The term narrative has its linguistic origins in the Sanskrit gna meaning “to know”, the Latin gnarus or “knowing” and narro or “telling” (H. White, 1987, p. 215). It has
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been proposed as a root metaphor for the interpretation of lived experiences (Sarbin 1986) and “the quintessential form of customary knowledge” (Lyotard, 1984, p. 18). While it is beyond the scope of this thesis to give an account of its significant momentum in recent decades, it is noteworthy that persuasive advocates have appeared in philosophy (Barthes, 1974; Ricoeur, 1984, 1985, 1990, 2004; C. Taylor, 1989), history (Roberts, 2001; H. White, 1987), anthropology (E. M. Bruner, 1986, 1997; Geertz, 1973, 1986; Van Maanen, 1988) and literary criticism (Eakin, 1999, 2008; Smith & Watson, 2001). The professional disciplines of social work, counselling, psychotherapy and family therapy have endorsed this trend (Efran, Lukens, & Lukens, 1990; Flaskas, McCarthy, & Sheehan, 2007; Hall, 1997; Lieblich, McAdams, & Josselson, 2004; McLeod, 1997; Milner, 2001; Papadopoulos & Byng-Hall, 1997; Polkinghorne, 1988; Schafer, 1992; Spence, 1982; M. White, 2007; M. White & Epston, 1990). Psychology and psychiatry have also taken this direction (Berkenkotter, 2008; J. Bruner, 1986; Bruner, 1990; Crossley, 2000; Gergen & Gergen, 1983; Hamkins, 2013; Lewis, 2011; Mehl-Madrona, 2010; Sarbin, 1986).
My general purpose in this project was to engage in a “polyphony-driven mode of research” with participants being encouraged to reveal their intentions, values, beliefs, and commitments in their professional and personal lives with regard to mindfulness (Alvesson & Skoldberg, 2000, p. 258). I wondered how I might construct a reflexive methodology to call forth unique stories and create a design that could “obtain descriptions of the life world of the interviewee with respect to interpreting the meaning of the described phenomena” (Kvale, 1996, pp. 5,6). On the other hand, I wanted to restrain this enterprise from spiralling into interpretive and deconstructive acts without end through a “pragmatic knowledge interest” in the everyday and therapeutic purposes and effects of mindfulness (Kvale, 1996, p. 248). Given these aims, I was drawn to formal research that championed narrative, linguistic, reflexive and relational methodologies (Alvesson & Skoldberg, 2000; Andrews, Squire, & Tamboukou, 2013; Angus & McLeod, 2004; Chase, 2005; Clandinin, 2007; Denzin & Lincoln, 1994; Elliott, 2005; Etherington, 2004; Gee, 1991, 2012; Labov, 1982; Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, & Zilber, 1998; Mishler, 1986, 1999, 2004; Paechter, 2012; Percy, 2003; Riessman, 1993, 2008; Riessman & Speedy, 2006; Schwandt, 1994).
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It is not surprising that Rudrum (2005) notes the “sheer variety of different uses to which narratives are put” (p. 202), confounding what qualifies as a narrative. For Polkinghorne the word “functions to give form to the understanding of a purpose to life and to join everyday actions and events into episodic units” (1988, p. 11). Edward Bruner believes the “key elements in narrative are story, discourse, and telling” where story is the related sequence of happenings, discourse the contextual setting, and the telling an act of communicating in storied form (1997, p. 269). Riessman (2008) is concerned that precision has been sacrificed with the spread of narrative approaches and she offers a range of candidate descriptions linked to the purpose and design of an enquiry (pp. 3-7). In another place, she and Speedy define narrative crisply as “sequence and consequence” (2006, p. 430, emphasis in original). I came to the view that just as we cannot re-present the world in an unambiguous and neutral manner through narrative, neither can we decide on definitions of the term narrative impartially. My concern is that tight definitions could lead to an uncompromising solidification and potentially exclude speech and text that didn’t conform to strict parameters. Consequently, I join with Mishler’s refusal to “police the boundaries” (1999, p. 17) of what counts as narrative, follow Polkinghorne (1988) by not making a distinction between narrative and story and, like Rudrum (2005), prefer to consider what becomes possible, or not possible, through particular concepts of narrative and its enactments in context.
