Narrative Innovations Summer School

1. Narrative Innovations Summer School Prato, 25 – 29 June 2012

2. Introductions • Find a partner • Find out a little about them and their interests/wants in connection with narrative research and the Summer school • You will be asked to introduce your partner and briefly mention their narrative interests/wants

3. Narrative Innovations • Innovative approaches to narrative inquiry • tensions, effects, ethics, bodies, sensitive topics, looking, reflexivity • interaction, oratory, political life, temporalities, oral history • Innovative pedagogy • Didactic and experiential • Dialogical and practical

4. Overview

5. Teaching approach • Workshops • Discussion and exercises on hot topics in narrative research • Group meetings • Working on ‘projects’; interaction with Summer school tutors • Research seminars • Leading researcher presents their work + chaired discussion

6. Connections and sustenance • Computer labs and wifi (wirelesskeypo) • Coffee served at 9.30 before our 10am start • Light lunch provided at 12.30pm • Organised dinners • Monday, 7.30 pm at Caffe al Teatro • Via G. Verdi 28 • Friday, 7.30 pm at Il Palazzolo • Via Mazzini 37/39

8. Small group allocation • Handout • Location of seminar rooms • Group 1 with Cigdem in Sala Veneziana • Group 2 with Corinne in Seminar 4, Ground floor, room 27 • Group 3 with Mark in Seminar 3, Ground floor room 31

9. How are you approaching the Summer school? Do you have a project in mind? Do you have a ‘burning issue’ you want to explore? Are you content with ‘immersion’? Are you wanting to network? Make a note now of how you will make the Summer school work for you. The groups this afternoon will be devoted to developing these ideas.

10. Workshop one: narrative and its tensions Prato, 25 – 29 June 2012

11. Overview • Narrative as both research approach and research object • Narrative’s multiplicity • Narrative itself • Narrative and lived experience • Narrative and self • New media narrative as case study

12. New media narrative • Exploring the narrative – new media relation • ‘life with new media’ interviews in Melbourne

13. Research approach/object • Narrative and the new media • Storying of the rise of the new media • Self-conscious use of narrative conventions to address new media • Narrative organisation of new media • Narrative structures of new media • Transmediation • Collaboration

14. Mark says: (9:09:49 PM) what propostion of your friends do you interact with online? Mark says: (9:09:57 PM) sorry spelling - proportion Brad says: (9:10:55 PM) that made me laugh - I havent propositioned anyone online for ages !!!!! I think I have 6 friends on skype - thats it, so not many Brad says: (9:11:19 PM) I email friends from my work at their work during the day but mostly I try to speak to them Mark says: (9:11:27 PM) but is that most of your mates, some or a few Mark says: (9:11:39 PM) you mean people in Sydney Brad says: (9:12:49 PM) a small proportion of my melb friends are on skype or I email....they're the ones I try to call.  If I email them during the day, its mostly to ask specific questions - not to "catch up" as such Mark says: (9:13:18 PM) do you socialise like this with people in Sydney? Brad says: (9:14:54 PM) no Brad says: (9:15:16 PM) the people I am friends with in Sydney I see at work and sometimes on the weekends but never online Mark says: (9:15:30 PM) thanks for that Brad says: (9:15:56 PM) by the way, I do look at facebook pretty much everyday, very occasionally at work and most nights at home Mark says: (9:16:11 PM) you took the words right out of my mouth ;) Brad says: (9:16:12 PM) so there is an element of communication there Mark says: (9:16:17 PM) tell me more Brad says: (9:16:35 PM) thought I might have ! Mark says: (9:16:55 PM) am i that obvious ?? Mark says: (9:16:58 PM) thats OK Brad says: (9:18:12 PM) initially I wanted to resist facebook. -  as Ive said, i dont "chat" online with anyone and skype is great for friends overseas and interstate, not really into computers on a whole...but found facebook to be a bit of lighthearted fun, and It allowed me to catch up with people i had lost contact with Brad says: (9:18:43 PM) you're not obvious...i guess its just the natural place to go !!!!!!;) Mark says: (9:18:52 PM) sure Mark says: (9:19:08 PM) tell me more about facebook, why the resistance and now the attraction? Brad says: (9:21:32 PM) I tend not to go for the latest fad....Im pretty sceptical about most "popular" things, I hadnt gotten into myspace or friendster or bebo or any of those things prior to facebook, in fact Ive never visited any of those sites.  I think facebook is funny, some people appear so desperate to "impress" by way of the number of "friends" they have, or the mindless and ongoing commentary of their boring

