deep fractures in the fabric of interreligious dialogue—a process many hoped would resolve intergroup tensions and bridge the gaps between different groups' narratives and realities. However, this dialogue seems to have failed in reconciling competing narratives or finding common ground. The paper explores the key elements of these disagreements and proposes remedies for the growing narrative divide, including a more robust reflection on the meaning of hope and its role in fostering more empathetic and inclusive narratives.

Location | AUP: Q-801
Session Chairs | Anneke Sools, University of Twente and Shailoh Phillips, University of Twente

Narrative plays a constitutive role in human thought and experience through its capacity to imagine possible worlds, communicate knowledge, convey experience, form identities, train empathy and perspective-taking, or negotiate values. However, narrative thinking has also been associated with simplification, anthropocentrism, affective biases and other cognitive shortcuts that can hamper the understanding of complex realities. Also, uncritical use of narrative can perpetuate existing inequalities and fail to capture experiences that are ‘beyond words’ such as in illness. Moreover, Jill Bradbury, points out three additional epistemological and/or political problems of reliance on narrative for world- and self-building. First, that narrative risks imposing a normative form of a “good” narrative that entails logical flow, integration and coherence. Second, the distance between telling and living that typically occurs in research interviews tends to reproduce a gap between life and story. Third, the tendency to focus on single narrators hides from view their embeddedness in their social and ecological contexts. Arts-based, sensory and visual methodologies have been proposed in response to these limitations and critiques of a narrative approach. In this double panel, we will present examples of transdisciplinary research at the intersection of the arts, narrative research, social science and society. The various contributions will together cover a range of arts-based methods (visual, dance) and fields of application (health care, sustainability). We will reflect on the potential and limitations of combining narrative with arts-based methods. Panel I focuses on bridging the disparate worlds of patients or clients, professionals, and curators. Panel II focuses on engaging the embodied, sensory, performative functions of art.

Dramaturgical Approaches to Convey Counternarratives of Service Users in Long Term Care

Dr. Marjolein Heerings Erasmus University Rotterdam

Counter narratives to dominant healthcare policy narratives are important vehicles for critical reflection in, amongst others, quality improvement or professional education. Counter narratives however are difficult to voice as these go against the hegemonic discourse. Furthermore, service users in long term care, who may provide such counternarratives based on their lived experience, may experience epistemic injustice related to their position in the healthcare system or to their conditions such as (intellectual) disability, acquired brain damage, serious mental illness or dementia. To collect counternarratives from these service users, methods that allow for ‘small stories’ to emerge have proven useful, such as informal interviews or enactments observed in ethnographic research. Counternarratives collected in such a way are, however, often fragmented and therefore difficult to make generative in quality improvement or educational contexts. In response to this problem, we developed filmed monologues in collaboration with an inclusive theatre company based on ethnographic research. In the development process different translations are made from the field to film, which require reflection. These films where incorporated into the quality improvement tool for critical reflection, dialogue and co-design: the ‘Ask Us!’ method and an educational program for future healthcare workers.

A Narrative Evaluation of An Arts-Based Project with Senior Citizens in The Netherlands

Prof. Gerben Westerhof University of Twente

Due to transitions in the field of health and care as well as in the field of culture and arts, there is an increasing interest in crossing borders between these fields. This paper uses a narrative approach in order to better understand the dynamics involved from the perspective of participants in an arts-based project. This narrative approach aims to do justice to the creative and unique nature as well as the intrinsic value of the experiences of participants. The project brings older people in contact with professionals from the fields of art and care to work together with creative means. Interviews were conducted with 22 participants in the project, both older adults and professionals. The narrative methodology focused specifically on the moments and processes that were meaningful for the participants. On the one hand, the stories provide a rich resource that does justice to the idiosyncratic characteristics of each story. On the other hand, a thematic analysis shows the commonalities across stories: specifically, it reveals how the intervention contributes to talent development and connectedness of both the participating older people and the professionals.

The Art of Creating New Stories: Working with Art-based Learning in Palliative Care

Shailoh Phillips University of Twente, Marike Geurts Amsterdam UMC

Making sense of life after receiving a diagnosis of incurable cancer can be challenging. Previous research points to the potential of art-based practices to support the existential concerns of people with a life-threatening illness, by stimulating narrative meaning-making processes. Our research investigates the underlying factors and dynamics at play, aiming to inform the development of an Art-Based Learning (ABL) practice for patients living with incurable cancer. So far, we used three different qualitative methods: 1) a meta-ethnography, synthesizing existing literature on art-based practices in palliative care 2) interviews with curators in the Dutch arts field 3) an exhibition in the hospital and online to research the experience of ABL by patients. Preliminary results revealed patterns in three interrelated clusters: First, we found contextual factors such as time, money and space. Secondly, the role of relationships with facilitators, family, and caregivers in the social construction of meaning. Thirdly, the role of the patient’s ability and willingness to participate, and the personal narratives and legacy work they bring in. Across these areas, key factors seemed to be adaptability, trust and collaboration. We will present both our preliminary findings and the framework for the upcoming research to study the impact of art-based learning on illness narratives.

Location | AUP: Q-604
Session Chair | Josie Garza Medina, Texas A&M University

Constructing Queer Ecologies of Care in Cyberpunk Dystopias: On Cyberpunk 2077 and Citizen Sleeper

Josie Garza Medina Texas A&M University

Inspired by Hil Malatino’s concept of “trans care” as the ways in which trans, queer, and gender-nonconforming people develop and nurture networks of care in an increasingly queerphobic late capitalist dystopia (Malatino 2020), this presentation looks at the video games Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt Red, 2020) and Citizen Sleeper (Jump Over the Age, 2022) as cyberpunk games that extrapolate current elements of the dystopian present into a future where queer and genderfluid protagonists build queer ecologies of care with the people they encounter in their dystopian environments. The characters of V and The Sleeper, respectively coded as non-binary/genderfluid and agender, live in the respective dystopias of California megalopolis Night City and space station The Eye. As they progress throughout their game’s narratives, they meet multiple queer and trans people who become their allies and friends. While V and The Sleeper work towards their respective narrative goals of having a deadly chip removed from their body and leaving the Eye, each develops a network of cyberpunk care that is proletarian, queer, and resistant to their surrounding dystopia. Building off my own master’s thesis research into gender performance and expression in Cyberpunk 2077 and other cyberpunk media, I will argue that the queer resistance of Cyberpunk 2077 and Citizen Sleeper is indicative of a tendency for queer, trans, and proletarian persons in cyberpunk dystopias to form alliances of care that challenge the dog-eat-dog capitalism and daily violence of these worlds. I will also touch on how the historical proto-cyberpunk dystopias of Weimar Berlin and Marcos-era Manila, as seen through Alfred Doblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) and the films of director Lino Brocka, give us insights into how to actualize the lessons of Cyberpunk 2077 and Citizen Sleeper into our own practices of care.

Subjects of Fatigue. Narratives on Exhaustion after the Global Financial Crisis (2008)

Dr. Olga Szmidt Jagiellonian University

This paper is theoretical and synthesizing in nature. Presented considerations will be based on research on the literary narratives after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 as well as on philosophical and sociological studies on exhaustion and fatigue. The financial collapse, apart from direct result in drastic recession, catalyzed both decline of liberal optimism and changing attitudes towards work, capitalism, community, equality, public and private spaces, and subjectivity itself. Therefore, my analysis will be based on two pillars: first, reflection on the modern understanding of exhaustion with reference to Gilles Deleuze’s The Exhausted, various works by Wolfgang Streeck, The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han as well as generation-oriented studies such Can’t Even. How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen; second, comparative and summarizing reading of contemporary novels exploring various strategies around exhaustion, burnout, weariness or even sense of lethargy. In my presentation I would like to discuss the role of contemporary literature in understanding the economic crisis’ impact on social and subjective life. Among the novels I have analyzed for the purpose of this study are: The New Me by Halle Butler, Insatiable by Daisy Buchanan, There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, Pustostany by Dorota Kotas. I propose to analyze the exhaustion as a common root for both literary accounts of the crisis’ aftermath and public protests such as the Occupy movement and the austerity protests around the world. I propose to see individual, often idiosyncratic, novels set in a private space not as opposed to public protests, but rather to reflect on how closely both positions are interconnected in recognizing the exhaustion and fatigue as determinant for the post-crisis condition.

Frames of Isolation: Recording “Unnatural” Narratives in Mati Diop’s in My Room (2020)

Dr. Brittany Bernard Boston University

In 2020—at the height of the global Covid-19 pandemic—French-Senegalese filmmaker, Mati Diop placed a small camera inside her apartment in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. Perched from varying angles, the camera’s lens traveled from room to room capturing kaleidoscopic moments of confined isolation. These images are overlayed with voice recordings of Diop’s grandmother, Maji, as she loses her memory before her death. In the opening scene, Diop’s camera lens faces five oblong windows looking out to the Paris cityscape. The filmmaker’s figure appears dark and ambiguous; she opens the blinds of each window one by one, her back facing the camera in a shot that invites parallel to Chantal Akerman’s 2005 film, Là-bas. Like Akerman, Diop’s short documentary is a multilayered construction of authorial subjectivity—a poetic engagement with collective and personal memory—fluctuating between moments of clarity and fragments of obscurity. The recorded voice of Diop’s grandmother haunts the film: her ghostly presence mirrors the bodiless entity of the Covid-19 pandemic itself, oscillating between real and imaginary, hope and dejection, isolation and community. As what may be interpreted as an “unnatural” narrative—according to scholars such as Jan Alber (2016) and Brian Richardson (2006)—Maji’s recorded voice fosters a connection between contemporary and anachronistic worlds, generating a multidirectional framework for rethinking legacies of the past. Drawing on Michael Renov’s notion of domestic ethnography (2004) and Alison Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memory (2003), I argue that Diop’s framing of domestic space and its markers of personal identity bear witness to the shared collective memory of the Covid-19 pandemic. Simultaneously, the film interrogates—from the off-frame—questions of migration, displacement, and the diasporic experience in Diop’s filmic oeuvre. Like its many windows and portals on-screen, the film encourages a fluid, lateral, and porous approach to self-documentary by reconstructing divergent realms of meaning through creative and political engagement.

Location | AUP: Q-704
Session Chair | Liisa Anniina Merivuori, University of Turku

Risk Worlds and Narrative Frictions: Tracing Risks Narratives in Fukushima Non-Fiction Literature

Dr. Pascal Gin Carleton University

This paper aims to investigate risks narratives in long form non-fiction accounts of the Fukushima nuclear tragedy. Advocacy journalism, mainstream book-length reportage and creative forms of literary journalism are keenly attentive to the exclusions and societal divisions imparted by this still unfolding nuclear ecocide. Curtailed mobilities entailed by mass internal displacement, compromised rights to housing, health or fair compensation for nuclear victims, but also the plight of — and discrimination suffered by — "nuclear nomads" tasked with clean-up efforts are all recurring motifs in the non-fiction literature probing the 3/11 event. As is the case with other global catastrophes, nuclear disasters defy the singular coordinates of event and location. Their compounded and historically staggered causality as much as the expanded temporal and territorial scale of their impacts point to what literary scholar Eva Horn (2014) defined as "catastrophe without event". Accordingly, making sense of what exactly unfolds when such disasters strike focuses narrative sequencing away from a chronology of facts. Narrative attention shifts instead to what Ulrich Beck posthumously described as the "symbolic environment within which and against which the event is perceived" (Beck, 2016). It is such a symbolic environment, targeted specifically at competing "risk narratives" (Ursula Heise, 2008), that this paper will probe. By expanding emplotment (Ricœur, 1984) beyond what took place within the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant, the non-fiction accounts under consideration connect the production and experience of nuclear ecocide with conflictual, and shifting, representations of risk. The narrative configurations to be unpacked will be traced through these intersecting representations, involving State- and corporate-produced discourse, life stories of nuclear victims and the self-reflexive accounts of investigators. The symbolic risk worlds thus brought into narrative friction will further be analysed in relation to Beck’s "emancipatory catastrophism" and the potential for translocal norm-setting that non-fiction literature may offer.

The More-Than-Human Interview: A Comics-Based Approach to Connect Human and Nonhuman Worlds

Dr. Elise Talgorn University of Amsterdam

In response to global environmental challenges, storytelling offers a critical tool to explore the intersection of disparate narrative worlds—particularly the gap between human and nonhuman perspectives. Traditional anthropocentric narratives often isolate humans from the natural world, reinforcing a worldview where nature is instrumentalized or dominated. In contrast, more-than-human stories challenge existing divides by introducing nonhuman characters with agency and moral rights, enabling audiences to consider perspectives beyond the human sphere and fostering an understanding of a larger, interconnected system. This exploratory research presents the "more-than-human interview" as a narrative method designed to bridge the divide between human and nonhuman worlds. In this approach, a researcher embodies a fictional nonhuman character and interviews a real environmental activist about their experiences and memories, challenging anthropocentric norms. The result is a comic that integrates ethnographic research and creative storytelling to explore how human-nonhuman relationships shape environmental activism and systems of meaning. Through humor and a playful use of anthropomorphism, the comic form offers a medium that appeals to a broad audience, including those outside traditional environmental activist circles. By blending image and text, it creates a dynamic space for multiple interpretations, inviting readers to engage emotionally with the characters and their worlds. This method illustrates how disparate narrative worlds can intersect, offering a unique vantage point on the complex, interwoven relationships between human and nonhuman entities.

Geological Time and Comics Form: Narrating Deep History in Comics

Dr. Rik Spanjers University of Amsterdam

Comics tell stories in boxed moments. It is at least partly because of this basic feature of the medium that it has been so successful at narrating memory and history. In this presentation, I propose to extend the investigation of the representation of human history in comics, a topic that, following the success of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, has been researched rather widely in the past two decades, to the study of the hyperobject of the anthropocene. How do comics relate human beings and their histories to the broader geological history of the planet? By investigating Richard McGuire’s Here, Josh Neufelds A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge, and a number of shorter form underground comix, this paper will demonstrate the ways in which comics creators are putting to use the comics form to meld the history of humans and the planet they live on, and, thereby, translating the hyper object of climate change to a broad audience.

Location | AUP: C-101
Session Chair | Mariana Dias Paes, The American University of Paris

Between the Impossibility and Necessity of Restoring Moral Order – Debates and Narrative Around “H.R. 40” in 2019-2021

Dr. Magdalena Ewa Modrzejewska Jagiellonian University

Since 1989, when the first attempts to pass the "Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act" occurred, there have been ongoing attempts to address the issue of reparations for the slavery and the subsequent racial and economic discrimination. This paper offers an analysis of the discourses surrounding House Resolution 40 and the path to restorative justice. I engage with the legal act that followed the 1989 proposal, drawing on the arguments presented during the Congressional hearings in 2019 and 2021. Both hearings did not result in the passage of the legislation. The paper investigates how the hearings explored the possible establishment of a commission to study reparations and brought together diverse perspectives. To wit, the supporters of “H.R. 40” argue that the reparations address the historical injustices of slavery and systemic racism, whereas the figures such as Ta-Nehisi Coates or Dany Glover emphasize the slavery’s continuing economic and social impact. The reparations are perceived as a redress of these long-standing inequalities and a means to promote racial healing. Conversely, the opponents, such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, argue that reparations would exacerbate racial divisions and punish contemporary Americans for the actions of their ancestors. The discourse also highlights the concerns about the reparations’ economic feasibility and fairness, with the critics within the African American community such as John McWhorter and Robert L. Woodson Sr. questioning whether the reparations would truly address the structural problems facing African Americans today. I explore how these entangled different narratives of reparations reflect broader societal tensions, examining both the potential for crisis and conflict and the possibility of hope in confronting historical injustices.

Right of Return and Non-right to Citizenship? Narratives from Mixed-Status Families in Jordan

Benita Kawalla University of Kiel

The right of return of Palestinians mentioned in the UN resolution 194 is an important narrative in the Arab world: In the Jordan case it is the justification used by the government to maintain the patriarchal citizenship norm that only men can transmit the Jordanian citizenship – leaving children of Jordanian mothers and non-naturalized Palestinian fathers without Jordanian citizenship and therefore stateless. In short, the official justification goes like this: Without Jordanian citizenship, the Palestinian people remains willing to fight for their right of return and therefore, not granting half-Jordanian children the Jordanian citizenship pushes forward their fight for a free Palestine. Furthermore, Jordan establishes itself with this narrative against the, Israeli, narrative of Jordan as an alternative homeland for the Palestinians. In my current PhD project, I work on notions of identity and belonging of those mixed-status families in Jordan. In narrative interviews, I approach the question of how the official narrative of the “right of return” translates into the daily experiences and positionings of young Jordanian-Palestinians in Jordan. Which roles plays the right of return in a world without any foreseeable possibility of return? To what extend is the right of return connected with the non-right to citizenship? Which role plays the experience of exclusion and discrimination in the overarching narrative of the right of return? How the narrative of the affected can be told? First results of my field research, lasting from September to December 2024, may be presented in the presentation during the conference. In times focusing on the big geopolitical narratives and actions in the region, biographical narrative research can set a counterpoint in the emotional debate by closely listening to the people on the ground. This is my aim for this project I will be happy to discuss in Paris.