With regard to the ethics of this research, I read the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research (National Health and Medical Research Council, 2007) and the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (National Health and Medical Research Council, Australian Research Council, & Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee, 2007), noting the special relevance of Chapter 4.8. I reread the Australian Association of Social Workers Code of Ethics to ensure my research processes were consonant with the obligations of my profession including to engage in just, equitable, and accountable practices with culturally diverse communities (Australian Association of Social Workers, 2010). I believe the project, both in conduct and design, respects the local cultural and social values and traditions of Bhutan. In line with academic convention, all potential participants were made aware of my research intentions, the procedures to be deployed and the specifics of the design. Risks and benefits, possible outcomes, how the results may
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be used, and my part as the researcher were explained. A right to withdraw from the project at any time, without prejudice or negative consequences, was given. Confidentiality, privacy, and anonymity were addressed through the use of pseudonyms and the altering of certain identifiable data in the final report. However, given the small number of subjects in this study, consent to contribute was sought on the basis that identification might be possible (Appendices 2 and 9).
Orderly professional codifications and the “procedural rationality” of University Human Research Ethics Committees are necessary but they seem meagre when faced with the intricacies of human lives (Bauman, 1994, p. 6, emphasis in original). Common requirements from within Western academia may be experienced differently by populations which don’t share these views strongly, or at all, perhaps especially where they hold alternative cosmological views. This may lead to ethical positions that “are either irrelevant, unrealistic and/or possibly inappropriate and insufficient to address the complexity of such encounters” (Andrews, 2007, p. 498). In Bhutan I was convinced that all participants understood the ethical obligation of research confidentiality and yet, from my observation, privacy as it is usually understood in Australia is highly unlikely. This was underlined for me when one Bhutanese participant asked casually who else was being interviewed for the project. I felt uneasiness and, somewhat reactively, referred to the University’s requirements concerning confidentiality. A pause followed awkwardly, at least for me. I silently chided myself for being a detached academic, a clumsy enforcer of rules to follow, and an impolite cultural interloper. Seeming to notice my mood, in the next breath the interviewee said, with a graceful laugh, that it didn’t matter whether I told him as he would know soon anyway. I think he was direct with me due to our previous association. I certainly appreciated being relieved of my discomfort. Reflecting on this later, I heard in both my stumbling reply and his relaxed expectation a desire to care for each other. And I am left wondering whether in some circumstances the Western idea of research confidentiality may lead to participants being less trusting of the researcher. Perhaps, under certain conditions, using the actual names of participants might be a more culturally ethical stance as then they can be held accountable to others in their community for their comments. This raises many complex issues on privacy, trust and safety, to name a few.
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At some phase I became troubled too by my early conclusion that the nature of the topics and the senior professional status of primary participants in this project reduced the likelihood of causing harm. Thinking more carefully, I recalled occasions in therapy where clients who had achieved higher educational qualifications and held executive positions in their area of work became distraught when I asked seemingly ordinary questions about their personal life. My response to their distress was sometimes unhelpful, partly based on mistaken assumptions about shared social values and beliefs. Consequently, I decided to problematise the imagined benevolence of this project, my aim in part being to guard against what I saw as the hazards of naturalising or normalising interactions with people from my culture and of assuming participants and I would obviously act ethically given our similarities in social and professional standing. I sought to lessen the modernist tendencies of rationality, regulation, and scientific certainty in ethics opting instead for a critical “living tradition” approach (Hugman, 2005, p. 163), an ethically embodied researcher-self who could draw on established modes yet remake them in response to local issues and circumstances. As would be clear from my earlier remarks, I believed participants’ assertions of personal knowledges could only be made from socially situated perspectives on life within a continuous enactment of power relations (Foucault, 1988; Rabinow, 1984). Given that extolling individual agency in personal narratives can erase contextual and socio-political dimensions, I sought to produce texts within texts, drawing in part on Foucault’s ethics of concern for self where “a person can be responsible for and responsive to her or his own self and from that to her or his encounters with the world” (Hugman, 2005, p. 109). An ethic of care with others seeks to understand participants’ worlds of experience through listening for agreements, subversions, resistances and reverses with regard to the social discourses they inhabit (Foucault, 1997; Weedon, 2004).
Relatedly, I turned to the explanatory scheme of van Lagenhove and Harré (1999) who propose three modes of discursive positioning that can be taken up or assigned within an emerging plotline. First order positioning refers to the ways in which people morally situate themselves. A second order “occurs when the first order positioning is not taken for granted by one of the persons involved in the discussion” (p. 20), illustrating its reflexive or accountive features as people negotiate meaning through raising questions about the first position and perhaps refusing it.
