2024-03-28T22:20:59Z
http://ro.uow.edu.au/do/oai/
oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1000
2011-01-20T22:13:26Z
publication:assh
publication:currentnarratives
publication:journal_articles
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Integrating Image and Text: Where one story ends, another begins
Lysaght, Pauline
Brown, Ian
Westbrook, Roslyn
Stories may be read independently through images or text but their power to convey the experiences of others can be much greater when one provides a context for interpreting the other. Photographs and written responses provided by children and young people through their participation in an international project, Voices of Children, attest to the many layers of meaning that can be gained through the intersections of images and text. Playful images that present pictures of an idealised childhood are often at odds with the fear and distress that is conveyed through the written word. On the other hand, the aspirations and ambitions of young people as they write about their hopes for the future stand in contrast to the images that reflect the context in which their lives are lived. Reading across images and text is necessary if we are to gain an understanding of the lives of others.
2009-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss1/1
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1000/viewcontent/1.pdf
Current Narratives
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oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1006
2011-01-20T22:54:04Z
publication:assh
publication:currentnarratives
publication:journal_articles
publication:document_types
“I’m crying too ... help, what do I do?” – Unexpected encounters experienced by a first time researcher
Tanner, Kathleen
Being a first time researcher conducting semi-structured conversational interviews for a PhD, I thought I was prepared for any story or discussion that would occur. My participants were adults who have dyslexia and I was asking them to recall their educational experiences, and how they perceive them to have impacted on their life choices. Having already established a relationship with the selected participants in a previous context as their lecturer, nobody had prepared me for the emotional roller coaster I was about to ride during the interview process as an ‘insider’. I have identified five unexpected types of encounters that occurred in the course of the interviews that made me more of an active participant than an observer in their life stories and made me question my role in the research process. These encounters I have identified as (1) The Sad encounter; (2) The Unexpected Proximity encounter; (3) The Language Processing encounter; (4) The Empathetic encounter; and (5) The Boy Scout – Be Prepared Encounter. On reflection and analysis of the interviews these encounters have shaped the responses not only of the participants but also of myself. How has this occurred and how have the encounters influenced and shaped the responses of the participants? More importantly, as the researcher, whose story is really in my head during the interviews? Will my personal interactions and stories influence the final outcome in terms of the representations of their stories?
2009-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss1/7
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1006/viewcontent/Tanner.pdf
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oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1002
2011-01-20T22:51:13Z
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publication:currentnarratives
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Life is a tapestry: a cautionary metaphor
de Carteret, Phoenix
This paper draws from two research projects where the power of dominant discourses to influence storytelling was evident. Drawing on examples from story workshops central to the research, I discuss my use of collective biography to facilitate the re/membering of embodied experiences. While stories give access to the complex nuances of personal experience that give rise to the metaphor ‘life is a tapestry’, healthy subjectivity is often measured by the understanding of the self as coherent and whole. For this reason the metaphor provides a caution – stories are not innocent, naïve representations of lived experience but are shaped to coherence by narratives that may elide transgressive experiences. Dominant socio/cultural discourses and narratives can colonise imagination and memory to effectively silence or sideline the complication of ambiguities and ambivalences.The combination of a collaborative storytelling process and the use of place as a framework facilitated diverse stories. The knots and tangles of disparate experiences sustain the breath of life in narrative representations of the women’s lives. The resulting peripheral view of dominant storylines is a useful, if not a necessary aspect of personal narratives as research data.
2009-01-01T08:00:00Z
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss1/3
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1002/viewcontent/1.pdf
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oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1005
2011-01-20T22:23:02Z
publication:assh
publication:currentnarratives
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Unreliable narration in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho: Interaction between narrative form and thematic content
Phillips, Jennifer
In this paper I analyse the narrative technique of unreliable narration in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991). Critics have been split about the reliability of Patrick Bateman, the novel’s gruesome narrator-protagonist. Using a new model for the detection of unreliable narration, I show that textual signs indicate that Patrick Bateman can be interpreted as an unreliable narrator. This paper reconciles two critical debates: (1) the aforementioned debate surrounding American Psycho, and (2) the debate surrounding the concept of unreliable narration itself. I show that my new model provides a solution to the weaknesses which have been identified in the rhetorical and cognitive models previously used to detect unreliable narration. Specifically, this new model reconciles the problematic reliance on the implied author in the rhetorical model, and the inconsistency of textual signs which is a weakness of the cognitive approach. In conclusion, I demonstrate how the technique of unreliable narration has undergone a paradigm shift towards a greater historical and cultural interaction with historical and cultural contexts. The example of American Psycho will be used to demonstrate the interaction between the narrative form of unreliable narration and thematic content.