Thinking with Narrative —On Organisational Accounts of Facing Colonial Pasts

Dr. Bethany Elce University of Lincoln

In recent years, an ever-expanding number of key British organisations have been commissioning and/or responding to research into their links with British colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade: from universities, the National Trust, The Church of England, the Guardian newspaper, to the Greene-King chain of pubs. With reference to my project 'Reckoning for Racial Justice? A Study of the Impact of Addressing Colonial Pasts', this paper explores the idea of using narrative as a lens through which to examine this phenomenon. As part of 'Reckoning for Racial Justice?' I analyse documents in which organisations give accounts of how and why they are seeking to understand and explore their links with historic injustice and violence. In this paper I explore what it means to think about these public statements as narrative and I present some of the questions which begin to arise from such an approach. For example, some organisations speak about being on a “reflective journey”. If this so, what is the destination they are headed towards? And, what kind of protagonist emerges through these accounts? Does an institution perhaps become ‘heroic’ as they narrate themselves into a different relationship with their past? What about the other characters who form part of this newly constructed narrative world? Most of the organisations in this study emphasise that, as part of their response to research findings, they hold conversations with black and ethnically diverse colleagues or, consult with communities particularly impacted by the legacies of slavery. Yet, thinking with the theme of this conference, does this type of dialogue open up shared spaces, bridging disparate worlds? Or, are these institutional efforts always going to be limited in their ability to shape an act of repair between themselves and communities that continue to experience racial injustice in the UK?

Location | AUP Q-A101

Please join the Narrative Matters Steering Committee (Mark Freeman, Hanna Meretoja, Bill Randall, and Brian Schiff) to reflect on this conference, future conferences, and the organization of the Narrative Matters community

Location | AUP: C-505
Session Chair | Tanya Shereen Elder, The American University of Paris

Asylum Seekers’ Supranatural Narratives on Witchcraft: Challenges and Solidarities

Dr. Iphigenia Moulinou University of Athens

The issue of witchcraft in the narratives of asylum seekers, especially those from sub-Saharan Africa, often emerges, either without being directly related to the request for protection or sometimes as a central request for seeking asylum, but without always reaching the asylum file as such. It concerns asylum seekers who have been subjected to violence and often life-threatening violence either as targets of malicious witchcraft or those having been accused of being witch-magicians themselves (Geschiere 1997; Beneduce 2018; Lawrence 2018; Luongo 2020). I will examine the attitudes of professionals, specifically lawyers and mental health professionals working with refugees, in relation to this complex issue of invoking witchcraft as a cause of persecution and violence against these people and as a reason for claiming asylum. What role can the supernatural narrative as a cause of suffering and trauma play in psychotherapy (Schoretsanitis & Riza 2024)? How can the therapist find a therapeutic way through these par excellence culturally disparate narrative worlds in the encounter of western discourse and discourse on witchcraft? What role can this narrative play in the constitution of the asylum claim? For example, reframing the supernatural narrative in terms of narratives of gender-based violence, child abuse, patriarchal violence and misogyny seems to be a common approach to asylum claim management (Lawrence 2018), with the thought that these latter narratives have greater credibility for the asylum jury who often lacks training or awareness on such issues (Luongo 2020). Using the theoretical framework of linguistic anthropology and discourse analysis of interviews of lawyers and mental health professionals working with refugees, in association with my notes from sessions of professionals and refugees I attended during my ethnographic fieldwork, I will explore the attitudes of professionals towards these narratives and how they manage to bridge divides and create solidarities.

The Ghoul Against Genocide: Narrative Transformation from Arab Folklore to Indian Dystopia

Dr. Dhee Sankar Sanskrit College and University

Contemporary narratives of horror often represent marginalized or wronged communities, either as the protagonist or the spectral other haunting them. Ghoul (2018), the second Netflix original miniseries based in India, is a remarkable example that does these two things simultaneously, portraying marginalized people as both the haunter and the haunted. Set in a dystopian futuristic India in the grip of fascism, the series is a trenchant critique of the Islamophobic Hindutva perpetuated by the Modi regime at its heyday. The protagonist Nida (played by Radhika Apte) is a female Muslim military officer, whose patriotism is shaken when she discovers the genocidal crimes committed in a military detention center. A terrorist brought there to be interrogated has something monstrous in him that turns the tables and interrogates the officers themselves, making them reveal their most culpable crimes. He turns out to be a creature who assumes the shape of the last person whose flesh it consumes. “Ghoul” is a word derived from the Arabic غول (ghul), and it is this Arab form that is used to describe the shape-shifting monster. This monster from Arabic folklore is an ideal device to critique fascist military atrocities in India, since the Muslim community is the most prominent target of such atrocities organized or connived at by the state, especially in the embattled region of Kashmir. The "ghul" is a trickster figure, a narrative device that leverages the themes of cannibalism and shapeshifting spectrality to comment upon the collective trauma and violence underlying the Indian state system. In this paper, I shall analyze the "ghul" narrative's transformation from folklore to film and explore how it becomes a subversive commentary on India’s suppressed history of genocide and Islamophobia.

Myth Matters: Reinvesting Rwandan Myth and Orality

Dr. Anna-Marie De Beer University of Pretoria

Traditionally, Rwandan myths, proverbs and legends were an integral part of communal life, constituting a form of collective, indigenous knowledge that regulated and unified society (Kayishema,2009). In certain periods of Rwanda’s history, however, they were misinterpreted and abused, serving not to unify, but to divide, categorise and mobilize. When dealing with the memory of trauma, and especially collective mass trauma such as experienced in post-genocide Rwanda, it is essential to work within a “framework” that is coherent with local belief systems (Bagilishya, 2000). Traditional Rwandan culture has its own approaches to mourning and grief. Unsurprisingly, this includes drawing from precolonial forms of narrative such as imigani. In a country that experienced the destruction and subversion of many of its cultural points of reference, narratives that “revive” (Kalisa, 2013) these elements can be restorative and exemplify current turns in memory studies towards including localized and indigenous forms of remembering and mourning (Mwambari, 2023). The celebrated Rwandan-born storyteller, Scholastique Mukasonga narrates, rewrites and reappropriates some of her country’s myths and stories in order to reclaim and decolonize it’s history and collective memory, demonstrating that although myths can and have been used for destructive purposes, they also have the potential to reintegrate, heal and even suggest new stories (Toman, 2021). Such narratives also open spaces space for questioning and subverting existing myths and narratives, and promote dialogue and multiple perspectives. This paper briefly considers the itinerary and multiple forms of the Rwandan oral tradition from pre-colonial times to the postgenocide era. It then investigates how this tradition, which lies at the heart of Rwandan historiography and memory is reinvested and decolonised through the work of this author.

Location | AUP: C-103
Session Chair | Louise Creechan, Durham University

This panel will critically consider ‘communities of care’ as a generative site for exploring the narrative tensions of divergence and disruption. We consider how the relational dynamics of communities are shaped by – and shape – multiplicity in all its forms – from the ethical to the epistemic and ontological. We approach this through the lens of the critical medical humanities, variously interested in these questions and tensions from the perspective of illness and wellness, diagnosis, and healthcare. In particular, we are interested in how narratives are used to form community, how they might expose but sometime also efface the tensions of co-existing with multiple modes of being, knowing, and moving in shared space; how they might homogenise, or more perniciously, erase particularity. We are also interested in the form of narrative itself as a means of mapping out these tensions: what are the temporalities and spatialities of irreconciliation – narrative ‘stuck-ness’ and stagnation. Further to this, our responses consider how narrative might productively afford the possibility of holding together contradiction and conflict within an ethics and aesthetics of care, rejecting the momentum towards closure and reconciliation.

Embodying Multiplicity: Clinical and Cultural Narratives of Distress

Dr. Arya Thampuran Durham University

This paper unpacks narrative’s potential to embody multiple ontological realities in the cross-cultural clinical encounter. Positioning clinical and culturally-salient interpretations of distress as co-emerging – rather than counter or conflicting – narratives, I consider how narrative time and space can be stretched to accommodate a plurality of meaning and identity-making particularly salient in a West African diasporic context. Igbo-Tamil writer Akwaeke Emezi’s acclaimed semi-autobiographical literary debut, Freshwater, offers a generative springboard for this discussion, suspended as it is within both medical and mythological discourses. Protagonist Ada’s experience of hearing voices, self-mutilation, sex reassignment, and dissociative amnesia following a non-consensual sexual encounter might lend itself to an Western psychiatric reading. However, such a linear causal reading is vexed by the Igbo mythology of the malevolent born-to-die ogbanje, which co-emerges through the voices Ada experiences from childhood. This culturally-meaningful phenomenon disrupts the polarisation of medical and mythological, clinical and cultural discourses – indeed, it disrupts the very idea of a singular Truth or Reality. The discordance in lived realit(ies) extends beyond the textual encounter here: author Emezi’s identification as non-binary and ogbanje has been frequently disregarded in press and social media engagement with this semi-autobiographical text, which often misgenders Emezi and diminishes, or explicitly denies, the ogbanje schema as a prism for reading Ada’s experiences. Drawing on both the narrative world(s) and its real-world reception, I deconstruct the discourses around ‘truth’ and ‘reality’, unpacking how definitional disagreements can betray deeper-rooted resistance to, and intolerance of, plurality.

Missed, Excluding, and Imposed Communities in Epilepsy Narratives

Dr. Claire Jeantils Durham University

Epilepsy is a neurologic chronic illness that manifests mainly through seizures. Neurologists tend to say that there are as many epilepsies as there are people with epilepsy. Epilepsy is one of the most common neurologic chronic illnesses, with 50 million people affected worldwide (WHO, 2024). Despite its prominence, public health and daily social contexts rarely address epilepsy. When epilepsy is mentioned, it is often approached with a stigmatizing attitude (Wolf, 2022). Indeed, historical figures, expectations of how one should address their illness, and silence alike weigh on people with epilepsy. They are encouraged to go back in time to understand their present and to have a specific approach to their illness to get access to peer support. Undoubtedly, these constitutive elements of their experience impact how affected people interact (or not) with one another. Based on the wide diversity of epilepsies (new epilepsies are regularly discovered) and their experiences, this paper will look into missed, excluding, and imposed communities. In fiction, poetry, and testimony, people with epilepsy convey how they sometimes get closer because of their shared experiences of these unwelcoming and fleeting communities. By addressing the precarity of such an intangible yet formative contact, this paper will investigate how epilepsy narratives can be creative levers for acknowledging limitations and holding conflict without finding substitution. Specifically, it will focus on how intertextuality, experiential knowledge, and polyphony outside of narrative coherence provide breaths of communal spaces of care.

Care, Complexity and Collectivity: The case of ME/CFS

Dr. Katharine Cheston Durham University

In 1997, Lars-Christopher Hydén proposed a typology of three different kinds of illness narratives, including illness as narrative and narrative about illness. ‘Illness as narrative’ describes the articulation of personal experience of illness; ‘narrative about illness’ refers to stories conveying knowledge and ideas about illness, formulated by clinicians. While the former has been the subject of significant and enduring critical attention (Kleinman 1988, Frank 1995, Bolaki 2016, Wasson, 2018), the latter remains understudied. This paper interrogates these different, diverging forms of illness narrative – and the connections and conflicts between them – by examining how both patients and clinicians have made storied sense of a complex and controversial illness: myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). I bring clinical accounts of the illness (Wessely et al 1998) into dialogue with three memoirs published on both sides of the Atlantic – Dorothy Wall’s Encounters with the Invisible (2005), Julie Rehmeyer’s Through the Shadowlands (2017) and Alice Hattrick’s Ill Feelings (2021) – so as to offer a nuanced perspective on the collective narrativisation of illness. My analysis illuminates the ways in which care is fractured when different parties compete to control the narrative about illness.

Navigating Uncertainty while Narrating Anxiety

Dr. Veronica Heney Durham University

Anxiety is one of the most common mental health diagnoses, and its prevalence has been consistently rising over recent decades. Yet despite a large body of research aimed at exploring the suitability of various psycho-therapeutic treatments (James et al, 2007; Kapczinski et al, 2003), anxiety continues to occupy an uncertain or liminal social and cultural position. Anxiety has featured prominently in public discourses around mental health, such as high profile awareness campaigns and celebrity disclosures, in contrast to more highly stigmatised experiences such as psychosis. However it has also been central to popular and academic debates regarding pathologisation and over-medicalisation. Thus its legitimacy, as both a medical condition and as a distressing experience, is both easily taken for granted and easily undermined. This paper explores the role of fiction in both navigating and exacerbating this tension, drawing on data from qualitative interviews with 24 people with experience of severe or debilitating anxiety. Specifically it will consider their experience of fictional narratives as constructing anxiety as humorous or comedic, and thus easy to dismiss. The paper will hold this in tension with participants’ interest in narratives which were able to convey the everyday impact of anxiety, which might not be dramatic or easily visible, but was nonetheless significant. The paper will draw on examples from film, television, and literature to explore how these themes intersect with genre and form. This will demonstrate how fictional narratives establish and intervene in models of relationality, community, and care through both establishing and undermining legitimacy.

Location | AUP: Q-801
Session Chair | Marjolijn Heerings, Erasmus University

Narrative plays a constitutive role in human thought and experience through its capacity to imagine possible worlds, communicate knowledge, convey experience, form identities, train empathy and perspective-taking, or negotiate values. However, narrative thinking has also been associated with simplification, anthropocentrism, affective biases and other cognitive shortcuts that can hamper the understanding of complex realities. Also, uncritical use of narrative can perpetuate existing inequalities and fail to capture experiences that are ‘beyond words’ such as in illness. Moreover, Jill Bradbury, points out three additional epistemological and/or political problems of reliance on narrative for world- and self-building. First, that narrative risks imposing a normative form of a “good” narrative that entails logical flow, integration and coherence. Second, the distance between telling and living that typically occurs in research interviews tends to reproduce a gap between life and story. Third, the tendency to focus on single narrators hides from view their embeddedness in their social and ecological contexts. Arts-based, sensory and visual methodologies have been proposed in response to these limitations and critiques of a narrative approach. In this double panel, we will present examples of transdisciplinary research at the intersection of the arts, narrative research, social science and society. The various contributions will together cover a range of arts-based methods (visual, dance) and fields of application (health care, sustainability). We will reflect on the potential and limitations of combining narrative with arts-based methods. Panel I focuses on bridging the disparate worlds of patients or clients, professionals, and curators. Panel II focuses on engaging the embodied, sensory, performative functions of art.

Expanding Perspectives Through Embodying Human-Nature-Technology Relationships in Dance and Storytelling

Dr. Anneke Sools University of Twente, Dr. Julia Hermann University of Twente, Dr. Corelia Baibarac University of Twente

In the context of calls to expand current anthropocentric approaches in science and society to eco-centric and nature-inclusive approaches, inclusion of the voices of more-than-human life is needed. This expansion includes an epistemological and ontological shift that counters mind-body and nature-culture dualisms and has the potential to increase epistemic justice by endowing plants, animals, rivers, mountains, bacteria etc. with the right to speak and be heard. However, to create the conditions for expressing, listening, and understanding more-than-human actors, we need artistic and narrative methods and tools. The idea is that those methods and tools could foster sensory, embodied engagement with other perspectives that open up new understandings and opportunities to relate to those perspectives. In this presentation, we will reflect on an experimental dance-narrative method that was designed with the objective of (1) enabling taking the perspectives of actors different from ourselves, (2) gain insight in (value) conflicts that may arise through the interplay between those actors, (3) open up space for creatively enacting new, more just, caring and empowering relationships than currently are possible. We will reflect on our first impressions of this experimental method, and on the challenges and limits of expanding our human perspectives to the more-than-human.

