Narrative Workshops

Workshop 1

The first Narrative workshop, held on 4 December 2009 in the Berrick Saul Building's Treehouse, was a very promising first step towards productive interdisciplinary conversation within the Centre for Modern Studies.

The event attracted numerous participants from:

English
Politics
the Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past
Social Policy
Linguistics/the Centre for Advanced Studies in Language and Communication
Theatre, Film and Television
Biology/York Centre for Complex Systems Analysis.

Interest has also been expressed by researchers in the Centre for Women's Studies.

In discussion, we identified ideas for bids to the CModS research fund and explored the potential for establishing an international narrative research network. The conversation also dwelt on the challenges and rewards of interdisciplinary dialogue itself, both in relation to the way the issue is framed in the Narrative and Emergence project, and with reference to the interdisciplinary contexts already familiar to those present, notably CASLC, YCCSA and the TRANSIT project. The next step will be to hold a study afternoon, aimed at addressing interdisciplinary barriers and potential, to be scheduled for the Spring 2010 term.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this very enjoyable and stimulating workshop; the event generated a strong sense of the possibilities for interdisciplinary narrative research at York.

To be included on the mailing list for the upcoming study afternoon or other events under the Narrative strand, please contact Richard Walsh rmw8@york.ac.uk

Workshop 2

The first study afternoon for the Centre’s Narrative Research strand took place on 23 April 2010, and included presentations from Richard Walsh, Geoff Wall and Sarah Collins

The event attracted about twenty participants, and apologies were received from another half dozen who were stranded in various parts of the world due to the volcanic eruption in Iceland.

The afternoon was organised around two objectives deriving from the workshop in December:

to draw out and clarify our various assumptions about key terms that we too readily assume have interdisciplinary currency—in this case, “narrative” itself
to present case study material from participant’s current research, in order to focus our discussions upon specific and concrete examples and allow us to triangulate our different disciplinary perspectives in relation to a common frame of reference.

The first objective was served by Richard Walsh’s presentation on “defining narrative” The Concept Itself (MS PowerPoint , 94kb), which served both to offer a notional definition and to make explicit the various conceptual choices involved (and hence the scope for dissenting definitions).

The presentation provoked some lively and thoughtful responses—and, indeed, some proposals for revision.

The second objective was met by two related presentations on oral narrative:

Geoff Wall (Department of English and Related Literature) offered two examples from his current oral history project, “Cultures of Dissent,” as sound recordings and transcripts, with a commentary about his own interview and evaluation processes
Sarah Collins (CASLC, Department of Health Sciences and Hull York Medical School) presented sound recordings and more formal transcriptions of her own conversations with her grandmother and a friend, as instances of the negotiation of storytelling exchanges in the context of dementia, and reflected upon the issues of understanding, care and respect these examples raised.

Both presentations were followed by enthusiastic discussions in their own terms, and served both to reveal some unexpected links and continuities in the research perspectives of seminar members, and to stimulate questions of a more centrifugal nature that ramified in several directions.

The afternoon closed with a discussion aimed at articulating some of these larger themes, both as a reflection upon the afternoon as a whole, and as a way of identifying promising topics for future research seminars. Among these were:

issues of performativity and narrative
music, narrative and Beckett
the functions of context, relevance and subtext; and social normativity.

The consensus was that the event was very successful, not only as a thought-provoking exploration of its particular topic, but also as a model of the kind of interdisciplinary exchange for which there are too few opportunities. Another seminar on the same plan is slated for the near future, based around one of the topics identified above.