2009-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss1/6
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1005/viewcontent/Phillips.pdf
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oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1001
2011-01-20T22:50:28Z
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publication:currentnarratives
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Appealing for help: A reflection on interpellation and intertextuality in the visual narrative of an Australian welfare campaign poster
Crinall, Karen
We know the world, our world, through stories (Turner 1988: 68). Stories in childhood, whether verbal or written, are inevitably accompanied by visual language forms. This might be the storyteller’s body or a puppet performing mime and gesture; it may be pictures in storybooks, or the endless hybrid combinations of these in film and the electronic media. Even a single photograph can perform in a narrative way: “A picture of a forest tells implicitly of trees growing from seedlings and shedding leaves; and a picture of a house implies that trees were cut for it and that its roof will soon leak. (Goodman 1981:111)” Within a story–making activity, however, the visual image is not a sole performer; it is a participant in an intertextual web of discursive forms and endless meaning-making exercises. It is a complex, fluid experience (Belova 2006). The aim of this paper is to raise some questions about how narrative processes might operate in and through visual texts designed to communicate social injustice and elicit emotional and moral response, such as social documentary photographs and fundraising campaign posters. Using the example of an Australian Salvation Army Red Shield Appeal poster, the paper reflects on how the engaged viewer might be implicated as both character and author in the resonance between the meta–narratives and personal stories from their own life–world and the meanings arising from the poster’s text. In doing so, concepts of interpellation and intertextuality help explain some of the processes which position and compel viewers to respond, and also how they contribute to identifying meanings which reach beyond commonly received readings.
2009-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss1/2
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1001/viewcontent/1.pdf
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oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1003
2011-01-20T22:14:06Z
publication:assh
publication:currentnarratives
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Externalising stories: When research becomes therapy
Lysaght, Pauline
Stories can be expressed in a variety of different ways: they may involve oral or written accounts of experiences or they may exist in visual form. Regardless of the medium, however, the story resides in a space that is external to the teller of the tale and accessible to interpretation by others. According to White (2007), this externalised space can become a productive site for collaboration between a therapist and client, resulting in therapeutic value for the storyteller. Researchers involved in narrative inquiry also negotiate this space as they encourage participants to tell their stories, blurring the boundaries between research and therapy. An awareness of the challenges faced by participants and the ability to respond sensitively and appropriately is necessary as the transition from research to therapy (and back again) occurs.
2009-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss1/4
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1003/viewcontent/Lysaght_1.pdf
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oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1004
2011-01-20T22:52:12Z
publication:assh
publication:currentnarratives
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Negotiating professional identities: dominant and contesting narratives in medical students’ longitudinal audio diaries
Monrouxe, Lynn V.
The successful development of a professional identity is paramount to becoming a successful doctor. This study investigates medical students’ professional identity formation over time through the analysis of their narrative accounts of events recorded during their first two years of medical school using longitudinal audio diaries. The data was analysed for underlying narrative plotlines. Six dominant discourses from societal narratives about doctors and medicine were found within the students’ narratives: The Privilege narrative, the Gratitude narrative, the Certainty of Medicine narrative, the Good Doctor narrative, the Healing Doctor narrative, and the Detached Doctor narrative. A further two narrative plotlines were identified as emerging narratives that contest master narratives and which are frequently found in the current culture within a modern medical school: the Informed Servant narrative and the Uncertainty of Medicine narrative. Following an overview of these narrative plotlines identified within medical students’ audio diaries, a single event narrative is presented in full, in order to provide a deeper understanding of how these are played out as medical students try to make sense of the events they experience and of their own development as a doctor.
2009-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss1/5
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1004/viewcontent/Monrouxe_1.pdf
Current Narratives
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oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1007
2011-08-12T00:10:56Z
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Current Narratives 2 : Contents
Edwards, Helen
Maple, Myfanwy
Embracing Multiple Dimension - Papers from the 2nd Australasian Conference on Narrative Inquiry, University of New England, 1213 July 2009. Guest Editors: Helen Edwards and Myfanwy Maple. This conference explored the depth and breadth of the many different voices and stories of Narrative Inquiry research. The conference covered a broad range of themes related to aspects of methodology and creative applications of this approach, including but not limited to: * Gender, * Indigenous Research, * Health and Social Care, * Education, * Humanities, * Ethics and * Methodology and Analysis.