‘The Art of Conveying an Experience’: A Cinematic Approach to Patient Stories

Roman Gilling Erasmus University

Patient narratives provide us with a glimpse of what ‘living with’ a disability must be like. We learn about idea’s, practices, obstacles and possibilities that are interwoven in the experiences they share with us. Through the lens of visual anthropology, we create pathways and possibilities to reflect on how we convey an experience and bring a message across to a wider audience via film. Conveying an experience most and foremost means ‘making contact’ and the question we should ask ourselves is: ‘How do we make this contact?’ With the incorporation of visual anthropology, the role of film can become more than just a medium to transfer a message. Visual anthropology helps us to better understand the emotions, memories and senses that are rooted in these stories and how we can use them to activate emotional/sensorial responses within our spectators. ‘Making contact’ in this manner becomes one of a literal and figurative fashion. When we watch a film, we not only do that with our eyes but with the whole of our bodies. With visual anthropology we can critically reflect not only on the conveyance of experience but also our understanding of what experience is.

Narrative, Complexity, and the Playful Mind

Dr. Steven Willemsen University of Groningen, Dr. Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar University of Groningen, Cora Ziengs University of Groningen

This paper explores the nexus of narrative, complexity and play. Play and narrative are two culturally and cognitively central mechanisms for dealing with complexity in controlled environments with limited real-world consequences. This paper explores the link between narrative engagement and play through the creation of a narrative DJ set, and analysing the process of doing so by drawing from recently developed theories of narrative studies, media studies, and cognitive sciences. Reflecting on the findings, we discuss their possible ramifications for today’s complex societies. We live in an increasingly complex world, and the inability for dealing with complexity (e.g. in globalization, ecological crises, or migration) can make situations appear more threatening, confusing, or frustrating, leading to detrimental shortcuts in problem-solving and problematic linear thinking. By connecting mediated-aesthetic and real-world complexity, we speculate on narratives artworks' potential as an attractive tool to target the relevant cognitive capacities for coping with everyday complexity, by offering “cognitive playgrounds“ to playfully engage with complexity.

Location | AUP: Q-609
Session Chair | Hanna Protasova, University of Western Ontario

Framing Conflict: The Role of Russian Cinema in Shaping Perceptions of Russia-Ukraine War Based on the Case Study of the Mini-series "20/22"

Iryna Yeroshko University of Luxembourg

This paper explores how contemporary Russian cinema frames wartime narratives to shape public perceptions of patriotism and national identity, with a specific focus on the ongoing war against Ukraine. By analyzing the recently released mini-series "20/22," this study examines the use of historical narrative, language, and visual tools in constructing a particular image of the war and its participants. The analysis will involve a close examination of the series' scripts, dialogues, and visual compositions. By focusing on these elements, the study will identify the strategies used to frame the war narrative and assess their effectiveness in shaping public perceptions.

Preliminary findings indicate several key themes:

• Language as a Key Instrument: The series employs language to clearly distinguish enemies from allies, a tactic seen in previous Russian war films.

• Historical Revisionism: The narrative suggests that Russia is the creator and stabilizer of Ukraine, portraying Ukrainians as inherently conflict-prone and incapable of peace.

• Dehumanization of the Enemy: Ukrainian characters are consistently vilified and dehumanized, reinforcing negative stereotypes.

• Realistic Scenery: The depiction of the destroyed city of Mariupol provides a visually convincing backdrop that enhances the series' credibility and emotional impact.

The paper will conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for understanding how Russian cinema influences public perception and national identity during wartime. It will also explore the broader impact of state-sponsored media on societal attitudes towards the conflict.

Learning to Live in a Narrative World: National Education and its ‘Reality’

Dr. Deniz T. Kilincoglu Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient

Every national education system creates a distinct ‘narrative world’ and immerses pupils in it to (re)produce national norms of understanding and responding to sociopolitical reality. History classes, for example, rely on canonical narratives about the nation’s backstory, which presents various story elements, from heroes and foes to the formative events of the collective self. These stories and especially their emotional content are used to perpetuate existing borders and power relations between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ including various internal others like migrants and minorities. Schoolbook narratives hold influence because they are perceived to reflect socially accepted knowledge and feeling patterns. Textbooks claim to provide the norms and boundaries for thinking about sociopolitical reality, guiding students in attuning themselves to feeling and acting as ‘normal’ citizens of their community. In school, students internalize societal norms of thinking, feeling, and behaving through continuous narrative-building exercises, such as exams and homework assignments, carried out within the narrative ecology of schools and under the guidance of teachers, who represent the norms and oversee narrative-building practices accordingly. This article examines the narrative ecology in Turkish schools by exploring the boundaries and key elements of the narrative world presented in schoolbooks. It analyzes secondary school textbook narratives related to national identity and history, focusing especially on emotion- and value-laden key story elements such as protagonists (heroes and enemies), events, and places. By placing the Turkish case within a comparative framework and drawing insights from studies on other cases, the article aims to break new ground in research on the influence of national ideologies and their emotionally charged narrative worlds.

Location | AUP: C-104
Session Chair | Emilie Garrigou-Kempton, Pasadena City College, and Catherine Nesci, University of California

In the criminal justice system, victims, bystanders, and perpetrators routinely face each other in the courtroom, in the hopes that, out of conflicting accounts, truth can emerge and justice can be served. In the context of genocides and mass crimes, these conflicting accounts exist both inside and outside the courtrooms. Memoirs, testimonies, autobiographies and biographies, journalistic investigations, but also works of fictions, present either victims/ survivors, bystanders, or perpetrators accounts. Our panel proposes to explore instances where conflicting accounts co-exist and intersect within literary works, oral histories, or official state-sanctioned accounts. Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 Holocaust documentary, Shoah, famously presents survivors’ testimonies and a hidden camera interview of war criminals; the director also meets with and interviews Polish bystanders and even asks a Polish train driver to reenact his gestures and roles when driving Jews to Treblinka. More recently, in 2007, French journalist and writer Jean Hatzfeld published a third volume entitled Antelope Season’s, following Dans le nu de la vie (2001, Life Laid Bare, the narratives of Tutsi victims) and Une saison des machettes (2003, Machete’s Season, the narratives of Hutu perpetrators); the third volume confronts the narratives of survivors and those of the perpetrators of the 1994 Genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda. Last year, illustrator and author Nora Krug published Diaries of War: Two Visual Accounts from Ukraine and Russia, where she documents the first year of the war in Ukraine from the perspective of a Russian artist and a Ukrainian journalist. These editorial initiatives prompt many questions. First, what are the ethical implications of putting conflicting accounts side by side? Who is entitled to speak and whose stories get told? What role do these narratives play in public perceptions? Do the categories - victims/bystanders/perpetrators – typically used in these accounts, blur some of the complexity present in times of conflict. What happens in the confrontation of these narratives, and conversely, what happens when these narratives are not confronted, as is often the case when there is no public forum for the word of the victims. Finally, what role does storytelling play in bridging divides – or broadening them? Which positions do storytelling and forms of confrontational remembrance offer readers and viewers within or beyond paradigms of traumatic violence, national and cross-ethnic reconciliation, and the moral claims of survivors?

“Living Together Again? Voices of Survivors and Perpetrators in Post-Genocide Rwanda (Mukagasana, Hatzfeld)”

Prof. Catherine Nesci University of California

As many scholars have shown, the promises and mandates of victims’ testimonies of large-scale and genocidal violence have been threefold: documenting histories, alleviating suffering, and crafting cultures of peace and reconciliation, all actions that point to ethical and political obligations for both sufferers and communities in the wake of extreme political violence. In meshing the voices of the survivors with those of the perpetrators and pardoned killers, Jean Hatzfeld’s 2007Antilope Strategy seems to emulate the logic and framework of the gaçaça courts (the traditional local jurisdictions) in their documentation of a nightmarish history and the reminders of people’s obligations to that history and to their society, in order to help all parties involved face the demands of their present and futures as members of the Rwandan nation. Hatzfeld’s shocking collage of voices and relayed testimonies raises political and moral issues, even more so because an armistice has been granted to the “neighborly” criminals and the gaçaça courts are being held. In an earlier work of shocking collage, and one that refuses the genre of the “sensational photograph,” Yolande Mukagasana’s Les Blessures du silence (The Scars of Silence, 2001, with photographs by Alain Kazinierakis), interviews and photographs of killers appear side by side with those of survivors who lost their entire families, similar to survivor Mukagasana. In her introduction to the book, Alex Parisel (from Doctors without Borders) points that both killers and surviving victims “se côtoient dans ce livre comme ils se côtoyaient avant le génocide et comme ils se côtoient encore aujourd’hui au pays des mille collines” (7). In what terms do the foreign writer and the native survivor probe the issues of reconciliation and postgenocidal co-living in their different approaches, through a narrative alternate setting, on the one hand, and a text-image montage, on the other? ]

“Navigating Ambivalent Narratives: The Two Sides of the War in Ukraine in Nora Krug’s 2023 Diaries of War: Two Visual Accounts from Ukraine and Russia.”

Dr. Emilie Garrigou-Kempton Pasadena City College

In her 2023 graphic novel Diaries of War: Two Visual Accounts from Ukraine and Russia, German-born author and illustrator Nora Krug proposes to highlight “the contrasting realities of Ukrainian journalist and a Russian artist grappling with their own individual experiences of Russia’s war on Ukraine.” Krug’s previous graphic memoir – Heimat (2019) – told “the story of her attempt to confront the hidden truths of her family’s wartime past in Nazi Germany and to comprehend the forces that have shaped her life, her generation, and history.” It was celebrated for its portrayal of the complexity and the weight of German people’s inheritance and for its ability to ask difficult questions. Her Diaries of War is very much an attempt to produce something similar. She asks: “How can the voices of two individuals with such complicated and contrasting identities contribute to our understanding of the current war in Ukraine?” These two accounts, first published as a journalistic initiative in the Los Angeles Times, during the first year of the war, are presented side by side on the page. There is evidently a desire to humanize the conflict and to give a voice to individuals whose lives are profoundly affected by the war. But the diaries also highlight the increasingly diverging experience of both men. I propose to explore the two different worlds that emerge and to expose the subtle, but increasingly evident, cracks that appear as the situation grows more dire. Among the questions I will consider: what is the role and the status of witnesses in this project? How do these individual narratives contribute to our understanding of the conflict, and become part of an official public record? What is the role of the journalist, and more particularly of a visual journalist, as Krug defines herself?

“Perpetrators and Bystanders in Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated”

Dr. Laurence Benarroche Université d'Aix-Marseille

Paradoxically, quite a number of similarities exist between The Lost and Everything is Illuminated although Mendelsohn’s narrative is a memoir in which every single story is true whereas Foer’s experimental novel, as a work of fiction, contains imaginary facts obviously inspired, however, fromtrue accounts. Because both belong to literature as opposed to chronicles or historical essays, some parallels can be drawn between the two books and I will focus on their “characters” (a term I will also use about The Lost although the people encountered or mentioned by the author-narrator are real). Holocaust writings and the studies devoted to these writings usually focus on victims, survivors or Righteous people who hid and saved Jews. I will choose to concentrate on the “grey zone” in The Lost and Everything is Illuminated, which concerns perpetrators, snitches or bystanders, when the reader is made to face evil or the inability to do good. Both writings stage similar figures such as descendants of victims or survivors of the Holocaust facing descendants of snitches or bystanders, characters who silently witnessed the round-ups and the mass-shootings and who still remember them. Among the questions I address are:

• How are perpetrators, snitches, and bystanders portrayed in The Lost? How does the author deal with their accounts? How is the reader made to reflect upon ethical and philosophical subjects?
• Is reconciliation possible between Jews and Ukrainians? Can Alex and Jonathan ever become friends (in Everything is Illuminated)? How does Mendelsohn get on with Alex Dunai (in The Lost)?
• Other questions of interest would be guilt on the one hand and forgiving on the other hand, which are dealt with in both books.

Confronting Narratives about a Genocidal Massacre in South Sudan

Prof. Clemence Pinaud University of Indiana

This paper explores the existing narratives about a state’s massacre that started a civil war in South Sudan. The massacre started at dawn on 16 December 2013 in the capital Juba, and targeted the Nuer, the second ethnic group after the Dinka, killing between 15,000-20,000 Nuer, mostly civilians. It lasted for a week, involving various Dinka state troops who shot, slaughtered, raped, castrated, burned alive and bulldozered Nuer civilians in their houses, in addition to cases of enforced cannibalism. The Juba massacre is the origin of the country’s last decade of war. But it remains an extremely sensitive topic in South Sudan and is rarely discussed publicly. Although foundational of the last decade of war, the massacre is understudied. There isn’t a single academic article in a peer-reviewed journal that explores the violence in detail, and very little literature written by Nuer survivors. Ten years later, there is still no accountability. Various narratives of the massacre from international organizations exist: from Human Rights Watch (HRW), the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), Amnesty International, and the African Union Commission of Inquiry in South Sudan (AUCISS). The few academic works mentioning the Juba massacre rely on them. This paper will dissect these narratives, and interrogate the questions they leave unanswered, especially regarding the drivers of the violence and planning behind the massacre.

The state also deployed its own alternative narrative about the massacre. State denial has been remarkably stable throughout the years and the paper will address its main themes. This paper will confront both these international and national narratives of the massacre to the testimonies of survivors that I gathered. It will highlight the gaps between these three sets of narratives and replace them within the context of past genocide narratives, with references to national and international denial in Rwanda and Srebrenica.

Location | AUP: C-101
Session Chair | Kseniya Fiaduta Prokharchyk, Autonomous University of Barcelona

Fragile Worlds: Narratives of Soviet Repression and Hope in Svetlana Alexievich’s Poetics

Kseniya Fiaduta Prokharchyk Autonomous University of Barcelona

For several decades, Belarusian writer and journalist Svetlana Alexievich has been giving voice to the voiceless, to women and men who lived through the Soviet-era repression and whose histories and experiences have been continuously silenced, marginalized, and obscured by the official master narratives and hegemonic memory scripts. By chronicling “what might not otherwise be heard”, Alexievich’s cycle "Voices of Utopia" reflects on the multiple, ongoing legacies of Soviet totalitarianism, as well as on the complex potential of narratives to shape, create and disrupt our being-in-the-world. Within the "Voices of Utopia", narratives oppress and liberate, divide and bring together, resist and console. In dialogue with the narrative hermeneutics approach (Meretoja, 2018), in this presentation I will explore the metanarrative dimension of Alexievich’s oeuvre, focusing specifically on the narratives’ capacities to a) perpetuate mechanisms of systemic violence and repression; b) expand and constrict agency, space of experience and horizon of expectation (Koselleck, 2004; Meretoja, 2018); c) provide nuanced accounts of widespread complicity, forms of “impure” resistance (Mihai, 2022) and human capacity to hope and “begin anew” (Arendt, 1958); d) create, challenge and disrupt narrative in-betweens; e) provide an ethical mode of understanding other lives and experiences in their ambiguity and singularity (Meretoja, 2018); f) create spaces of “mnemonic care” (Mihai, 2022), in which societies can engage in open-ended reflection on their past, present, and future possibilities. By drawing attention to both narratives’ limits and possibilities, Alexievich's novels provide a complex and nuanced account of literature’s world-making and world-disrupting powers. The dialogic, open, plural, non-subsumptive, and deeply anti-totalitarian form of her novels testifies to the ethical potential of literature, its capacity to resist totalitarianism and disclose alternative forms of remembrance and being-in-the-world with others.

Wandering Engagement: World literature, Peacebuilding, and Gao Xingjian

Dr. Michael Ka-chi Cheuk Hong Kong Metropolitan University

The study of world literature has long been marked by conflict, from Goethe’s nineteenth-century observation of weltliteratur as defined by its tension between the ideals of universality and the ideals of diversity, to the twenty-first century debates of the politics of global circulation of literary texts, conflict is a constant in the history of world literature as a discipline. Recent scholarship has further examined the normative aspirations of world literature, and asked whether its ideals of fostering global reconciliation, mutual understanding, and sustainable peace may have only reinforced structural violence and perpetuate Western hegemony. With Gao Xingjian, the first Chinese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, as case study, this paper illustrates how the discursive conflict arising from world literature can facilitate mass engagement in addressing deep-rooted causes of violence. The arts are deemed to be useful for grassroots, or bottom-up, approaches towards peacebuilding because of its uncertainty, creativity, and hence capacity of creating intimate dialogue and attention towards emotional aspects of conflict, such as trauma, memory, healing, and truth-seeking. As a banned writer in China since 1990, Gao Xingjian’s novels and plays have caused widespread debates for their portrayals of Chinese Cultural Revolution memories, which emphasize on personal guilt and responsibility that contrasts starkly with the state-sanctioned narrative of a collective experience. And such controversies have become a common case study in world literature studies since his Nobel Prize win in 2000. Rather than remaining within fixed boundaries of “Chineseness” and “Western,” Gao encourages readers to wander fluidly within and beyond them in their reflections about the Cultural Revolution. As such, I consider Gao’s creative works as contributing to a mass engagement in facilitating a culture of peace, or what I refer to as “wandering engagement.”