15. Narrative’s multiplicity • Narrative itself • Narrative in lived experience • Narrative and self

16. Narrative itself • Stories of the new media • Self-conscious deployment of narrative

17. Narrative itself

18. Exercise • What are these news stories telling us? • How do the news stories compare/contrast? • What narrative(s) of new media is sustained by these news stories? • What are the effects of such new media narrative?

19. Narrative in lived experience It has always been known and often repeated that life has something to do with narrative; we speak of a life story to characterize the interval between life and death. And yet assimilating life to a story in this way is not really obvious; it is a commonplace that must first be submitted to critical doubt. This doubt is the work of all the knowledge acquired in the past few decades concerning narrative, a knowledge which appears to distance narrative from lived experience and to confine it to the region of fiction . . . I want to apply to the relation between narrative and life Socrate’s maxim that an unexamined life is not worth living. (Ricoeur, 1991, page 20)

20. Narrative in lived experience Ellen: I don’t have a real fear of the world collapsing [because] we find paper, we find pots, we find things that tell us the story of the time. But the computer time, if that happens, there’ll be just a piece of plastic screen that no one can connect with. A whole story will be lost. And I think of that with my website now. If that happened, that’s all gone. You know, there’s no way to recover it. It’s out… I: You mean information can be deleted? Ellen: Yes. And I believe that will be the warfare of the future. People will come in and just (snaps fingers) you’re deleted! And then, how does a country go like that? Imagine Australia being deleted, off all the servers, everything. What happens? Total chaos. We have our water supply by a computer programme. You know, everything… [later] I: If you had to switch it off, here and now, how would you feel about it? Ellen: I’d find that very hard. My story is in the computer. It’s not in a book.

21. Narrative and self My account of myself is partial, haunted by that for which I can devise no definitive story. I cannot explain exactly why I have emerged in this way, and my efforts at narrative reconstruction are always undergoing revision. There is that in me and of me for which I can give no account. But does this mean that I am not, in the moral sense, accountable for who I am and for what I do? If I find that, despite my best efforts, a certain opacity persists and I cannot make myself fully accountable to you, is this ethical failure? . . . Is there in this affirmation of partial transparency a possibility for acknowledging a relationality that binds me more deeply to language and to you than I previously knew? (Butler, 2005: 40)

22. Narrative and self • Relation of self to oneself may not be wholly transparent • Aspects of self (presence) non-narrativisible • Important events/relations escape narrative • One cannot author the conditions that make one’s story intelligible to others (norms, conventions, imperatives) • One’s story depends on the ‘structure of address’ that make it possible (interview, biography, blog)

23. Narrative and self Diana: I don't know. And this is rare probably, maybe where I do differ from other people. I guess I prefer to do other things. So I prefer to be active. I'm someone who likes to go to the gym. Some people hate going to the gym they think it's the worst way to spend an hour in their life. If I've had a long day at work and I want to de-stress I'll go to the driving range and hit golf balls. I'm not going to sit on the internet to Facebook people. And like I said that's probably just my personality more than anything else. But at the same time I still kind of dabble and I absolutely understand the social networking it's just not something that is as big in my life as maybe I see it in other people's lives. Where they're sharing everything they do. [later] Yeah but like I said I think I'm pretty boring so I don't know. Maybe it's just a situation where I see how it can benefit me is how I utilise it. And that's just because luckily I've grown up having other interests and having a really good balance which makes me appreciate time outside and being active and all of those sorts of things. Whereas probably people who've always grown up with the internet and it's part and parcel of, like what TV is to other people, maybe like the older generation where it's just what you do. You don't even think about how much time you're spending watching TV and what you could be doing elsewhere. So again I have no idea how you'd come up with any answers to bring that balance back.

24. Exercise • How does Diana address herself in this extract? • What kind of subject does Diana wish to be seen to be? • What might be some norms, conventions, imperatives in play in this account? • How is new media implicated in Diana’s self address?