2010-01-01T08:00:00Z
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss2/1
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1007/viewcontent/ContentsCN2.pdf
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oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1012
2011-01-20T22:44:22Z
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publication:currentnarratives
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Using narrative ideas to learn about mental illness in the classroom
Morrison, Paul
Narrative ideas provide an interesting basis for teaching health practitioners. The specific notions discussed here have been referred to as reflecting teams and as outsider-witness practices. These practices involve offering feedback in non-evaluative ways as a means of exploring new possibilities and perspectives for participants. The emphasis is on the acknowledgement and resonance that occurs when a story is told and witnessed through connecting the story with the lives of the listeners. This paper offers an example of classroom work linked to studentsʼ assignments that was designed to help general nursing students learn about people with mental health problems. The assignments focused on the media representations of people with a mental disorder. The notions of reflecting teams and outsider-witnesses were used in a classroom exercise to witness the stories described in the assignments. The primary aim was to help students to develop richer understandings of people with mental health problems that might lead to more caring ways of practising nursing. The reflecting team process helped students to go beyond the media stereotypes of mental illness and the people who suffer from it. It promoted new understandings of mental health consumers. The exercise enabled students to learn more about stigma and its undermining influence on peoplesʼ lives, to pay close attention to their own language use, and to commit to an enhanced advocate role for vulnerable groups in their care in future practice settings.
2010-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss2/6
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1012/viewcontent/morrison.pdf
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Mental illness
peer learning
narrative practice
oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1013
2011-01-20T22:46:33Z
publication:assh
publication:currentnarratives
publication:journal_articles
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Narrative research across cultures: Epistemological concerns in Africa
Muwanga-Zake, Johnnie W.F.
Narratives among Bantu in Africa are complicated by introductions of Western knowledge such as Information and Communications Technology. Narrative research suffers from and is challenged by the inferiorities due to colonialism and by African academia that rejects African Indigenous Knowledge Systems. Narrative research about Information and Communications Technology among Bantu requires a combination of Western methodology in the context of Afrocentric approaches, such as Ubuntu, to yield authentic and valid data. The challenge in introducing Western knowledge such as Information and Communications Technology into Bantu communities is to develop research hybrids that recognise Bantu Indigenous Knowledge Systems and use Western knowledge, with sensitivity to cultural biases. The other challenge is for Indigenous Africans to get involved in serious research to develop their own Information and Communications Technology.
2010-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss2/7
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1013/viewcontent/muwanga_zake.pdf
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Narrative research
Ubuntu
Afrocentricity
oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1008
2011-01-20T21:17:56Z
publication:assh
publication:currentnarratives
publication:journal_articles
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The active role of interpreters in narrative development in two cross-cultural studies in Thailand
Ditton, Mary
Lehane, Leigh
This paper details steps that were taken to ensure authentic narrative development in two cross-cultural studies of oppressed participants when interpreters were used actively in the research process. The recent interview-based studies of migrants from Burma living in Thailand highlighted some important issues of narrative methodology and analysis when interpreters were used not just as language translators but as cultural conduits. Recruitment, selection and training of the interpreters were important, and review of their translations was essential, in ensuring that the narratives were authentic. Throughout the interview-based cross-cultural studies we learned to understand the complexity of narrative methodology and analysis in exploited populations; appreciated that a ʻlife storyʼ is complex and determined and shaped by socioeconomic and political forces; and identified ways of optimising the active role of interpreters in narrative development in cross-cultural research.
2010-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss2/2
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1008/viewcontent/ditton.pdf
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oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1009
2011-01-20T21:20:44Z
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publication:currentnarratives
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From the periphery: Experiencing being an academic newcomer
Foskey, Ros
We humans share our life stories, as Bauer, McAdams and Pals (2008: 84) have suggested, ʻto try to derive some sense of unity and purpose out of what may otherwise appear to be an incomprehensible array of life events and experiencesʼ. Yet as Holtgraves and Kashima (2007: 91) have pointed out the sharing of stories is also an inherently communal event for what is shared and how it is expressed is also dependent upon the audience. The complex story I am sharing is centred on my experience of transition and change as a rural mid-life female and junior academic. I consider whether gender has been the most salient aspect of my identity in creating meaning within my story of transition and change. I explore how, for me, the performance of gender is intertwined with the performance of many other aspects of identity. I also describe how my relationships to, and in, place have influenced the story I share. The telling of my story was shaped with two audiences in mind. The first and more interactive audience occurred within the conference session. The second is an audience of academics interested in narrative theory and methodology who will silently read, and evaluate, my written story. Additional layers are inserted as I consider what must be left out of my narrative, as well as what I have chosen to include in order to portray the sense of unity, purpose and professionalism anticipated by an academic audience.