Narrating Silence and Solitude: Herta Müller’s Atemschaukel and (Im)Possibilities of Hope

Liisa Anniina Merivuori University of Turku

Romanian-born, German-speaking author Herta Müller won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature for her depictions of “the landscape of the dispossessed”. One of those landscapes is painted in her 2008 novel Atemschaukel (The Hunger Angel, transl. Philip Boehm) which tells the story of Leo Auberg, a German-speaking Romanian sent to a Soviet prison camp as a 17-year-old in the aftermath of the Second World War. Because of his homosexuality, Leo feels like an outsider already before the traumatic experience of his sentence. That feeling of non-belonging only intensifies during and after the camp years. This leads to Leo living in chosen exile, unable to share his memories or hope for a different kind of future. In this paper, I use feminist trauma studies and narrative hermeneutics to analyze how the intersecting traumas explored in the novel affect the main character’s narrative identity and sense of the possible. I argue that the traumas the main character suffers – hunger in the camp, extreme minority stress, and life-long experience of not belonging – have several effects on the main character’s narrative identity. Those include self-imposed isolation from the world and other human beings, a lack of belief in a better future for himself, and the inability to see a possibility for change in the world. The novel’s tone is quite hopeless and its narrative world is filled with loneliness and silence as a result of indescribable trauma. However, its existence in itself can be read as a possibility of hope: it expands language to break the silence the main character carries, communicates his story to readers, and while describing the diminishing of the main character’s sense of the possible, it may expand ours.

Location | AUP: Q-604
Session Chair | Olga Szmidt, Jagiellonian University

Inquiring into the Experiences of Waiting Narratively: A Feminist Pragmatist Viewpoint

Dr. Katelin Albert University of Victoria, Dr. Vera Caine University of Victoria

We all wait throughout our lives, although mostly ordinarily. However, waiting for health care is extraordinary, yet also expected and normalized in health care. Exceptionally long medical wait times are defining characteristics of Canada’s health care system. The median wait time in Canada for medical treatment is 27.4 weeks. This is the longest it has ever been in Canada; it ranges from around 51 days to 271 days, depending on the province and the care required. When people seek care, they wait: for appointments, diagnosis, specialist care, results, surgery, and answers. As a social phenomenon, waiting is not neutral – it shapes the lives of those accessing care, is imbued with power, inequality, structural violence and is filled with expectations and responsibilities that are gendered, normative, and cultural. It is also relational, with other people and institutions, shaping the social organization of many aspects and domains of life. When people wait, they are in a complicated state of stasis, suspension, but also active waiting. Those waiting may imagine future possibilities, consider who and what they are waiting for, and are living in precarity where their lives are marked by suspension. Despite the centrality of waiting in health care, it is an underexplored aspect of research and practice. In this paper, we explore the phenomenon of waiting from a narrative vantage point. Drawing on feminist pragmatist scholars, we explored the lived experiences of waiting for sexual reproductive care in relation to social ethics and with a focus of changing the social realities of people who wait.

Mind The Gap: Sharing Stories and Challenging Narratives of Loneliness in Later Life

John Neufeld Concordia University

Existing definitions suggest that loneliness results from a less than desirable quantity or quality of social relationships. While definitions can describe what loneliness is, they cannot capture the nuances of how loneliness is experienced across various life stages. Narrative gerontology, which considers how people age biographically, has demonstrated that personal autobiographies (life stories) offer generative ways for individuals in later life to express how loneliness is experienced, and how they navigate the complexities of loneliness in daily life. Methods: Using narrative gerontology as a guiding framework, research was conducted in two phases. Phase one consisted of a literature review dedicated to identifying cultural narratives concerning loneliness, temporality, and aging; and how such narratives become integrated into stories people tell about themselves. In phase two, using a research sample of 30 participants 65+ years of age who live alone, two semi-formal interviews per participant were conducted in order to elicit personal stories related to loneliness and aging. Results: The combined analysis of phase one and phase two revealed discrepancies in how loneliness is defined and how it is experienced in later life. Since the perception and value of social relationships change over time, the use of narrative as form of expression and method of research helps to better understand how loneliness is socially and temporally heterogenous, and how adapting to loneliness involves a process of navigating personal autonomy and social relationships. Discussion: The development and sharing of life stories challenge existing assumptions of old age and the social stigmas associated to loneliness in later life. In countries where the population of people 65+ living alone is projected to increase, the use of narrative in future research and interventions has potential to bridge the gaps on aging and loneliness through the voices of those it impacts most.

Lonelyscapes: Narrative Imaginaries of Loneliness and Aging in Daša Drndić’s Doppelgänger

Dr. Neus Rotger Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

In line with the proposed theme “Disparate worlds of illness and care”, this paper examines the ways in which narrative accounts of loneliness in literature problematize current conceptualizations and imaginaries of what news headlines have been reporting as the next big global health problem. Research shows, indeed, that loneliness has direct impacts on longevity, mental and physical health and well-being, especially among vulnerable social groups affected by gender, age-based, ethnic, socioeconomic, and educational inequalities. Even though the relationship between the current “loneliness pandemic” and poor health has been well established, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers agree that there is a lack of conceptual clarity around the definition of loneliness, and that more transdisciplinary work is needed to develop a shared language that facilitates the discussion beyond the rhetoric of crisis that we find across media. Loneliness scholars insist on how difficult and critical it is to define loneliness and find a suitable language and satisfactory conceptual tools to better describe and address it in all its complexity. Yet one of the main challenges is precisely the fact that loneliness is a very private and often stigmatized emotion that is difficult to recognize and to articulate a coherent discourse around. Drawing on recent loneliness research, I argue that introducing perspectives from narrative medicine, comparative literature and global literary studies can help us address and better understand the constellation of interwoven narratives (personal, cultural and institutional, fictional and non-fictional) that shape and transform the experience of being and feeling alone. To illustrate this I will turn to a reading of Crosatian writer Daša Drndić’s Doppelgänger (2002), two subtly linked stories about loneliness, aging and disease that invite reflection on the transformative and emancipatory potential of narrative worlds.

Location | AUP: C-102
Session Chairs | Matti Hyvärinen, Tampere University and Mari Hatavara, Tampere University

Ever since William Labov’s and Joshua Waletzky’s ground-breaking word, sociolinguistics has provided theoretical and methodological tools for detailed analyses of oral narratives. This panel turns attention to how these approaches from positioning analyses to small story research can contribute to the study of larger societal issues, in particular the study of master and counter-narratives. Can sociolinguistics help to find tools to identify the “countering” act and thus the counter-narratives? How can sociolinguistics contribute to the study of fictional narratives? How can the sociolinguistic approaches contribute to the issue how crises, conflict, and hope are narratively communicated? What, in general, is the relationship between large societal issues and detailed analysis?

Negotiating ‘the Good Immigrant Identity’-Prototype

Dr. Annika ValtonenTampere University, Prof. Dorien Van De Mieroop KU Leuven, Prof. Melisa Stevanovic Tampere University

Trying to bridge the gap between the highly particular level of detailed analyses of idiosyncratic and extremely personal narratives and the various collective levels of shared societal backgrounds in which certain ideologies circulate and particular, yet abstract forms of master narratives prevail, is quite a challenge to the sociolinguistic study of narratives. Yet, as has been argued before from the perspective of developing positioning analysis – and in particular level 3 – further (see e.g. De Fina, 2013), the quest for patterns and recurrent identity work in a series of narratives told by people from a particular community may be one of the important ways forward in this respect. In this presentation, we study a corpus of immigrants’ narratives regarding their experiences of the immigration process, as well as encounters with services, institutions and laypersons in their new country of residence. These narratives originate from twenty-three qualitative interviews with immigrant participants from heterogenous backgrounds living in Finland. Employing narrative positioning analysis (Bamberg, 1997), we analyze how the narrators position themselves vis-á-vis master narratives regarding immigration. In particular, we scrutinize the ways in which these narrators construct or subvert versions of what could be labeled as ‘the good immigrant identity’, which is associated with features of being appreciative, understanding, resilient and working hard to integrate according to certain master narratives (see e.g. Hackl, 2022). The results show how narrators agentively engage with this ‘identity prototype’ by revealing how they personalize, reconstruct and/or reject it while negotiating the balance between the particular and the collective. Finally, we conclude by discussing the implications of our findings on how detailed analysis of individual narratives enables us to shed light on societal power relations embedded in master narratives and major societal discourses.

Scripting Confrontation with Master/counter Positionings in Political Interaction

Dr. Hanna Rautajoki Tampere University

My paper investigates the aspects of illocutionary intent in the acts of political contestation on diverse political arenas. I am interested in the types of activities launched in the discursive portrayal of political scenes. Counter-narrative tools provide a rich rhetorical resource for political persuasion. Countering per se fits well with the argumentative framework of political action which sets out to discredit the opponent, convince the audience, and steer the direction of future events. Counter-narrative resources enable a dramaturgical set-up for contrastive inferences, justifications, affiliations, antagonism, and future activities in an ongoing political process. They can be harnessed to address the audience, produce a sense of moral disorder, map contrastive constellations of actors, build a collective and raise an urge to fight against that disorder. I will analyse and compare the acts of narrative rebuttal, moralization and agitation in the examples of political speeches, parliamentary debates and civic activism. The paper explores how detailed interactional analyses can illuminate the usage of political power in governance and political processes.

Narrative Contestation over an Ongoing Event. Early Tellings about the Collapse of the Soviet Union in Finnish Parliamentary Talk

Prof. Mari Hatavara Tampere University

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was vividly addressed by Finnish politicians during the time. This paper analyses the early tellings of the ongoing event in the Finnish Parliament’s plenary sessions and also in the oral history interviews of former Members of the Parliament from 1989 to early 1990’s. Using positioning analysis, I trace the narrative contestation that emerged over the happenings, their meaning and their consequences mostly between the left and the right in the Parliament. In accordance with the small stories approach, I focus on hypothetical and fragmented tellings besides short narratives on the significant event unfolding. Positioning self and others and projecting narrative scenarios were important means for the politicians to grasp the happenings and to influence the formation of the important historical event. For some, the happenings looked like a crisis, for others, indication of hope for a better future.

Location | AUP C-102

Participants:

Clive Baldwin, Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Narrative, St. Thomas University, Canada

Per Krogh Hansen, Center for Narratological Studies, University of Southern Denmark, Kolding

Hanna Meretoja, SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory, University of Turku, Finland

Sylvie Patron, Paris Centre for Narrative Matters, Université Paris Cité, France

Laura Piippo & Aura Lounasmaa, Narrare : Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies, Tampere University, Finland

Anneke Sools & Gerben Westerhof, Story Lab, University of Twente, Netherlands

Veronica Heney, Narrative Practices Lab, Durham University, UK

Location | AUP: C-104
Session Chair | Gerben Westerhof, University of Twente

Computation narratology is a fast-evolving field, partly motivated by new modes of communication, new technologies and the multiplication of sources. As described in the call for papers, these innovations combined with violence and (political) extremism often result in disparate narratives, containing alternative facts and multiple truths. Computational narratology can make an important contribution to identifying those elements and patterns that make certain disparate narratives so attractive. Once this detection has occurred, we will gain more insight into how stories can also bridge the gap between different disparate worlds. This multidisciplinary panel investigates in detail what this computational analysis can look like, combining insights from the humanities, sociology and technological disciplines. In one approach, computational recognition of narratives and the study of their role within the flow of communication requires finding a reduced set of linguistic markers corresponding adequately to the definitions of narrative or, alternatively, huge sets of annotated material to enable machine-learning methods in finding narratives. The paper on how verb classifications could be utilized as features in narrative detection subscribes to this methodology. In another approach, computational analysis can make use of existing tools to analyse crucial elements of narratives, which still needs further human interpretation. That approach is made concrete in the presentation on the story navigator, a tool that provides the researcher with information about the narrative composition of a story, with which researchers can substantiate, supplement and expand their interpretation. The presentation on disassembling stories explains how stories can be brought back to and visualized as building-blocks of subjects and actions, making it possible to reveal patterns relating to both the structure and the content of stories. In this way, we aim to improve the understanding of how stories function and gain insight consciously deploying certain features to build common spaces between different worlds.

Disassembling Stories: A Graphical Analysis of Stories as Sequences of Story Blocks

Dr. Stefan Bastholm Andrade VIVE, UT, Dr. Saartje Gobyn UT,  Prof. Anneke Sools UT, Prof. Gerben Westerhof UT

This paper introduces a new computational and graphical approach for examining stories. The graphical nature of this approach allows it to function both as a standalone tool for gaining an overview of multiple stories and as a supplement to qualitative analysis by mapping narrative patterns and changes in the plot structure. Using a sample of letters from the dataset ‘Letters from the future’, we demonstrate how this approach enhances the study of narrative plot structure. A computer algorithm divides each story into its smallest building blocks–clauses, consisting of subjects and actions. Leveraging recent innovations in sequence analysis, we illustrate how these story blocks can be visualized as graphical sequences. Our findings reveal patterns in stories that relate not only to traditional plot elements, such as exposition, inciting incidents, climaxes, and resolutions, but also to shifts in characters’ sentiments and motives.

The Impact of Corona on Amsterdam: A Computational Analysis of Corona-Stories with the Story Navigator

Dr. Saartje Gobyn UT, Dr. Stefan Bastholm Andrade VIVE, UT, Prof. Anneke SoolsUT, Prof. Gerben Westerhof UT

In this paper we present a computational tool, that helps researchers analyzing different kind of narratives. The tool – the story navigator – offers the researchers crucial information on 5 basic narrative motifs (actor, action, agency, means and purpose), with which they can substantiate, supplement and expand their interpretation. To demonstrate the story navigator, we use the ‘Corona in de stad’ dataset, an open and freely accessible collection of stories initiated by the Museum of Amsterdam in 2020 (and still open for contributions). In the digital exhibition, the Museum of Amsterdam – with many partners – shows the impact of the coronavirus on the city of Amsterdam and its residents. By analyzing stories from this collection with the story navigator we explain which information the tool gives the researchers and how the information is extracted from the stories. Subsequently, a number of pain points and challenges that the analysis with the story navigator entails are addressed. By using and analyzing stories of the ‘Corona in de stad’ dataset, we not only want to demonstrate this new computational way of narrative analysis, we also want to offer an answer to the question which influence societal changes have on story telling and in which way stories can offer hope and connection.

Operationalizing Semantic Verb Classes to Detect Narratives in Political Rhetoric of Parliamentary Debates

Dr. Kirsi Sandberg Tampere University, Prof. Mari Hatavara Tampere University, Dr. Nanny Jolma Tampere University, Dr. Hanna Rautajoki Tampere University

There is a growing interest in identifying narratives or narrative segments from large textual data sets. Narratives as a political language use in the parliamentary debates - organizing and explaining events, and a powerful tool for persuasion – form a relevant and topical yet methodologically challenging target. Different types of data as well as working with low resource languages continue to pose challenges to the current NLP methods (see Santana et. al 2023). Our previous work (Hatavara et al. 2024) with narrative detection from the official records of Finnish parliamentary plenary sessions (years 1980-2022) have demonstrated that narratives are short, used sparsely and the features typically formalized in detection tasks - chains of concrete actions and events organized on a timeline - don’t regularly signal a narrative in parliamentary debate data. Also, the density and complexity of the language used in parliamentary speech challenges methods that are often based on narrative sequentiality. This paper provides a continuation to our rule-based approach to narrative detection in parliamentary talk (see Andrushchenko et al. 2021). At first phase, we operationalized verb semantics and morphology to detect key sections in temporality and narrative modes. On this second phase, we broaden the scope from speech act verbs and past tenses to differing uses of thinking and emotion verbs to capture explicated experientiality in MPs’ speeches. Theoretical foundation to utilize semantic verb classification is based on verbs and grammatical forms encoding conceptual components of event structures (Levin & Rappaport Hovav 2019). This enables for example to detect not only agentive actors and targets, but also wordings of changes in emotional states based on the semantic classifications.