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Conversations that involve the accountive in another time and place are a third order. All positions are vantage points from which to construe events employing specific metaphors, analogies, and images which are formed into storylines. Of import with regard to ethics is that “the rights for self-positioning and other-positioning are unequally distributed and not all situations allow for or call for an intentional positioning of the participants" (p. 23). Attention is given to the moral stances taken up through “the local distribution of rights and duties”, which then “determines the way episodes unfold” (Rom Harré, 2006, p. 228). Although the term “determines” seems unfortunate, implying a strong causality, Harré & Moghaddam (2003) clarify that positions are fluid, with people taking up or contesting, stepping back from or aligning with, the present circumstances. This description of mobility worked well for me as it acknowledges peoples’ predicaments when socially performing their preferences, the consequences being an expansion and contraction of certain lines of action. While the notion of performing a social self is not new (Goffman, 1969; V. W. Turner, 1986), discursive positioning requires researchers to consider how personal claims are made continuously through distributions of power.
As well as the academic works cited, I drew on my heart/mind lived experiences of Australia and Bhutan. When the scholarly and other lived personal histories are knitted together an “ethical pluralism”, to borrow Hugman’s term (2005, p. 161), may be attempted. This comprises academic knowledges, experiences of being a moral person, and the recognition of our collective social responsibilities. Ellis writes of “mutual respect, dignity, and connectedness between researcher and researched, and between researchers and the communities in which they live and work” (2007, p. 4) and May theorises a “responsive and reciprocal” covenantal ethic and its requirement for “an exchange of promises” (2006, p. 367). Guided by these philosophical views and research traditions, I chose a reflexive and dialogic narrative research design where the “dividing line between performer and audience blurs, and culture itself becomes a dramatic performance” (Denzin, 2001, p. 26). I will give details of this approach in the design section of this thesis especially with regard to the structuring of conversations with counsellors and psychotherapists as they become audiences to, and commentators on, each other’s interviews.
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Even so, an ethic of participatory narrative inquiry with its aspiration for equitable justice-based relationships only serves to emphasise inevitable difficulties (Riessman, 2002). I felt the tension between tendencies to sway participants’ answers so they might say what was valuable in my eyes and opening space with them for uncensored remarks and a shared say in the project’s outcomes. I can claim we all participated in the spoken and unspoken positionings of each other, with each person making decisions as to utterances and revelations. Still, my collaborative ambitions remained problematic. To put it minimally, I invited participants into processes I structured. I interpreted their accounts through our conversational and somatic expressions, choosing which parts to include from a back-then-and-there historical past into a written here-and-now text for an unpredictable future when- and-there. I gain academic and social prestige if the thesis is passed. In striving for polyphonic texts I recognised, like Adams, that in deciding the final ways interviewees’ accounts are interpreted in this document, I ‘escape textual debate with the people I textually implicate’ (2008, p. 180). Keeping this in mind, I was on guard against the possibility of harm from the researcher-me who I believed had good intentions but who may, in the end, misunderstand. Josselson’s comments are apropos.
The greater the degree of rapport and trust, the greater the degree of self- revealing and, with this, the greater degree of trust that the researcher will treat the material thus obtained with respect and compassion. (2007, p. 539)
I placed participants’ voices alongside mine as researcher, not giving voice to them or empowering them to speak, but rather aspiring to a co-created context that made possible the bringing forth of multiple voices where language is always mutable and constitutive. For this to succeed I made continuous efforts to take seriously the predicaments of who could speak and under what conditions, what accounts were tellable or silenced, whose knowledges were brought to light and for what purpose, who was included and who was excluded, and what expressions were allowed or avoided. Contradictory perspectives were predictable and encouraged. These kinds of collaborative ethics demanded a critical reflexivity, a continuous willingness to contend with power/knowledge and knowledge/action through destabilising hierarchy and making way for “partnerships of relational truths where all parties co-
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create knowledges that further the aims of the conversation” (Percy, 2006, p. 97), words that are easy to write and far removed from the predicaments of achieving such an engagement during an actual conversation.
Given this co-learning ambition, my preference is to refer to interviewees as conversational partners though I do use the terms participants and interviewees as well. On a similar note, “client” was the word most used by partners in professional settings and “people” was given by interviewees who had other identity markers such as teacher or student. Consequently, I mostly use the term client people for the recipients of counselling or psychotherapeutic services rather than client. One exception is referring to people in a hospital setting as patients. At different times, I more or less personified and claimed the identities of researcher, family therapist, mindfulness practitioner, university lecturer, and Euro-Australian male as well as colleague, acquaintance, and friend. I am conscious that all of us moved between various identity states, the shifts often marked by more or less formality of language, tone of speaking, and gesture. As Josselson puts it, we must be “conversant with the ultimate complexity of moral choice when confronted with the situational particularities” (2007, p. 559). We are relentlessly invited to take up positions in response to the momentary uniqueness of happenings, never able to stand nowhere.