2010-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss2/3
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1009/viewcontent/foskey.pdf
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Narrative
story
gender
place
nostalgia
solastalgia
communities of practice
oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1010
2011-08-12T00:06:06Z
publication:assh
publication:currentnarratives
publication:journal_articles
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The lived experiences of families and individuals affected by haemophilia in relation to the availability of genetic testing services
Herbert, Dilinie
Cregan, Kate
Street, Alison
Bankier, Agnes
Komesaroff, Paul
Ill health may be related to a combination of genetic and environmental factors. Haemophilia, a rare congenital bleeding disorder, predominantly affects males and females may be identified as carriers. Genetic testing is available for individuals and family members who are interested to know their predisposition to the condition Thirty-nine members of a cohesive haemophilia community in Victoria, Australia, were interviewed about their attitudes towards genetic testing. The transcripts were analysed using thematic and narrative analysis techniques. The themes reflected the meanings people attached both to the disease itself and to the use of genetic testing to detect it. Narrative analysis was then employed to investigate these patterns of meaning further. We identified three typical narratives models within this haemophilia community: those of a male with haemophilia, of a female carrier and of a female non-obligate carrier (female without a familial predisposition to haemophilia). Close examination revealed a distinct pattern where aspects of the narratives tended to ʻclusterʼ according to thematic categories. While people in the haemophilia community are broadly in favour of genetic testing and genetic counselling, males with haemophilia have concerns that arise in relation to biological data banks, female carriers are cautious about antenatal testing and support greater communication of risk within families, and female non-obligate carriers are specially concerned about the safety of obstetric practices. The pattern of responses we have identified indicates that, despite the proliferation of issues and themes across the narratives, the number of possible personal narratives in which they are embedded is in fact quite limited. In this sense narrative analysis offers a supplementary dimension to thematic analysis in the elucidation of qualitative data.
2010-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss2/4
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1010/viewcontent/herbert.pdf
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Genetic testing
haemophilia
medical ethics
oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1011
2011-01-20T21:28:40Z
publication:assh
publication:currentnarratives
publication:journal_articles
publication:document_types
Analysing and representing narrative data: The long and winding road
Hunter, Sally V.
The analysis stage of a narrative inquiry project presents particular challenges. Finding the most suitable method of data analysis and presentation of the findings takes time and effort. It is important to make the most use of the data collected and to represent participantsʼ narratives in a coherent and meaningful way. This paper reviews some of the analytic lenses used in narrative inquiry and explores some of the difficulties in representing narrative data. Using an example from a PhD study conducted into childhood sexual abuse, the researcher describes reasons for choosing a social constructionist approach, the intertwined processes of data analysis and writing up the thesis. Several data analysis processes were explored the process of analysis of narrativebiographical interviews was chosen (Rosenthal and Fisher-Rosenthal 2004). The practicalities of finding a suitable approach to data analysis are described. How this process could have been improved is examined, with the wisdom of hindsight.
2010-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss2/5
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1011/viewcontent/hunter.pdf
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oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1014
2011-02-14T21:41:22Z
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publication:currentnarratives
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Narratives within narratives: One young Chinese– Australian boy’s exploration of ideas of difference, identity, and friendship through his drawings
Richards, Rosemary D.
Engaging in conversation with immigrant children about selfinitiated home art experiences can reveal valuable insights into the complex world of immigrant children, and what constitute their ʻfunds of knowledgeʼ (Moll 2000). Lee Wong, a five-year-old Chinese–Australian boy, is one of four young children involved in a visual ethnographic research project investigating childrenʼs art experiences in their homes, preschool and school. Lee is equipped with a digital camera and through regularly sharing and discussing his photographs Lee reveals how he explores complex ideas and experiences through his drawings. This article will share, in narrative form, one of Leeʼs graphic stories, ʻFarmer Bob: Bobʼs Farmʼ to demonstrate how he explores concepts of difference, identity and friendship. Employing a Vygotskian perspective I will discuss how this personal, semi-fictional story provides insights into Leeʼs creative processes (Moran and John-Steiner 2002), and how drawing and storytelling function as cultural tools and mediating devices (Vygotsky 1962/1934, 1978) for multilingual and immigrant children to make sense of their social and linguistic worlds.
2010-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss2/8
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1014/viewcontent/richards.pdf
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Narrative inquiry
childrenʼs drawing
Vygotsky
early childhood
immigrant children
ethnography
childrenʼs photography
funds of knowledge
oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1015
2011-08-11T23:57:31Z
publication:assh
publication:currentnarratives
publication:journal_articles
publication:document_types
Gimmelife: Listening for dialogic voices in the email self-narratives of gifted young adolescents
Dillon, Lisette
The art of listening for voices within narrative research is a positive endeavour that has specific value within research design and subsequent approaches to analysis. This paper details an investigation into the dialogic nature of voices among gifted young adolescents who engaged in the co-construction of email-generated self-narratives. Data are drawn from a study involving ten adolescents, aged between ten and fourteen years, diagnosed as gifted according to Australian guidelines. Individual participants were asked to produce self-managed journal entries written and sent as asynchronous emails to the researcher who was the sole recipient and respondent. Within this approach, specific techniques of listening were used to examine a series of multi-vocal narratives generated over a period of six months. This paper proposes that an adaptation of the everyday convenience of email with the traditional journal format as a self-report mechanism creates a synergy that fosters self-disclosure. Individual excerpts are presented to show that the harnessing of personal narratives within an email context has potential to yield valuable insights into the emotions, personal realities and experiences of gifted young adolescents. Furthermore, the co-construction of self-expressive and explanatory narratives supported by a facilitative adult listener appeared to promote healthy self-awareness amongst participants. This paper contributes to narrative exploration in two distinct ways: first, in using online methods for gaining access to the everyday, emotional realities of participants; and, second, in demonstrating the value of listening as a narrative technique for uncovering layers of voices across a body of texts produced over time. These methods represent an innovative attempt to move beyond face-to-face approaches and away from a focus on content and coding techniques that might oversimplify complex emotions.