Location | AUP: C-102
Session Chair | Constance Pâris de Bollardière, The American University of Paris

Narrative Empathy in Autofiction: Political Implications

Dr. Larissa Muraveva Bard College Berlin

The question of how narrative structure contributes to the formation of empathy remains a topic of debate. Researchers have not reached a consensus on which elements of narrative are most effective in activating readers' empathic responses [Keen]. There is also no unified opinion on how narrative empathy is constructed in the genre of autofiction, but it is assumed that the basis for empathy lies in the authentic and sensitive experience, which evokes an emotional response in the reader. Autofiction constructs the sensitive not only at the thematic level but also at the narrative level. First, it does so by involving the idea that authors aim not just to represent but to reenact emotional experience. Second, I argue that autofiction constructs empathy through a particular configuration of events within the narrative intrigue and through a sense of immediacy. The unmediated emotional experiences—particularly those of trauma, suffering, or negativity—creates tension between the reader and the narrator: autofiction appeals to empathy, even though the reader's immersion in the text may be challenged by this tension. Narrative empathy in autofiction serves various functions: social, affective, and performative [Hogan]. Empathy also has a political dimension, particularly in autofiction, where personal experiences foreground sensitivity and trauma, aligning with the democratization of literature. By providing a voice to social, gender, and ethnic minorities, autofiction becomes a space for processing personal and collective traumas. Empathy legitimizes these practices, reshaping the relationship between ethical and aesthetic considerations. In this paper I aim to examine the political dimension of narrative empathy through the lens of Russian-language autofiction, which has recently become a key mode of oppositional political expression. Studying Russian-language autofiction as empirical material is not an end in itself but serves to clarify and deepen the theoretical understanding of narrative empathy and its political functions.

(Dis-)Comforting Solidarities. Germany and Israel-Palestine

Dr. Snežana Stanković Center for Health Ethics, Ev. Academy

When questions of responsibility and repair fail before atrocities, how do we recognize those at loss and shape and express our support? Based on ethnographic and collaboratively engaged research among women activists in Germany and Israel/Palestine, this paper follows how solidarities around Israel/Palestine in Germany evolve and address the narratives of the Holocaust, Nakba, occupation, and colonialism. It touches upon Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg’s concepts of empathic unsettlement and unsettling otherness. In exploring several Berlin sites of conflicting and converging solidarities, I ask why and when one solidarity excludes the other. Who is an unsettling otherness, and why? Does the capacity to feel through others (Niehuus, 2024) have to be historically and politically prescribed? Or one may transgress the norm to build other—even shocking—intimacies, as Marie Niehuus writes about repair and healing in Congo through affective solidarity with those who once embodied the sites of violence. Solidarities are various. They can recognize and account for those injured; they can be excluding and violent, and they can be patronizing and comfortable.

The Death of the Maronites

Dr. Jerome David Bowers Rutgers University

The “Cyprus Problem” is one of the most contested and politicized narratives among historical and contemporary stories of prolonged conflicts. Determinants such as who is responsible, engaged in the more horrific crimes, and the punishments that should be extracted shape the everyday discussions of the issue. Each of the major communities, Greek and Turk, focus their tellings on how “the other” tells inaccurate stories of the past, rather than exploring the uses or function of those narratives in creating increasingly false testimonies, especially when it comes to the minority groups. This paper examines the ways that the prevailing narratives exclude nuances, avoid self-recriminations, prolongs political or territorial advantageous standing, and forces the manipulation of one’s own people to a preordained conclusion. All of which contribute to the exclusion, figuratively and literally of the Maronies, one of the island's minorities. Today's narratives belie the very existence of the Maronites as a vested party or entity within the conflict. With each passing marginalization of their status, the narratives do further violence and disenfranchises a people who have lived in Cyprus for thousands of years, denying them unfettered and equal access to their land, villages, political rights, religious expression, and their identity. Once numbering a hundred thousand, today the Maronites are barely 8,000 and will, by all projections, disappear entirely as an identifiable and distinct people, within the next century. How the Maronites are fighting back, but still ultimately losing, and how the international community and justice have abandoned them is the focus of this paper (stemming from a forthcoming monograph more than 10 years in the making). Competing narratives, disparate worlds, all within one of the smallest nations of Europe, as we all watch a people disappear.

Location | AUP: C-101
Session Chair | Debajyoti Biswas, Bodoland University

Migration and Identity in When I Was Puerto Rican: Exploring Cultural Displacement and Identity Formation

Buse Arslan University of Bayreuth

This paper examines the interaction of migration and cultural identity through the memoir When I Was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago. This memoir further highlights the themes of new identity formation, and the effects of migration that Santiago and her family began to experience with their move from Puerto Rico. Using a postcolonial theoretical lens, this analysis will delve into how these themes illustrate the complexities of identity shaped by historical and cultural contexts. Through her memoir, Santiago shows the reader the emotional turmoil of cultural displacement, constant alienation, and longing for one’s homeland after migration. Furthermore, this paper also explores the empowerment of Santiago’s mother as she navigates her way out of a male-dominated society, as well as Santiago’s self-realization of her evolving sense of belonging as she tries to mediate her complex emotions. By engaging with these themes, this paper contributes to ongoing scholarly discussions on the complexities of migration, identity formation, and cultural displacement in contemporary society, specifically in terms of understanding how minority voices navigate their experiences within dominant cultures. Ultimately, this study aims to provide insight into how the profound effects of migration are felt by individuals and communities through the memoir When I Was a Puerto Rican, showing how migration can profoundly affect individuals and communities by depriving them of a sense of belonging.

Shared Letters – Disparate Lives: Narrative Potential of Epistolography

Monika Beata Kopcik University of Warsaw

The paper addresses the narrative potential of epistolography at the intersection of intellectual history, microhistory, life-writing and literary theory. In considering epistolography as a discursive space (Maingueneau 2004), the study will distinguish the framework and constraints that correspondence sets for the (re)construction of identity projects undertaken among artists and intellectuals from Central and Eastern Europe at the dawn of the 20th century. As a result of political shifts and tensions between ethnocentrism and cosmopolitanism (Benson 2006), their lives were characterised by conflict and translocation. Consequently, just as the community of scholars in the Republic of Letters transcended geographical boundaries and mediated disputes through correspondence (Burke 2012; Goodman 1994), so 20th-century 'modernist Argonauts' (Turowski 2023) from Central and Eastern Europe were able to establish spaces of self-expression and debate through letter-writing. Given that (1) a collection of letters represents a product of dialogical interaction between subjects situated at a distance from one another (in terms of geography, worldview or culture), and (2) such a collection is characterised by a strict temporal and spatial parametrization, it can be argued that correspondence is a genre particularly suited to the recording of the condition of uprootedness and instability. The paper will introduce the epistolarium (Stanley 2004) of Karol Szymanowski, a celebrated Polish composer (and occasional writer), as a corpus of disparate life narratives implied in epistolary dialogues. It is proposed that Szymanowski's correspondence can be read as a substitute for his unfinished autobiography (for which he prepared only the introduction), and that its openness is related to the phenomenon of disintegrated biography characteristic of figures from the modernist formation in Central and Eastern Europe.

Everyday Life in the Distorted Mirror of War: Life Narratives of Ukrainian War Refugees in Estonia

Dr. Leena Käosaar University of Tartu

This presentation will explore the ways in which the onslaught of the Russian full-scale military aggression against Ukraine that started on February 24, 2022, is narrated in life stories collected within the framework of the project “Taking Shelter in Estonia: Stories of Ukrainians Fleeing from the War” (University of Tartu, 2022-2024) as well as public social media posts of Ukrainians who have found shelter from the war in Estonia. The focus will be on life storying strategies that convey shifts in self-perception and one’s place in the world, understanding of time and space, and plans for the future or their lack thereof. Of particular importance are the ways in which the harmful, damaging, and traumatic impact of the war is narrated via the loss and distortion of basic, formerly taken-for-granted everyday life contexts. Though many writers document having lost, often irreplaceably, all familiar and habitual contexts of their lives, their stories testify to ways of resisting the harm and destruction caused by the war – traceable via their courses of action ways and their explanations for them through which they seek to build a new, often provisional, everyday.

Location | AUP: Q-801
Session Chair | Arya Thampuran, Durham University

This panel explores how neurodivergence operates at the level of narrative across three papers each of which draw upon frameworks from the emergent field of critical neurodiversity studies. The papers respond to a new critical wave of neurodiversity scholarship that aims to move literary and cultural analysis beyond discussions of neurodivergent representation in terms of mimesis or the application of (often anachronistic) diagnostic frameworks to fiction. This panel positions neurodivergence – understood as a divergence from an established neurological norm (Asasumasu, 2000) – as a critical construct through which a literary and cultural analysis that accounts for a disparate range of narrative worlds, diversity of perceptions, and access needs. We demonstrate how the dual focus of critical neurodiversity studies analyses – as both literary critique and methodological experimentation – offers an expansion of how intellectual endeavour values and includes atypical bodyminds.

The Lifted Veil: Neurodivergence, Narrative, and Disparate Scholarship

Dr. Louise Creechan Durham University

In Adam Bede (1859), George Eliot famously explains that it is the responsibility of the realist novelist ‘to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in [their] mind’ with the caveat that this mirror is ‘doubtless defective’ as the narrator is neither infallible nor omniscient; they make mistakes, hold biases, and are unable to access the interior mental processes of every character without undermining their commitment to giving a ‘faithful account of men and things’. As an outlier in Eliot’s oeuvre, The Lifted Veil (1859) explores what would happen if the narrator’s mirror was not ‘defective’, but expanded through clairvoyance – by definition, a divergence from established neurotypical standard of the novella. The aim of this paper is two-fold: firstly, to provide a reading of The Lifted Veil using a critical neurodiversity studies framework, the application of which will demonstrate how neurodivergence is operating at the level of narrative to critique the realist mode of contemporary novels, including those written by George Eliot herself. Secondly, while lifting the veil on nineteenth-century realism, the paper will also lift the veil on my neurodivergent scholarly process – to make visible that which is hidden in my ‘masked’ academic writing. As such, I will invite delegates to share in the perhaps disparate world of cripped literary scholarship where the text is, not only the object of analysis, but the point of disablement. Part textual analysis, part autotheory, this atypical engagement with the formal expectations of literary criticism asks how neurodivergent forms of knowledge making and dissemination might be facilitated and, ultimately, valued by the wider academy.

Tristram Shandy, Wittgenstein, and the Limits of Theory of Mind

Dr. Anna Stenning Durham University

The idea that humans and other primates share a Theory of Mind (ToM) - meaning that individuals understand others' thoughts, intentions, and beliefs by attributing mental states to them - suggests that successful communication relies on one person being able to "mind-read" or infer what another is thinking. ToM-based narratology often emphasizes empathy and identification with characters as the primary way readers engage with narrative meaning. However, insofar as we rely on ToM for explaining all aspects of literary meaning, we can neither account for either the formal or contextual complexity of literary interpretation, and nor can we account for how narratives can serve as a bridge between different forms of life, including those that arise through cognitive and/or cultural difference. Insofar as through Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne critiques John Locke’s theory of language as invoking clear and distinct ideas, it can also be seen to challenge the notion that literary meaning is concerned with the attribution of mental states – as implied by ToM – and illustrate Wittgenstein's philosophy of language games (1953). I will explore how Sterne’s playful subversion of narrative conventions through non-linear storytelling, and his characters' obsessions with particular subjects and communicative peculiarities can be read as historically rich examples of neurodivergent language games at play. This approach allows us to bridge the narrative worlds of distinct neurotypes since it is premised on contextual language practices rather than innate capacities, unlike readings for theory of mind or empathy. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy serves as an early example of a narrative that allows for such bridging.

Navigating Co-Authorship: Marketing Neurodivergent Memoirs

Dr. N Simonetti Durham University

This paper examines the complexities of authorship in co-authored neurodivergent memoirs. While much Medical Humanities and Literary Disability Studies scholarship focuses on the valuable insights these memoirs provide into lived experiences, little work has explored the marketing strategies behind these texts and the implications for public perception. This paper extends the discourse surrounding inspirational and supercrip narratives by analysing two neurodivergent memoirs – Wendy Mitchell and Anna Wharton’s One Last Thing (2023) and Peter Berry and Deb Bunt’s Slow Puncture (2020) – to reveal the marketing mechanisms that lead many publishers to emphasise the contributions of neurodivergent co-authors over those of neuronormative co-authors. Looking at the spaces of authorship in these texts, I argue that the prominent position given to the neurodivergent co-author (on the book cover and sometimes in other paratextual sections) is not merely a gesture of empowerment but can also become another compensatory mechanism for the perceived ‘lack’ associated with neurodivergence. By contrast, I explore how a neurodiverse perspective on neurobiology – emphasising variation over disability – can prompt a reassessment of authorship in these narratives as a neuromixed space of collaboration. I highlight the importance of applying insights from Neurodiversity Studies both to key literary concepts and to the marketing strategies that engage with them, so that the transformative value of neurodivergent narratives might extend beyond representation to also encompass how they present themselves to the world. By doing so, these texts can become plural sites of signification and help bridge societal divides, fostering a greater appreciation of neurodiversity.

Location | AUP: C-103
Session Chair | William Randall, St. Thomas University

Tasting Home: Diasporic Eelam Tamil Heritage in Cynthia Shanmugalingam’s Rambutan: Recipes from Sri Lanka (2022)

Dr. Arththi Sathananthar University of Groningen

Cookbooks stem from rich oral traditions; recipes that have been passed down through generations in the family. Because of the focus on life narrative, today’s cookbook is a form of memoir, or recently coined, foodoir. Together with my own personal life narrative, I will examine Cynthia Shanmugalingam’s Rambutan: Recipes from Sri Lanka (2022) to explore diasporic ancestries. Although located in the Global North, the UK, Shanmugalingam tell stories of lives from the Global South, Sri Lanka. In light of the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war (1983-2009) and its resulting Eelam Tamil immobilities, I argue that this cookbook functions to root the rich culinary cultures of the ancestral homelands and transplant home to the textual, but also to the kitchen. Rambutan details the distinct socio-political history of which its narrative has emerged and the critical acts of memorialization which this text performs. Shanmugalingam foregrounds the act of remembrance by memorializing maternal family recipes which reveal a sustained link to the ancestral homeland. She pays homage to her homeland through culinary expression. The cookbook includes heartfelt essays that convey the importance of documenting oral food histories in order to preserve their distinct gustatory cultures in an environment where the physical land is threatened or erased from national consciousness. The cookbook is an ideal site for mobilizing the oral to the textual while also stressing on the intimacy and distinctness of these diasporic family accounts. Therefore, the text mediates the interconnected acts of diasporic writing, reading and cooking to exemplify the notion of ‘third-culture cooking’ .

Things We Cherish as Portals into our Disparate Storyworlds

Prof. William Randall St. Thomas University, Prof. Matte Robinson St. Thomas University

The objects we hold dearest in our lives—a particular photograph or painting, an item of clothing or furniture, an obscure memento that would hold little worth for anyone else—can be intimately entwined with our sense of identity, and with key chapters, subplots, and themes in the stories of our lives. They can serve as portals into the distinctive “storyworlds” that each of us inhabits. And they become repositories of memory and emotion whose value for us can intensify with time. We may thus be reluctant to let go of them when, for instance, “downsizing” from a house to an apartment, or having to leave home quickly in the face of a fire or other emergency. Drawing on concepts and distinctions from narrative psychology, narrative gerontology, archeology, literary theory, etc., this presentation will outline research conducted by members of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Narrative (CIRN) at St. Thomas University and the edited collection (book) in which it resulted: "Things That Matter: The Role of Special Objects in Our Stories As We Age" (University of Toronto Press, 2023). It will also discuss the potential of reflecting on the significance of our most cherished possessions as a way of broadening our horizon of self understanding and enriching our narrative development in later life. This presentation will be of special interest to therapists, social workers, chaplains, nurses, doctors, and volunteers seeking to practice “narrative care” with older adults.

Allied Objects: Narrating Things in Early North Korean Youth Magazines

Prof. Dafna Zur Stanford University, Dr. Derek Kramer The University of Sheffield

If our pencils could talk, what would they say? In the early 1950s, the young readers of North Korea could hazard a guess. Right as communities around them were crumbling, the objects that populated their world were coming to life. Protons and protractors, tables and tanks—North Korean readers were nudged by artist and writers to see the everyday as mediated by things. This study takes up the proliferation of anthropomorphic subjects in early North Korean youth magazines. It considers how objects—imbued with agency and purpose—acted as intermediaries between a socialist project still in formation and individuals that were being constituted as postcolonial subjects. Through representation and narrative structures, these objects outlined an impassioned collaboration between human and non-human elements in the search for a new political and social world. This project draws from an archive of early North Korean young adult serials, pictorial monthlies, and popular science magazines. It considers early socialist attempts to narrate the way objects played an active role in building a socialist everyday. Written against the backdrop of the decolonial violence, civil conflict, and Cold War strife, the North Korean press animated diverse inanimate participants in a collective search for a socialist tomorrow. This personified world performed multiple roles. Animated things mediated new notions of cooperation and at the same time modeled ways for readers to understand their place in the emerging socialist order. Yet, once turned into agents, objects also became subject to the norms of narrative, form, and praxis. In this regard, socialist things were party to the possibilities and constraints that populated everyday socialism in a newly postcolonial world.