2011-08-12T00:07:47Z
text
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss2/9
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1015/viewcontent/dillon.pdf
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Listening
voices
gifted
young adolescents
narratives
email.
oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1017
2011-08-12T00:04:28Z
publication:assh
publication:currentnarratives
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Commentary: Getting behind closed doors: The process of conducting research in a criminal justice setting
Wise, Jenny
Engaging with narrative inquiry research methods, such as indepth interviews, can provide researchers with valuable qualitative data. However, the processes involved with conducting in-depth interviews can often be problematic. This paper examines the barriers in the way of conducting research into criminal justice organisations within New South Wales (Australia) and in the Thames Valley (United Kingdom). It presents the personal experiences of the researcher in trying to gain access to organisations such as the police, judiciary, corrective services and forensic science services. Such organisations are often considered to be ʻclosed organisationsʼ because they are resistant to externally-based research. The paper also examines the practical difficulties of interviewing criminal justice practitioners even where official permission to conduct research has been granted. Some of the problems that were faced included fear and suspicion about what the research was examining and fear of reprisal from senior colleagues about what was said to the researcher. This fear led to some participants declining to answer certain questions, or when they did answer, using the ʻofficial organisation lineʼ.
2011-08-12T00:07:49Z
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss2/11
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1017/viewcontent/wise.pdf
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Empirical research
criminal justice organisations
closed organisations
oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1016
2011-08-12T00:02:39Z
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publication:currentnarratives
publication:journal_articles
publication:document_types
Commentary: Narrative inquiry as a means of moral enquiry in higher education
Buckland, Corinne
Narratology has long been a formal, major strand of literary studies, and narrative theory has more recently entered the fields of social science, psychology and theology. In all these fields, analysis of narrative reveals valuable insights into the structure and meaning of story-making, and narrative is now a widely used therapeutic tool. This paper revisits an original source of narrative inquiry, literary texts, to show how they can be used in higher education as a significant means of ethical and moral thinking. More than any prescriptive moral code or set of professional ethics, these texts have the capacity to enlarge our sensibility, sharpen, yet soften, our judgements, and make an immense contribution to human flourishing.
2011-08-12T00:07:48Z
text
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss2/10
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1016/viewcontent/buckland.pdf
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Ethics
morality
education
oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1022
2011-12-07T04:39:07Z
publication:assh
publication:currentnarratives
publication:journal_articles
publication:document_types
Discontinuous Narrative : The Trace Dance
Prendergast, Julia
I am working on a novel, which takes the form of a collection of interrelated stories. In each story, the narrative is framed by the idiosyncrasies, and prejudices, of a different first-person voice. There are gaps in narrative time, and there is disparity between the narrators’ voices. The result is a ‘discontinuous narrative’; this term describes the early work of Frank Moorhouse: ‘an innovative narrative method using interconnected stories’ (Griffith University 2011). This paper explores Derrida’s concept of alterity: specifically the ‘trace’ of ‘otherness’, as it corresponds to presence (Rivkin & Ryan 2004, p.278). I call this trace of otherness: The Trace Dance, because of the way alterity operates in discontinuous narrative. The playoff between the narrators’ voices occurs in the shadowy place: in the realm of alterity. Derrida’s concept of alterity explicates the gaps and disparity in discontinuous narrative: the process whereby reverberations simulate presence. I compare the act of narrative representation with the process of remembering. In particular, I compare the relationship between the historical event of the memory, and the rememberer’s sense of that event. Idiosyncratic associations determine the shape of the memory and, crucially, these associations need not be either consciously determined or logical. I argue that remembering is an act of Experiential Representation; I formulate this concept to clarify the metaphorical manoeuvre that occurs in remembering: the attempt to capture the meaning of one thing in terms of the other. This metaphorical manoeuvre connects memory with narrative: which is the attempt to capture an idea in the context of a story. The concept of alterity allows for a new way of looking at discontinuous narrative, because it reconfigures gaps in narrative time, and disparity in narrative voice, as crucial rhythmic forces that give the narrative its shape.
2011-12-07T04:52:14Z
text
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss3/5
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1022/viewcontent/1.pdf
Current Narratives
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oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1023
2011-12-07T04:41:50Z
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The Haunted Photograph : Context, Framing and the Family Story
Schutt, Stefan
Berry, Marsha
In this paper we examine conceptions of framing and context as they apply to photographs and other visual historical material. In particular we focus on the ways that context and framing are operationalised in the intimate, fragmented space of family history and how they play out through the construction of narrative coherency, what these sites are, what we bring to the sites, and how the interactions between beholder and object manifest as encounters. To investigate this we present a selection of photographic items representing key moments from our own European family histories. Throughout we ask: is meaning primarily created through devices such as framing and context, or may there be subtle, inherent meaning embedded in items that we can sense?
2011-12-07T04:52:16Z
text
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss3/6
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1023/viewcontent/1.pdf
Current Narratives
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oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1018
2011-12-08T02:15:24Z
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publication:currentnarratives
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Current Narratives 3 : Contents
Ballardie, Ruth
Martin, Elaine
Table of contents for Current Narratives, issue 3, 2011.
2011-12-07T04:50:50Z
text
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss3/1
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1018/viewcontent/cncover3.pdf
Current Narratives
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oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1019
2011-12-07T04:33:09Z
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Introduction : Losing the Plot - Tangling with Narrative Complexity
Ballardie, Ruth
Martin, Elaine
What is narrative? The question lies at the heart of narrative approaches to research. The simplicity of the common response to this question, however, ‘a story with a beginning, a middle and an end’, with its implied coherence, veils significant tensions and ambiguities. This special edition brings together a range of papers from a recent conference that explored some of the uncertainty around the role of coherence in narrative and narrative research. The conference ‘Losing the Plot – Tangling with Narrative Complexity,’ held in Melbourne, in July, 2010 was inspired by a recent publication, Beyond Narrative Coherence (Hyvarinen, Hyden, Saarenheimo and Tamboukou, 2010). This present collection of papers is a response to these questions and ideas from an Australian perspective and it represents a range of disciplinary backgrounds including media and communication, creative writing and psychosocial studies.
2011-01-01T08:00:00Z
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss3/2
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1019/viewcontent/1.pdf
Current Narratives
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oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1020
2011-12-07T04:35:29Z
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'Portraits of Moments' : Visual and Textual Entanglements in Narrative Research
Tamboukou, Maria
In this paper I consider questions of coherence and sequence in narrative research and explore their conditions of possibility and their effects. What happens, I ask, when the Aristotelian plot and the coherent self cannot be identified? Who gets excluded and to what effect when narratives are trapped within restrictive models of analysis? In focusing on a quantifiable and divisible model of time that underpins the conception of narratives in terms of linearity, completeness and closure, the paper charts a plane of analysis wherein narratives are taken as ‘portraits of moments’—textual and visual traces of eruptions and events. Such an analytical stance draws on Hannah Arendt’s philosophy and particularly the connections she has made between life histories and the discourse of History. In this context completion is examined not in terms of narrative closure but as an agential cut in making meaning about ‘the lives of others’.
2011-12-07T04:52:12Z
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss3/3
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1020/viewcontent/1.pdf
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oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1021
2012-08-05T23:44:12Z
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Magical Realism and Experiences of Extremity
Langdon, Jo
Examining magical realist texts including Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato (1991), and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2006), this paper discusses how magical realism examines the extremities of trauma and fear, proposing that magical realist narratives afford a unique ability to represent trauma in a way that is not open to the stylistics of literary realism. Blending the real or believable with the fantastically outrageous, magical realist narratives typically destabilise and disorder privileged centres of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’, demonstrating the constructedness of knowledge and history. Accordingly, magical realist strategies are frequently used in interventionist or counter narratives that refuse to adhere to privileged versions of truth or history and insist upon a multiplicity of experience. The majority of magical realist scholarship explores how the genre undermines hegemonic perspectives of history to clear a space for marginal representations of the past. However, as this paper argues, magical realist narratives also provide a unique space for writing about experiences of extremity. Examining the role of fantasy in representations of violence and trauma, this paper proposes that rupturing a realist narrative with the magical or un-real accommodates representations of extremity by conveying the ‘felt’ experience of trauma.