Location | AUP: Q-604
Session Chair | Ioanna Kouki, Université Paris Cité

Autosociobiographical Affordances: Narrating Disparate Social Worlds and the Possibility of Reconciliation

Kristian Ingemann Svane Yale University

The hybrid genre of “autosociobiography”––coined in German scholarship based on the writings of Annie Ernaux, Didier Eribon, and Pierre Bourdieu––offers a unique lens for exploring how autobiographical narratives can bridge divergent realities resulting from class divides. Autosociobiography blends literature and sociology to narrate the experience of social mobility through the perspective of the transclasse and to analyze the lived non-reproduction of social divides. These narratives claim to reveal how individuals navigate the borders between disparate social worlds, thereby shedding light on the broader sociocultural conditions of division and disparity. In writing autosociobiographies, authors participate in forming a new collective understanding of transclasse mobilities. This paper introduces the genre through its paradigmatic French tradition, refining the notion through including its international developments across anglophone and Scandinavian literatures. Complicating the existing research, the paper critiques the underlying notion of genre. By treating autosociobiography as a form of writing it becomes possible to ask for its narrative affordances. The paper explores how this genre hitherto has served as a rhetorical device for both individualizing political responsibility––as seen in J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016)––and for constructing transsocial relationality, as exemplified by Morten Pape’s Planen (2015) and Kim de l’Horizon’s Blutbuch (2022). In engaging with these texts, the paper asks how the narrative form of autosociobiography offers tools for reconciliation across fractured social landscapes, revealing both the conflict inherent in these divides and the potential for new solidarities. By focusing on the potential for autosociobiography to understand conflicting social realities, the paper examines how narrative can work to connect disparate worlds and what hitherto underemphasized reconciliatory potentials its heterogeneous form allows for.

“Il n’y a pas de justice entre l’homme et le monde”: Narratives of Justice in Xabi Molia’s Fiction

Dr. Philippe Brand Lewis & Clark College

Over the past two decades, French writer and director Xabi Molia has published seven novels, directed three feature-length films, and co-directed two documentaries, assuming a role of growing significance in the French cultural landscape. Molia’s documentaries focus explicitly on contemporary issues of social exclusion, national identity, and class, studying a youth football team in the banlieue of Aubervilliers in Le terrain (2014) and an experimental middle school program in Grenoble that targets at-risk students in Un bon début (2021). In his novels, Molia explores a wider range of possibilities, incorporating a surprising variety of disparate genre elements not often encountered in “serious” literary fiction. This talk focuses on articulations of justice through the lenses of three of Molia’s works. In Reprise des hostilités (2007), a young writer seeks to avenge the injustice of the death of his father, who commits suicide after being laid off from his factory by a right-wing businessman turned nativist politician. Avant de disparaître (2011) paints the portrait of a near-future post-apocalyptic Paris, ravaged by pandemic and engulfed in civil war, where suspect citizens are rounded up in internment camps and a splinter group instigates terror attacks under the banner of ecological justice. Finally, Des jours sauvages (2020) explores utopian attempts at self-governance, reimagining hierarchies of power, ethics, and justice in the absence of formal institutions after one hundred French citizens are shipwrecked on a desert island. In each work, institutions are fragile, crumbling, or absent altogether. These disparate narrative worlds are united by the common theme of citizens who take up the mantle of justice in moments of crisis, with unforeseen consequences. Playing on and destabilizing the codes of genre fiction, Molia slyly overturns our expectations about the form, content, and potential of serious literary fiction in unexpected ways.

Zones of Discomfort: Empathic Distance and Worlds of Suffering in Marie NDiaye’s Novels

Dr. Anne Susanna Riippa University of Helsinki, Ansa Salonen University of Helsinki

The work of contemporary French author Marie NDiaye is marked by a profound engagement with identity conflicts, fraught family dynamics, and various mechanisms of rejection and alienation. Her characters navigate harsh, destabilizing social worlds, the effects of which are mirrored in their private worlds of suffering. This presentation explores portrayals of suffering and their ethical and political implications in two novels of NDiaye. We analyze the narrative techniques employed in depicting distress and desolation, paying particular attention to the regulation of empathic distance in third-person narration, as well as to the kaleidoscopic image composed of the interwoven trajectories of the characters. As we shall argue, NDiaye’s writing conveys both the experience of suffering and its opacity, thereby probing the possibility and the limits of empathic understanding. The presentation thus undertakes a reflection on the broader literary ethos embodied in NDiaye’s work: while contemporary French literature is frequently associated with a therapeutic function, NDiaye’s novels, plays, and short stories create zones of discomfort and insecurity, prompting a nuanced discussion on the ethical and political questions they raise. By complementing our analysis of representations of suffering with perspectives from social sciences, we aim to illuminate the form of social criticism embedded in her writing.

The corpus for this analysis includes:

NDiaye, M. (1989) La femme changée en bûche. Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris.

NDiaye, M. (2009) Trois femmes puissantes. Gallimard, Paris.

NDiaye, M. (2021) La vengeance m’appartient. Gallimard, Paris.

Location | AUP: Q-704
Session Chair | Magdalena Dziaczkowska, Lund University

Communicating the Experience of Microaggression

Dr. Eva Mulder University of Humanistic Studies, Prof. Lois Presser University of Tennessee

This research investigates the narrative challenges posed by microaggressions—subtle, everyday acts of exclusion, insult, or discrimination directed at members of marginalized groups. Microaggressions, despite seemingly minor in isolation, reflect and can add up to significant psychological and social harm. They do not necessarily require the intent of an "aggressor," which has made the term misleading and hence controversial according to some critics. Furthermore, microaggressions are deeply linked to social group membership, limiting the experience of these acts to marginalized communities based on the perceived targeting of their identity. This means, for example, that a white woman may experience gender-based but not race-based microaggressions. Given the complexity of microaggressions, narrating these experiences presents a unique challenge, particularly when it comes to conveying the sense of injustice to an audience that may be indifferent or uninformed. To explore how these stories are shared, we recorded 17 conversations between pairs of U.S. participants about their experiences with microaggressions, followed by debriefing interviews conducted by one of the researchers with each of the 34 participants. We examined how storytellers used rhetorical devices, such as metaphor, hypotheticals, and narrated time to communicate the subjective feeling of microaggressions and signal the moral transgression embedded in these experiences. Our next step is to explore how listeners engage with these stories and attempt to empathize and make sense of a different social reality. This research contributes to broader efforts to examine how narrative might foster dialogue and mutual understanding, while acknowledging the complexities of bridging social divides.

Affect, Narrative, and Violence in Anuk Arudpragasam's 'A Passage North'

Digvijay Nikam Jawaharlal Nehru University

This paper investigates the affective experience of a war-torn society by engaging in a close analysis of Anuk Arudpragasam’s novel 'A Passage North' (2021). A meditation on the aftermath of the Sri Lankan Civil war, the novel is written from the point of view of Krishan, a Sri Lankan Tamil, who was distanced from the events of the war. The journey to the former war zone to attend a funeral becomes an occasion for acknowledging the violence that has occurred from the position of a mundane and tranquil present where only traces of the catastrophe remain. The paper examines the novel’s exploration of violence not as an extraordinary event but as an embedded experience in everyday life, what the sociologist Veena Das has called the ‘enfolding’ of violence within the ordinary. Situating the arguments within the framework of affect theory, the paper illustrates Arudpragasam’s insistence on the experiential economy of daily life as an attempt, on the one hand, at narratively recovering a dimension of human experience that escapes normative modes of analysis and on the other, to generate an aesthetic effect that brings a phenomenological attention to the subjective experience of reality. The paper scrutinizes the acute role of Arudpragasam’s narrative style that employs extremely long sentences to create a slow-paced and rhythmic prose with an uneventful plot structure that raises issues of narration vis-à-vis emotions. Furthermore, taking the episode of the novel’s extended sensory description of a funeral, the paper tries to reveal the uneven affective texture of everyday experience that complicates our understanding of mourning, compassion, and solidarity. The paper concludes by reflecting on the political potential of such literature in building a stronger awareness of affect in daily life and through that engendering a more informed ethical response to violence in the contemporary world.

Women and Children in the Nigerian-Biafran Civil War Narratives: A Comparative Analysis of Female and Male Representation of the War

Dr. Solomon Omatsola Azumurana University of Lagos

This research focuses on the Nigerian-Biafran civil war of 1967 – 1970 through the prism of four narratives written by both women and men. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s and Helene Cixous’ notions of women writing themselves into history, the research examines the depictions of women, and the effects of the war on women and their children, in Festus Iyayi’s Heroes (1986), Iweala’s Beast of No Nation (2005), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s Roses and Bullets (2011) - two male- and female-authored novels respectively. While all the narratives are appropriate responses to the war, they all create disparate worlds based on their gender, generational difference, and closeness or otherwise to the conflict. The study, therefore, argues that while Iyayi’s Heroes and Iweala’s Beast of No Nation sustain the temporality of the masculinist literary heritage of the war narrative they inherit, Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun while trying to transcend such masculinist trope nonetheless sustains its temporality that it turns out to become both masculinist and feminist; and that it is Ezeigbo’s Roses and Bullets that is the most fully realized feminist narrative of the war. Hence, even though Adichie has been credited with revising the masculinist trope and temporality of the civil war narratives in Nigeria, the study argues that it is indeed Ezeigbo and not Adichie who should be credited with such revisionist trajectory.

Location | AUP: Q-A101
Session Chair | Zed Zhipeng Gao, The American University of Paris

Narrative Worlds in Conflict: French Political Responses to the Russian Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine

Olena Siden Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University

The Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 ignited polarized narratives within the French political discourse, revealing distinct narrative worlds among right-wing politicians. This study examines how Twitter communication from three prominent French right-wing politicians—Valérie Pécresse, Éric Zemmour, and Marine Le Pen— shaped opposing interpretations of the conflict, using thematic analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis over the January–April 2022 period. Although all three politicians condemned Russia’s aggression, their rhetoric varied significantly. Valérie Pécresse, a center-right candidate, aligned with pro-Ukraine, pro-European unity, emphasizing sanctions against Russia and rallying for strong EU-NATO support, constructing a narrative world centered on European solidarity and defense of democratic ideals. In contrast, Éric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen, both far-right figures, adopted a narrative that positioned NATO and the U.S. as antagonists, presenting the conflict as the fault of the West. Their rhetoric reinforced Russian narratives by questioning EU sanctions and calling for "peace" while resisting the direct labeling of "war." This narrative ambivalence allowed them to appeal to both nationalist and isolationist sentiments, reflecting a fragmented narrative world within France itself, where differing allegiances and perceptions of national interest influenced responses to the crisis. This research illustrates how Twitter enables the construction of distinct narrative worlds, with platform-specific features amplifying ideological divides and influencing public perception. Such polarized messaging on social media can bridge or deepen social and political fragmentation, especially in times of conflict.

God Bless the President! Religious References in Online Political Communication in the U.S. Election Campaign

Nina Kotula Kozminski University, Maria Lipinska Kozminski University, Prof. Dariusz Jemielniak Kozminski University

Religious rhetoric is a powerful tool in political communication, shaping not only public discourse but also reinforcing polarized group identities. This paper examines religious references in online political discussions during the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign, focusing on Facebook communities supporting Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Using netnography, the study identifies two dominant communication strategies: sanctification, where religious symbols are used to elevate the preferred candidate as divinely chosen, and demonization, where opponents are cast in morally negative terms, often framed as evil or demonic (Goffman, 1986; Durkheim, 1995). These strategies create distinct and disparate narrative worlds that strengthen in-group cohesion and exacerbate political polarization, reflecting a broader phenomenon of affective polarization (Iyengar & Westwood, 2015). Sanctification fosters a sense of unity among supporters through shared religious rituals, while demonization dehumanizes political opponents, contributing to echo chambers and the reinforcement of confirmation bias. Despite the deep divisions these narratives create, the study also explores the potential for using religious rhetoric to bridge divides by fostering moral alignment across political lines (Haidt, 2012). This research contributes to the understanding of how religious and political narratives intertwine in digital spaces, influencing voter behavior and the fragmentation of political realities. By examining the impact of religiously framed political communication, the paper offers insights into how these disparate narrative worlds can be both sustained and potentially reconciled through more inclusive discourse.

‘JFK Jr. Would Have Run for President’: Reimagining What Might Have Been Through Counterfactual Thinking

Dr. Marina Lambrou Kingston University

On the 17th October 2017, the American lifestyle magazine Town & Country published an online article with the headline, ‘JFK Jr. would have run for President’. JFK Jr. or John John, was the son of President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy who died at the age of 38 in a tragic accident when the plane he was flying crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, also killing his wife Carolyn and sister-in-law Lauren Bessette. This act of human counterfactualising can be defined as ‘a hypothetical alteration in a past sequence of events that changes the events in a factual sequence in order to create a different, counterfactual outcome’ (Dannenberg, 2008: 119). The above headline can be seen as an example of a historical counterfactual as these scenarios offer alternate versions of the past, while asking what would have happened if? for a hypothetical deviation from real-world history. This talk explores the prevalence of counterfactual thinking in factual and fictional scenarios (Lambrou, 2019) to understand the conditions that would make this alternative version of the world exist counterfactual thinking; counterfactualising; ontological flicker.

Location | AUP: C-104
Session Chair | Mark Freeman, The College of the Holy Cross

Contemporary Silent Narratives: Fishing, Labor, and Human Rights

Dr. Marta Puxan Oliva Universitat De Les Illes Balears

This paper explores silence in visual narratives concerned with hard labor, even slave labor in the fishing industry. I propose that silence is a paradoxical narrative strategy that vectors a narrative that leaves the pain of the trails of fisherman and slaves at sea to the image, as a trace to their silent testimonies. Silent narratives serve multiple purposes. In this occasion, the paper explores their role in relation to human and nature rights. Silence works to highlighlight an invisibility occurring at a liminal space, such as the coast or the limits of territorial sea waters. The paper explores two, very different, case studies that interrelate labor, fishing, environmental concern, and silent visual narratives belonging to two different genres: the graphic memoir The dead eye and the deep blue sea (2018), by Cambodian author Vanak Anan Prum; and the film Costa da Morte (2013), directed by the Spanish Lois Patiño. Prum’s graphic memoir tells the autobiographic story of a Cambodian who is kept as a slave five years in the Tailand fishing industry. The graphic memoir uses a kind of illustration that excludes language from its main framework, emphasizes condensed scenes, and places the narrative in the silent scars and mediated story. Patiño’s documentary film discusses the hardships of the shellfish workers in the Costa da Morte in Galicia, Spain. The documentary strongly uses a silent non narration in combination with blurring images so as to erase the boundaries between nature and human beings, in a paradoxical effect that invisibilizes labor hardships and rights.

Negotiating Identity and Legacy Across Disparate Narratives: The Case of Leila Bederkhan

Bilal Akar University of Milan

How do disparate narratives shape the legacy of marginalized figures? How can the transference of stories across generations and cultural contexts restore forgotten histories? The life of Leila Bederkhan, a Kurdish-Jewish modern dancer who rose to prominence in Europe in the early 20th century, provides a lens through which to explore these questions. Combining archival and ethnographic research, my presentation examines how Bederkhan navigated the intersections of her identities to carve out space in the European dance world. Most importantly, I demonstrate how her negotiations of Kurdish and Jewish heritage, including her decision to conceal her Jewish identity amid rising antisemitism, contribute to the growing literature on decolonial, non-Eurocentric dance historiographies. Leila Bederkhan was exoticized in the dance field and media as the "Kurdish Princess," a label that capitalized on Orientalist expectations of European audiences and often overshadowed her artistic contributions. The labels of "Kurdish Princess" and Jewish heritage shaped her public and private personas during a time of political upheaval, antisemitism, and colonial oppression of the Kurds. Decades after Bederkhan’s death, her goddaughter’s niece, Leyla Safiye, uncovered the forgotten legacy of this pioneering dancer. Through Safiye’s books and further research by Kurdish intellectuals, Bederkhan’s narrative resurfaced. My research seeks to restore her place in dance history by acknowledging the erasure of non-European contributions and connecting her story to decolonial movements in cultural studies. By examining these three narratives—the exoticized public persona of Leila Bederkhan, her negotiations of complex identities, and recent efforts to reclaim her place in dance history—this presentation explores how disparate modes of representation can converge to revive and reframe forgotten histories. Bederkhan’s story reveals the power of narrative to bridge cultural and temporal divides, offering new possibilities for resilience and solidarity in marginalized communities.