2011-12-07T04:52:13Z
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss3/4
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1021/viewcontent/1.pdf
Current Narratives
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oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1024
2011-12-07T04:44:49Z
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Broken Narratives in the Immigrant Folktale
Yekenkurul, Senem
Folktales contain a life-force embedded within their structure. Life narratives are carried along in an autobiographical form as folktales are transmitted from one generation to another. This autobiographical nature of folktales inspires the unique approach of narrative identity in understanding the construction of a meaningful self-identity. Growing up, my mother would tell me Turkish Arab folktales. Today, I realise not only the impact they have had on my life but also on my mother’s. One folktale, which I title The Angel, when contextualised in accordance with the storyteller’s (my mother’s) life, produces some dazzling insights into the reason behind the telling. The Angel is embedded in the life histories of my grandmother and mother and is abundant with insight into their life-worlds. The experience of the fragmentation caused by migration and the choices made has turned The Angel into a ‘broken narrative’. Their life story is the driving force behind the telling of the folktale and can be a touchstone for children who seek to locate themselves within the narratives of significant others and broader social structures.
2011-12-07T04:53:38Z
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss3/7
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1024/viewcontent/1.pdf
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narrative identity
migrant experience
folktale
fragmentation
oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1025
2011-12-07T04:46:33Z
publication:assh
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Inauthentic Tales or Resonating Voices?
Vicars, Mark
As folk taxonomies of contemporary sexual identities continue to proliferate, this paper positions narrative research as a productive methodology for troubling the coherence of the ‘normal’. Re-presented from life-history interviews, conducted within a friendship group of gay men over a six month period, are reconstructed accounts of the ‘…processes, procedures, and apparatuses whereby [our] truth and knowledge are [became] produced (Tamboukou & Ball, 2003, p.4). Our endeavors attempt to show something of how we talked ourselves in and out of our scattered, obscure and partial stories of self. Throughout this paper, our disjointed and chaotic narrations aim to undo ‘normalizing’ narratives of educational research. In piecing together our adolescent queering experiences, our fragmented and incoherate voices mingle on the page to show something of the complexity of our narrative experience(s) of self.
2011-12-07T04:53:39Z
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss3/8
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1025/viewcontent/1.pdf
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Queering practices
Narrative identity
Representation
oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1026
2011-12-07T04:57:39Z
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Narrative Coherence, Co-incidence and Listening In-between (Book Review)
McLeod, Julie
This collection of essays explores the challenges of researching personal narratives and the many levels of ambiguity that beset such an endeavour. The volume aims to disturb the dominance of an interpretive and ethical paradigm that privileges ’narrative coherence’. As such, it immediately invites meditation on where (in)coherence lies – the teller, the tale or the listener, or the in-between relations among them. The collection is framed as an attempt to move away from or beyond the conventional structure of narrative form as following a beginning, middle and end. It argues for a more generous sense of narrative possibilities, ones not confined by what the editors characterize as Aristotelian conceptions of narrative coherence that favour linear sequencing and thematic closure. Of course, fictional narratives take many forms – they play, subvert, parody, delight in and disappoint conventions – but so too do personal narratives, as the authors elaborate in their diverse examples. Related to this, the editors propose to question what they see as a dominant presumption that ‘persons live better and in a more ethical way, if they have a coherent life-story and coherent narrative identity’ (p.2). There is, then, a strong voice questioning perceived assumptions about narrative form and effects, and a corresponding interest in elaborating some alternative ways of recognizing and writing about narratives that may take different a form, or struggle to be recognized. I have some mixed responses to these ambitions, in part because I had thought that the conceptions of narrative coherence which the editors dispute had already been profoundly unsettled – by, among others, modernism, psychoanalysis, memory studies, and numerous variants of post-structural theorizing. It was, however, with somewhat of a refreshing jolt that I encountered reflections on the authority of narrative coherence and its necessary undoing, making me think again about making meaning from personal or identity narratives and the constellation of aspirations animating narrative enquiry.
2011-12-07T04:53:39Z
text
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss3/9
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1026/viewcontent/1.pdf
Current Narratives
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oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1037
2015-01-29T04:00:02Z
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Analysing literary journalism: Twentieth century stories: objectivity and authority in Wilkerson and Hersey
Schulte, Bret
Isabel Wilkerson’s award-winning The Warmth of Other Suns (2010) is an evolutionary marker for transparency and authority in a genre that remains in flux. This paper examines the presence/absence of the narrator in this masterwork, in particular how Wilkerson negotiates the journalistic goal of objectivity and the inevitable confrontation with subjectivity. This paper argues that Wilkerson taps the literary tradition of John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946). Like Hiroshima, Wilkerson’s Warmth embodies the soundest of journalistic conventions: third person point of view, extensive sampling/interviews, and secondary research. Structurally, Warmth also mirrors Hiroshima. Wilkerson chose characters that span spectrums of privilege, age, and circumstance, winnowed down as emblematic of a cast of millions who fled the Jim Crow South. Just as in Hiroshima, the camera eye rotates among them, providing alternating vignettes in an advancing chronology. However, Wilkerson breaks from Hersey in important ways, namely the authorial detachment that has come to be known as Hiroshima’s hallmark. Wilkerson, on the other hand, has been praised for her empathy and transparency. She lays bare her connection to the story, her techniques, and her decision-making process in an extensive methodology section written in first-person. In a historical moment marked by increased reader anxiety and distrust of the press, the reception of Warmth has rewarded this subjectivity and increased transparency.