Ìwàpẹ̀lẹ́: Soundscapes of Yorùbá Knowledge Systems on Peace and Conflict in Beautiful Nubia's Music

Oluwatosin John Ibitoye Kwara State University

In the evident contraction of the world into a ‘global village’, the globe seems to be combating more crises where war, violence, insecurity, corruption, man’s inhumanity to man, incivility, betrayal, oppression, economic and political exploitations have become the order of the day. Particularly, in Nigeria, economic and political crises, civil uprising, insecurity as evident in the spate of banditry, insurgency, kidnapping, secessionists clamours, and incessant arson becloud our socio-cultural fabric. Hence, the quest for peace from cultural perspectives, the need for home-grown solutions to existential problems is inevitable. Against this backdrop, my study asks: How can indigenous Yorùbá epistemologies shaped in musical narratives influence social constructs on conflict and peace in contemporary Yorùbá societies in Nigeria? My study adopts sonic and textual analysis of musical narratives on Yorùbá indigenous knowledge systems on peace and conflict resolution in selected works of Segun Akinlolu (Beautiful Nubia) within the framework of Yorùbá Ọmọlúàbí concept. My study establishes that musical narratives on ìwàpẹ̀lẹ́, the ultimate basis for moral conduct in Yorùbáland as a germane strand within the tripod of virtue in the Yorùbá Ọmọlúàbí concept is capable of fostering peace and conflict resolution in contemporary Yorùbá societies in Nigeria. My study posits that within sociological influence of music in the society, the conscious internalisation of ìwàpẹ̀lẹ́ will subsequently lead to àjọgbe and àjọsepọ̀ within the Yorùbá Ọmọlúàbí temper of mind towards a peaceful and developing society.

Location | AUP: C-102
Session Chairs | Mari Hatavara, Tampere University and Matti Hyvärinen,Tampere University

Ever since William Labov’s and Joshua Waletzky’s ground-breaking word, sociolinguistics has provided theoretical and methodological tools for detailed analyses of oral narratives. This panel turns attention to how these approaches from positioning analyses to small story research can contribute to the study of larger societal issues, in particular the study of master and counter-narratives. Can sociolinguistics help to find tools to identify the “countering” act and thus the counter-narratives? How can sociolinguistics contribute to the study of fictional narratives? How can the sociolinguistic approaches contribute to the issue how crises, conflict, and hope are narratively communicated? What, in general, is the relationship between large societal issues and detailed analysis?

Vicarious Voices in Ex-Parliamentarians’ Counter-Narratives

Dr. Matti Hyvärinen Tampere University

Parliamentary debates are regulated by a pro-and-contra structure, which importantly makes parliaments highly resistant to disparate narrative worlds. This paper studies counter-narratives that ex-MPs tell in their oral history interviews. The dominant text-type in the interviews is chronicle, and the proper narratives are rather exceptional. However, the found counter-narratives typically exhibit various vicarious voices. The vicarious voices appear at least in three roles: as opponents, as motivators (senders), or as legitimators. The central role of these vicarious voices can partly be explained by two factors: firstly, the pro-an-contra setting invites the opponents and legitimators, secondly, the representative role of parliaments encourages the (ex)MPs still to transmit other voices. Vicarious voices thus work to break the disparate narrative worlds and enhance the inclusion of various, conflicting voices in a joint political realm.

Sidetracks and Other Instances: Experimenting Possible Signposts of Counter-Narratives in Oral History Interviews of Former Parliamentarians

Dr. Nanny Jolma Tampere University

This presentation examines the possibilities of identifying counter-narratives in oral history interviews of Finnish politicians. I ask what kind of signposts of counter-narratives can be recognized through a qualitative analysis of linguistic features that are repeatedly accruing in reminiscent narrative sequences. In this context, the concept of counter-narrative is understood as a communicative strategy that could be utilized by such an elite group as veteran parliamentarians (Hyvärinen, forthcoming). The data consists of the records of oral history interviews of former members of the Finnish parliament (1988-2018). In the interviews, the MPs are asked to reflect on their personal history and their path of becoming a politician. In a previous research project, the large digital corpus has been lemmatized and grammatically parsed, and a random sample has been annotated for the detection of narratives. In this presentation, I will analyze a smaller collection of examples that share linguistic markers indicating that the story told is something that the interviewee remembers in addition to the actual topic or interviewer´s questions. My hypothesis is, that in these sidetrack stories the tellers communicate more spontaneously and less guided by the expectations and norms of narrating one’s political path – and thus they could bear potential for counter-narratives. In my analysis, I will compare features of countering acts that can be identified in the examples and experiment if the recurring features discovered could be interpreted as signposts for counter-narratives.

Verbalizing the General. Linguistic Features of Master Narratives in Fictional and Actual Speech

Dr. Anna Kuutsa Tampere University

The study of master and counter-narratives has emphasized the analysis and theoretical discussion about counter narratives (see Bamberg & Andrews 2004, eds.; Lueg & Wolff Lundholt 2020, eds.). Utilizing the concept of master narrative into narrative analysis has been challenging, since narrative itself can be seen as an explanation of the unexpected (see Bruner 1990). Therefore, the construction, verbalization and representation of the dominant narratives have been less discussed. In the proposed presentation, I will discuss the linguistic and narrative features through which fictional dialogue can represent culturally shared and dominant narratives. In addition, I will juxtapose these fictional examples with excerpts from real-life speech. The non-fictional examples originate from the corpus of the official records of Finnish parliamentary plenary sessions currently analyzed in the ongoing Political Temporalities -project. Drawing on Fludernik’s (1993) influential study on the schematic nature of fictional discourse and pronoun alternation in fictional and real-life conversational narratives (Mildorf 2016; Fludernik 1996), I will examine how fictional and actual speech can verbalize and utilize master narratives through the use of generic pronouns, anonymous speech and culturally canonized phrases. The analysis examines how master narratives can represent societal issues in fiction as well as serve as a rhetorical mean in real-life political debate.

Location | AUP: C-101
Session Chair | Maria I Medved, The American University of Paris

Joseph Boyden’s Narratives as Recreation of the First Nations of Canada’s Context in Colonial Ambiguity

Dr. Oksana Shostak Université Paris Cité

The historical novel genre is considered to be the most dependent upon the official and literary ideology. Historiosophy is usually tasked with comprehending the empirical knowledge gained from historiographical national sources. The historiographical novel breaks free from the history of the dominant race, class, or culture and draws attention to the unwritten histories of minorities, thus the writer seeks to break away from a limited understanding of history. These are the tasks outlined in Orenda (2013) by Joseph Boyden, one of the most read novel in Canada in 2014. Using the literary images the writer created an explination for historiosophical basis of modern Canada, which confirmed that narrativity was weakened in official history, but nowadays it becomes a powerful tool in the historiographical truth searching. In Boyden’s narrative the confrontation and mutual reflection of two different worlds - the indigenous and European ones are presented in the historical retrospective of 17th century. The standpoints are submitted from the perspective of a modern ethnic minority. The author seeks to reveal the civilization place as well as the space of the First Nations (in the specific case of the Mohawk and Huron) in the history of the formation of statehood in Canada. The purpose of the novel is not tuned for creation of a romanticized past, a kind of home for the ‘noble savage’. J. Boyden recreates the complex moments of Indian history associated with the territory to the north of modern Toronto, exploring the preconditions for modern Quebec. Individual versions of Canadian history as a new trend of historicism in literary creativity has been developed by Boyden and with it a new view of the First Nations people has been formed, which breaks down the stereotypes that have been established over the previous centuries.

“Mixed in the Spring of Our Existence”: Storyworld Ethics in Louise Erdrich’s Plague of Doves

Dr. Corinne Bancroft University of Victoria

Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich’s novel Plague of Doves (2008) tests the possibility of reconciliation for the harms of settler-colonialism. As a braided narrative, the novel twines together two Indigenous and two settler character-narrators who tell distinct stories that seem to unfold in disparate worlds shaped by the divergent, even incompatible stories each speaker has heard about the history of the territory they cohabit. These dichotomous worldviews lead to conflicting ethical claims creating a complicated knot that cannot be unraveled. As one character puts it, “Now that some of us have mixed in the spring of our existence both guilt and victim, there is no unraveling the rope” (243). By tying these strands together in the same “spring” or storyworld, Erdrich demands that readers think them together rather than using one to undercut the other. While traditional approaches to narrative ethics tend to focus on the relationship among the characters or between the narrator/author and narratee/readers (Booth [1961, 1988], Newton [1995], Phelan [2005]), this analysis reveals that the storyworld itself has a significant ethical dimension. The four protagonists are only weakly connected on a plot level (with the notable exception of an affair), but their various narrative threads get tangled and knotted precisely because they take place in the same storyworld. Drawing on Christopher González (2017), Malcah Effron, Margarida McMurry, Virginia Pignagnoli (2019), and Erin James (2022), I argue that the different values, ethics, and assumptions implicit in each narrator’s worldview accrue over the course of the novel creating a complicated moral landscape. The ethical understanding that emerges in one narrative strand influences how we interpret the next even when there is no tension between the two narrators. Erdrich creates an ethical framework that invites readers to countenance the way different worldviews work and to develop an accountability for historical violence.

Victim and Victimizer: Women’s Narratives of Captivity in Colonial America

Maria-Simona Bica West University of Timișoara

This research aims to explore texts authored by women during periods of conflict, focusing particularly on the narratives that emerge from encounters between white settlers and Indigenous people of America. This study discusses the political implications of women’s captivity narratives from the 17th and 18th centuries, highlighting both the similarities and differences in their portrayals of conflict. Specifically, it analyzes A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (published in 1682), Narrative of the Captivity of Elizabeth Hanson (published in 1728), and A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (published in 1824). By examining these texts, the research aims to reveal how captivity narratives not only reflect the deeply disturbing individual experiences in times of conflict but also serve as a form of propaganda, shaping societal perceptions of Indigenous people and colonial authority. The findings suggest that these texts function as vehicles for ideological messaging that influences public sentiment, reinforcing the image of Indigenous people as "savages." Moreover, the gender of the storyteller plays an important role in these narratives, as the public is more prone to empathize with the female victim. As a result, the narratives take on a more emotional form rather than a historically objective one. This raises important questions regarding the ethics of narrative construction and its power to transform perceptions of reality.

Location | AUP: Q-801
Session Chair | Brian Schiff, The American University of Paris

The Forms of Hope in Climate Fiction and Beyond

Prof. Marco Caracciolo Ghent University

The imaginary of climate crisis is often split between doom-and-gloom scenarios and techno-optimistic visions of a future made sustainable by renewable energies, carbon capture, and so on. While one may be tempted to align "hope" with the latter, more upbeat outlook, this paper's starting point is the idea that hope is actually the result of an emotional dynamic that brings together concern and a more positive sense of futurity. Put more simply, there is no hope without awareness of adverse--and in some cases even catastrophic--outcomes. My main inspiration for this view is work on hope (in general, and in relation to ecological questions specifically) by authors including Jonathan Lear, Panu Pihkala, Adrienne Martin, and others. Against this background, my paper argues that narrative, as a practice involving the segmentation and articulation of time, is ideally positioned to stage this dynamic of concern and open futurity through formal means. I discuss examples from contemporary climate fiction (including Briohny Doyle's The Island Will Sink and Jenny Offill's Weather) where, despite a bleak outlook, concern and positive futurity are woven together in readers' engagement with the protagonists. This requires a reading strategy that combines sympathy and a more distanced stance on the characters' material or moral shortcomings. The paper concludes by asking how the practices that surround narrative (in fiction as well as factual storytelling) may be able to foster this type of engagement with characters--and the hopeful dynamic that results from it.

Narrative Examples of Survival Strategies as Responses to the Climate Crisis and Digitalisation

Prof. Nicole Brandstetter Hochschule München

Climate crisis and disruptive transformation due to digitalisation represent enormous challenges for societies. Narratives of the past decade have increasingly explored the consequences not only for societal norms but also for individual survival strategies. This talk shall explore those strategies with the help of two novels, J. Lanchester’s The Wall (2019) and T.C. Boyle’s Blue Skies (2023). In both novels, the protagonists have to deal with the uncertainty that predominantly shapes their everyday lives as well as with the reversal of power structures as people have to adapt to their natural surroundings being out of control Their resilience is nourished by adaptability and ignorance but cannot overcome the apocalypse they are confronted with. In The Wall, the first-person narrator Kavanagh defends the Wall against the “Others“ in a future setting. The world has undergone a deep transformation due to Brexit, climate change and migration. The tedious work on the Wall represents a conglomerate of existential Kafkaesque crisis and Orwellian surveillance also mirrored in the aesthetic writing. The strategy of exclusion of others by the Wall as well as of inclusion of the own people by chipping them sets clear lines of difference vs. belonging is presented as a strategy of survival – people have adapted to the situation ignoring the implications on purpose. The society is deeply perturbed and corrupt, ignorant and without ethical codes. In Blue Skies, the people also struggle with the consequences of the climate crisis. The protagonists relentlessly try to adapt their way of life to the apocalyptic catastrophe that challenges their lives in all aspects. Devastating fires and incessant rain, fatal diseases and the extinction of species threaten humanity. In this hopeless situation, the protagonists try to develop resilience by adapting their way of life but fail miserably in various aspects: personally, interpersonally, and societally.

“The Obligatory Note of Hope”: Polarities of Hope and Despair in Climate Change Narratives across Media

Xanthe Amanda Muston University of New South Wales

It is well understood that both within and beyond the academy, individuals and groups make the same appeal to the importance of narrative as an invaluable tool to communicate complex phenomena in clear and compelling ways. This is particularly the case with the climate crisis where, as the need to mitigate its effects becomes increasingly urgent, narrative is turned to more than ever before: novelists use fictional narratives to imagine the dysphoric worlds of a climate in catastrophic flux, social media activists instrumentalise narrative frames to evoke the emotions of outrage they view as necessary for collective action, and climate policy is predicated upon the assumption that narrative is essential for communicating complicated policies in a persuasive manner. What is less understood is how this emplotment of climate change is framed by the language of genre, where the symbolic modalities of tragedy and satire, dystopia and utopia, shape our understanding of the current crisis. This paper will argue that our habit of narrativising information through generic frames evokes a narrowed way to communicate ecological breakdown as well as imagine possible worlds that deviate from the plots depicted by the narrative arcs of certain genres. By proposing a transdisciplinary econarratological approach to the study of narrative and climate, I explore how frames such as ‘apocalyptic doom’ and blinkered ‘techno-optimism’ are mobilised across fictional and factual forms of narrative, from ‘cli-fi’ literature to news journalism, IPCC reports, and social media posts. Ultimately, this paper proposes the need for climate change communicators to navigate between the polarities of generic extremes. It is only by rejecting the fatalist rhetoric of the tragedy frame and the idealistic recourse to what author Jenny Offill calls the “obligatory note of hope” that we might find a more effective way to frame the current crisis we collectively face.

Location | AUP: Q-604
Session Chair | Linda Martz, The American University of Paris

Exploring Community Mobility and Participation of Persons with Disabilities: A Narrative-in-Action Inquiry Involving South Africa Sweden and Switzerland

Clémence Orain Karolinska Institutet, Huddinge, Isabel Margot-Cattin University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland (HES-SO), Staffan Josephsson Karolinska Institutet, Huddinge

Background: Persons with disabilities face significant barriers to community participation due to restrictions in environment, limited access to transportation, and societal representations leading to discrimination. These barriers hinder their ability to engage in meaningful activities outside their home. The concept of “emplacement” highlights the importance of context in understanding how mobility and participation are experienced, these activities being deeply embedded in specific contexts. Narrative inquiry holds the potential to bridge individual stories of mobility and societal narratives about discrimination. Purpose: Using a multiple-country narrative approach, this study explores how the emplaced qualities of community mobility and participation are used and experienced by persons with disabilities. Methods: This study is an in-depth, narrative-in-action inquiry of the lived experiences of persons with disabilities as they go out-and-about in significant places in different cultural and geographical contexts (South Africa, Sweden, and Switzerland). Data is collected through narrative mobile interviews and observations. Purposeful sampling is estimated 2 to 3 participants from each country. Interviews are recorded and transcribed, and observations yield fieldnotes. A narrative analysis, using a recursive emplotment process, is applied. Expected Findings: This presentation will share insights into the implications of narrative inquiry in informing inclusive policies and offer preliminary observations and reflections on capturing emplaced experiences of mobility and participation. This multi-country narrative research involves advantages and challenges that will be discussed, particularly regarding cross-country comparisons and coordinating data collection among different academic teams. Future Perspectives: This research is the first study in a series aimed at understanding community mobility for persons with disabilities across various contexts. The overall aim is to inform public policies to promote inclusive mobility and reduce disparities in community participation. The presentation seeks feedback from fellow researchers on the narrative inquiry process and potential areas of exploration, enriching the study with diverse perspectives.