2014-01-01T08:00:00Z
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss4/3
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1037/viewcontent/3_Schute.pdf
Current Narratives
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oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1035
2015-01-29T02:28:42Z
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Contents of Current Narratives, 4, 2014
Table of contents for Current Narratives, Issue 4 (2014).
2014-01-01T08:00:00Z
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss4/1
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1035/viewcontent/1_Contents.pdf
Current Narratives
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oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1036
2015-01-29T02:26:24Z
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Current Narratives, 4, 2014: Editorial
O'Donnell, Marcus
Editorial for Current Narratives, Issue 4, 2014.
2014-01-01T08:00:00Z
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss4/2
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1036/viewcontent/2_Editorial.pdf
Current Narratives
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oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1039
2015-01-29T04:01:35Z
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Teaching literary journalism: Intentional meandering in the literary journalism classroom
O'Donnell, Marcus
What makes the literary journalism classroom a particularly creative one is the permission to experiment. It is an opportunity towards the end of a degree program to rethink core ideas about journalism, core ideas about writing, core ideas about ethics and core ideas about how to bring all these ideas into alignment. This is the unique pedagogical value of literary journalism. It is one of the few areas of journalism that takes both the world and the personal immensely seriously. The symbolic and the factual, emotion and observation, the tangible and the intangible all jut up against one another. So it becomes one of the few opportunities within the journalism curriculum where the deeply personal – who am I and how do I express what is unique and important to me – is given space.
2014-01-01T08:00:00Z
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss4/5
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1039/viewcontent/5_O_Donnell.pdf
Current Narratives
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oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1038
2015-01-29T04:00:55Z
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Analysing literary journalism: De(composing) narrative: writing true crime in Death at the Darlo Bar
Walker, Ruth G
This paper is in two parts: a true crime story, Death at the Darlo Bar, I wrote about a violent death at one of my local bars near Kings Cross, Sydney and an essay reflecting on the writing process. I first heard about the death of Brett Adam Sparks through rumours that circulated in my neighborhood, which presented him as a homeless man who had been attacked and killed at the hands of a group of respectable chess-playing locals. The second part of this paper is an exegetical essay that reflects on the issues arising from my writing a true crime story as a resident of Kings Cross and a regular patron of the Darlo Bar, whose research and writing process was informed as much by local encounters and gossip as painstaking research into the archive of inquest reports, police statements and witness testimonies held at the local Coroner’s Court. The essay discusses the uncanny experience of investigating and writing a story about violent crime that was quickly glossed over by local stakeholders and authorities, and which has no satisfactory resolution or truth claim. In particular, the essay explores the uncanny concept of homelessness and how it folds into competing narratives about Kings Cross as an alcohol-fuelled crime hot-spot in the Australian cultural imaginary. My own story reconstructs one of a number of competing versions of the same event. But it can’t really claim to be closer to an objective reality than any other account, let alone the Coroner’s preferred version, even though it relies on the same facts as presented in the archival documents and witness testimonies. I started out by looking for a true crime story, but the findings from the inquest meant that Sparks’ death is not actually considered a “crime”. Any other claims that it was a crime, and that people got away with it, therefore can’t be “true”.
2014-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss4/4
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1038/viewcontent/4_Walker.pdf
Current Narratives
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oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1042
2015-01-29T03:58:01Z
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Four Stories: A fragile life
Dean, Lucy
A fragile life: one of four stories published in Current Narratives, 4, 2014.
2014-01-01T08:00:00Z
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss4/8
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1042/viewcontent/8_Dean.pdf
Current Narratives
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oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1043
2015-01-29T03:46:57Z
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Four Stories: The Last Killer in Eden
Evans, Jake
The Last Killer in Eden: one of four stories published in Current Narratives, 4, 2014.
2014-01-01T08:00:00Z
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss4/9
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1043/viewcontent/9_Evans.pdf
Current Narratives
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oai:ro.uow.edu.au:currentnarratives-1044
2015-01-29T03:55:54Z
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Four Stories: Feral
Lindley, Amy
Feral: one of four stories published in Current Narratives, 4, 2014.
2014-01-01T08:00:00Z
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https://ro.uow.edu.au/currentnarratives/vol1/iss4/10
https://ro.uow.edu.au/context/currentnarratives/article/1044/viewcontent/10_Lindley.pdf
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