Physical Disability and Body Image: A Qualitative Study Using the Mirror Interview

Edo Gur, Gabriela Bronfman The New School for Social Research, Dr. Howard Steele The New School for Social Research, Dr. Miriam Steele The New School for Social Research

The purpose of this qualitative study is to explore the personal narratives of people with physical disabilities (PWPD) as they reflect on their bodies when viewing their own image in the mirror. This study is informed by the need to enhance the current psychological research surrounding the body, as it is predominantly focused on able bodies (Ben-Tovim & Walker 1995; Hammar et al., 2009; Hwang et al., 2009; Moin et al., 2009). Using the Mirror Interview (MI), developed by Kernberg and colleagues (2006), 10 participants who exhibit different physical disabilities answer questions that highlight levels of body appreciation, parental representation, and body integration. The interviews were video recorded, transcribed, and then used for thematic analysis (TA). Inductive TA generated five interrelated themes in relation to these questions: (1) Parental/other disability acceptance/rejection, (2) Internal disability integration/disintegration, (3) The effect of the self-image, (4) Choice/control, and (5) Body ideals. Findings suggest the importance of investigating the psychological processes underlying distinct features of the disability experience, especially early experiences with caregivers. Furthermore, the results highlight the need for further inclusion of PWPD in psychological research and the need to clinically focus on psychological processes and personal narratives, specifically relating to the body, when working with PWPD.

Location | AUP: Q-704
Session Chairs | Mohamedou Ould Slahi-Houbeini, NITE/De Balie and Alexandra S Moore, Binghamton University

In the effort to preserve the political value of disparate narratives, their ability to spark dialogue and debate, this panel thinks about the emphasis on and resistance to collective narration that informs discussions of migrant and refugee camps. The papers explore multi-modal and multi-genre storytelling that exposes the limitations of arguments that, first, the camp is a paradigmatic trope of contemporary life and, second, that camps have a unitary narrative. Across the three papers, we analyze how disparate narratives and technologies dissolve the borders of the camp with mixed results. We attend particularly to how political agency is constructed and distributed through different narratives. Beyond issues of representation, the papers explore audience reception and the constraints of different narrative genres.

Refugee Camps as Disparate Narrative Constructs

Prof. Eleni Coundouriotis University of Connecticut

Michel Agier’s influential views on story, narration, and the camp posit the camp as a threshold to a new sociality produced by the refugees’ storytelling. According to Agier, refugees enter the camp testifying of their “exodus” from war. Their stories echo one another and produce the effects of a collective voice, making the refugees’ political participation possible. This paper seeks to challenge Agier’s assumptions by showing that the narratives of exodus are “disparate” and only cohere in the way he suggests through intentional shaping. Describing the emergence of a collective narrative as an organic process elides the historical contestations that play out over such narratives and contributes to a false sense that the camp has a stable definition. The paper explores what is a camp through the disparate narratives that account for its varied instantiations. It draws from anthropology, journalism, and literature.

“Desert Dumps,” the Anti-camp, and Collective Storytelling in the Human Rights Report

Prof. Alexandra S. Moore Binghamton University

On May 21, 2024, the collaborative journalism agency Lighthouse released “Desert Dumps,” its starkly named report about EU support, logistics, and financing for clandestine operations in North Africa that “dump tens of thousands of Black people in the desert…to prevent them from coming to the EU.” “Desert Dumps” chronicles the apprehension of migrants based on the color of their skin and country of origin and their subsequent transport to border zones, “often arid desert areas…[where] they are left without any assistance, water or food, leaving them at risk of kidnapping, extortion, torture, sexual violence, and, in the worst instances, death.” As a kind of anti-camp that nonetheless requires camping for survival, desert dumps complicate our understanding of the camp in border control regimes. This paper is situated in conversation with scholarship about the human rights report as genre (e.g., Dudai, Wilson) and with theories of the Wastocene. The paper centers on the idea of the Wastocene as “a storytelling dispositif[,]…[that] has the power to speak the truth, taking injustices not as almost invisible side effects but as the centerpiece of a system that produces wealth and security through the othering of those who must be excluded.” On the one hand, the Desert Dumps report offers a kind of collective, polyvocal, multi-modal storytelling that might counter such “toxic narratives.” On the other hand, the genre of the human rights report itself is deeply implicated in the same global political and economic relationships that undergird the desert dumps themselves. Thus, this paper asks how and to what extent the report—in form and function—might repoliticize, rehumanize, and resituate the politics of abandonment in material time and space, and, in so doing, also reanimate the north African deserts in their local eco-social contexts.

Virtual Camps: empathy Machines and the End(s) of Narrative

Prof. Joesph R. Slaughter Columbia University

At Davos, in 2015, The UN Virtual Reality Project released its first production, Clouds over Sidra, a joint-effort with UNICEF, Samsung, and a Hollywood VR production company. Clouds over Sidra immersed viewers in the Za’atari Refugee Camp in northern Jordan, which housed more than 80,000 displaced Syrians. Thin on narrative, the VR film (and technology) was hyped by its creators as “the ultimate empathy machine,” with the “potential to actually change the world”: “through this machine we become more compassionate, we become more empathetic, and we become more connected. And ultimately, we become more human” (Milk 2015). The effort to automate empathy through simulated visceral, rather than narrative or imaginative, experience with others’ suffering has expanded with other productions that enable viewers to step into the virtual shoes, if only for a few minutes, of the despised and dispossessed. While this humanitarian effort is undertaken in pursuit of empathy, the medium actually betrays a deep distrust of narrative and empathy, of the human itself, and of the capacity to care about other human beings.

Location | AUP: C-505

Chair | Anne Bradley, Toi Ohomai Institute of Technology

Imagined Escapes: Playing with Narratives

Niru Sankhala Duquesne University, Promina Shrestha Duquesne University

“The same message filters through the many pages and memories: the play activities made life's continuation possible for a little while longer by making the camps, ghettos, and the cramped hideouts somewhat more bearable. These subconscious needs for ludic experience, not always amenable to adult logic and rationalization, manifested themselves on many levels and forms”. (Eisen, 1990) Children played during the world wars; they played in ghettos and concentration camps. They also play in the backdrop of urban violence and gang warfare. Narratives are also one way of playing with experiences, reality, and fantasy. Bringing together the constructs of narratives and playing the present research looks at narratives authored by individuals who have spent a significant time of their childhood surrounded by violent conflicts. Both published memoirs and picture books are used to locate playful themes. The central aim of the present research is to elucidate the birth of creativity on the infertile grounds of political conflict. In the same spirit, the paper also showcases how playfulness can be incorporated into the writing of research papers. We exemplify this by using graphics and illustrations. The researchers bring together expertise from psychology, art, and graphic design. The goal of this collaboration is to highlight how we can widen public engagement and improve the ability of research to influence public policy using creative methods of doing research.

Being Startled and Astonished: Recognition and Reciprocity in Narrative Inquiry

Dr. Jean Clandinin University of Alberta, Dr. Vera Caine University of Victoria, Dr. Bodil Blix Arctic University of Norway, Dr. Pam Steeves University of Alberta

Working with people who are structurally marginalized and often experience disparate worlds, such as refugee populations, Indigenous youth, and older adults, we have attended to ideas of reciprocity and respect as situated within the relational ontology of narrative inquiry. In 2024 we wrote “The entanglements of reciprocity within a relational ontology are inextricably linked to recognition”. In this paper, we wonder about these entanglements by tracing experiences across time, in diverse places, and social contexts, to unpack what we mean by recognition. For instance, drawing a multiyear study alongside refugee families, we were enfolded in relationships that brought us to shared dinners and family events. Through these intensive relationships we were attentive to those moments where we were challenged to recognise the other. Thinking with our experiences opens a space for astonishment that comes with recognition rather than answers and certainties about who we are in relation. Recognition is necessary to compose spaces where reciprocity can live in our ordinary interactions with others. Reciprocity holds the potential to change who we, and those with whom we work are, if we recognise the other and ourselves. Narrative inquirers understand that they are complicit and implicated in the experiences of others, both in larger narratives and in the day to day living alongside participants. In each way, we become part of their stories, and they become part of ours. If we hold ourselves outside of participants’ experiences, and they are outside of ours, there is little possibility for reciprocity. We inquire into moments where we recognize our own storied experiences as interwoven with participants and, in those moments of recognition, sense the possibilities of reciprocity across disparate worlds.

Living and Learning from Experiences with Ethics

Shamini Omnes Robert Gordon University

As a doctoral student who experienced unsteady housing during my undergraduate studies and as a person who worked in policy and practice settings with vulnerable people, I am curious about experiences of repeat homelessness among students attending Scottish universities and how it shapes their experiences as students. Ethics lives at the heart of narrative inquiry through ‘relational responsibility’ (Caine et al. 2019) which Clandinin et al. (2018) highlights a relational and contextual approach. In pursuing ethical approval for my narrative inquiry doctoral research, I confronted puzzling questions such as a request for a lone interview plan. A lone interview plan could be seen “as a physical object between us [and could create] a relational place in a different way” (Caine et al. 2022, p.45). A lone interview plan could negate possibilities for reciprocity as it enforces unequal power between researcher and participant (Blix et al. 2024). Narrative inquirers understand individual experiences as shaped, expressed, and enacted through institutional narratives (Clandinin et al. 2007). Furthermore, there are short- and long-term responsibilities marked by responsiveness (Clandinin et al. 2016) and transactions (Currie et al. 2024). The request for a lone interview plan raises other questions for narrative inquirers. Is there an assumption that those who are named as vulnerable such as students experiencing repeat homelessness are dangerous to researchers in ways that require additional protection? Can institutions listen to researchers who understand ethics in different ways just as researchers ‘listen deeply’ (Wallace and Lovell, 2009) with participants through relational responsibility? From challenging contradictions between institutional demands and relational ethics, I write about the right, authority, entitlement and experiences which reminds me to ‘remain awake to tensions and dilemmas within the work’ (Josselson 2007, p.538). Can it be about moving forward in new practice than recovering from challenging experiences in different realities?

Location | AUP: Q-A101
Session Chairs | Anene Ejikeme, Trinity University and Precious Stone, Community College of Baltimore County

"Until the lion tells the tale of the hunt, the hunter will always be victorious.” This well-known African proverb recognizes the truth of different perspectives. The path toward “truth” goes through the historical narratives of the events that have disrupted communal life. Who controls the narratives and who has access to these narratives determines whether ethnic, religious, and political divisions will be reconciled. This panel investigates the ways in which in Bosnia, the United States, Ethiopia and Italy, and Rwanda discourses affect how communities build resilience in post-traumatic contexts.

Bosnian Genocide: A Divergent Legal and Political Narrative

Dr. Rosa Aloisi Trinity University, Prof. Hikmet Karčić University of Sarajevo

In the past 30 years international criminal trials, decisions of the International Court of Justice, and national prosecutions within Bosnia and Herzegovina have definitively established that in 1995 the massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica amounted to the crime of genocide. While the decisions handed down by these courts have assigned different degrees of responsibility to the individuals or the Serbian government involved in the implementation of the genocidal campaign, the narrative delivered by the judges has crystalized the magnitude of the atrocities committed. Beyond the legalistic goals of the courts, those judgments and decisions represent a ‘memorial of words’ that have given to the survivors and the families of the victims the right to an uncontested space of commemoration and gathering. Yet, genocide denial, glorification of war criminals, and harassment of Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina is widespread. Particularly pervasive during commemorating events, especially at the annual July gatherings in Srebrenica, to remember the victims of the Bosnian Serb army campaign in 1995, genocide denial functions as a counter-narrative to the established legal truth and as the reframing of ‘justice’ in ‘legalized persecution’ of the Bosnian Serbs at the hands of the international and national legal systems. This paper seeks to provide a systematic analysis of the legal and political narrative built since the first cases about genocide were decided by courts. In particular, the paper will create a dialogue between decisions and political reactions as we try to understand how leaders shape the counter-narrative to the established legal truth and exploit it to create the myth of victimhood.

Kwibuka in Rwanda: Analysis of National Genocide Narratives

Dr. Anene Ejikeme Trinity University, Dr. Sarah Pinnock Trinity University

History has been rife with mass killings and even genocides, the Holocaust the best-known. The 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi is singular in the relatively short space of time in which the killings occurred. In only a hundred days, Rwanda was the site of extreme mass violence in which hundreds of thousands of people were murdered with dead bodies left in homes and churches, streets and bushes, until the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) ended the genocide. Today, Rwanda is a premier destination for tourists and conferences from around the continent and overseas. While Rwanda has successfully remade its image, every year the events of 1994 are recalled at Kwibuka with a formal opening event held in Kigali at the Genocide Memorial on April 7.

Testimonies by survivors are a constant as is the government-sanctioned official narrative of Rwandan history. Our paper will report on three visits to Rwanda (2017, 2023, 2024) to witness Kwibuka events and visit genocide memorials. We analyze the ways in which the government deploys various types of narratives (testimonies, regional and national gatherings, memorials, and documentation of artifacts) to inform and educate its citizens who, increasingly, were born after 1994. Kwibuka memorial events and gatherings of the bereaved at mass graves are directed towards all Rwandans. However, the silence around identity in present day Rwanda exists in tension with narratives of violence and the trauma of the population: they do not make references to ethnic identity, however they denounce ethnic hatred. Kwibuka events are intended to educate, remember, and foster national unity. They are guided closely by government directives and highly educated urban leadership. We ask the question: To what extent is the official slogan of Kwibuka -- Remember. Unite. Renew -- realized?

Reframing Reality: Narratives and Representations

Dr. Daniela Ricci Université de Paris-Nanterre

Narratives shape our imaginations and the world. It has become increasingly urgent to share stories that can broaden our perspectives on history and the contemporary world, which is constantly and rapidly evolving. This paper will examine how Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima, who resides in the United States, and Italo-Ethiopian writer Maria Viarengo narrate a part of the tragic history shared between Ethiopia and Italy. For example, the documentary Adwa. An African Victory by Haile Gerima not only recounts the historical battle—often portrayed in Europe as the "defeat of Adwa"—but also highlights the significant cultural heritage reflected in the continent's folkloric tales. Similarly, Maria Abebu Viarengo's novel Nel marsupio della storia offers a unique perspective on three generations of Italians in Ethiopia, weaving personal family stories into the larger History. These artistic narratives enrich our understanding of the contemporary world. Despite their vastly different lived experiences and positionalities, both operate within the diasporic space. This enables them to adopt critical perspectives and empowers them to construct unconventional narratives that blend personal experience with sociocultural and historical reflections. The study aims to explore how their nonlinear, creative, plural, polyphonic, and multilingual storytelling styles contribute to restoring truths that have long been silenced.

Adjusting the Narrative: Reflections on the Cultural Resilience of African American Names

Prof. Precious Stone Community College of Baltimore County

Few descriptors are more central to a person’s humanity and identity than one’s name. During the centuries-long period of slavery in the United States, people of African descent were systematically denied the ability to retain and pass on various connections to their African heritage, including names. This, along with prohibitions against the use of native languages and other practices, led to enslaved Africans and African Americans’ experiencing a tremendous disconnect from their cultural origins. The result was a form of cultural genocide. When slavery ended, African Americans had lost key connections to original family names and many aspects of their cultural heritage. Despite these losses, African Americans have shown great cultural resilience, including certain naming practices. As someone with an unusual name, I pay attention to unique African American names, particularly those that have become more common in the last five decades or so. These are names that are neither fully Anglo/European nor mainstream American. Often these names are not African in origin either. Do these names represent an effort to reject and replace Euro-centric names in favor of something more reflective of an African American sensibility and aesthetic? Further, do these unique names diminish some of the cultural dissonance that accompanies African descended people’s carrying European surnames? This paper explores the creativity involved with some African American naming practices and includes insights from my video Name Journey, a creative and personal reflection on my own name. Informed by recent scholarship and years of related work with communication students, this paper also discusses perceptions of African American names and their representations in popular culture. Finally, this paper highlights culturally creative resilience as a response to cultural decimation.