Call for papers: narratives in interaction WORKSHOP

[Joanna Pawelczyk]

Dear colleagues,

Please feel free to pass this call on to researchers who might be
interested in participating.

http://ifa.amu.edu.pl/plm/2011/

PLM 2011 – Workshop proposal
Agnieszka Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak and Joanna Pawelczyk

Narratives in interaction

The workshop is meant to mark the ‘narrative turn’ in
sociolinguistics.

This new approach aims at exploring situated language use, “employed
by speakers/narrators to position a display of contextualized
identities” (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou 2008: 379). Such a
conceptualization of the narrative allows analysts to look into the
processes of identities “’in-the-making’ or
‘coming-into-being’” (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou 2008:
379). Accordingly, emphasis will be put on the contextualizing aspects of
the narrative: in their narratives speakers construct their identities
contextualised in the current topic, they also evaluate their experience
and express attitudes towards others. The narrative is treated here as a
practice within social interaction, in which participants take and
negotiate their positions (cf. positioning theory).

Therefore we would particularly like to invite papers in which narratives
are talk, i.e. text-in-interaction (cf. Georgakopoulou 2007), observed
(and recorded) as part of authentic exchanges in a speech community; they
may be life stories, reminiscences, accounts of (intimate) personal
experience, etc. These are often so-called “small stories”,
i.e. fragmented, with multiple tellers, heavily embedded in their contexts
(see Bamberg 2004; Georgakopoulou 2003, 2007; Ochs and Capps 2001).
Nevertheless, the narratives under study may have also been collected in
the interview setting (in clinical or everyday-like contexts). Ultimately,
in the course of discussion, we hope to be able to compare narratives
elicited in interviews with narratives which are
talk-in-social-interaction.

Special attention will be given to the analytical tools of
‘narrative analysis’ (e.g. Conversation Analysis,
ethnomethodology) which allow for the fine-grained micro-analysis of the
narrative as talk-in-social-interaction with the aim to capture the
discursive process through which individuals make sense of themselves in
the currently available contexts.

We call for papers which address the following types of contexts/issues
(as well as others focusing on ‘narratives in interaction’):
1. The functions of narratives in a wide range of social contexts
2. Narratives about oneself and others in performing social identities
3. Fragmentation and multiplicity of identities revealed in narratives
4. Narratives and the contextualization of speech events
5. New analytical tools for analysis of narratives as talk-in-interaction
6. Structure and functions of small stories
7. Personal narratives and the transformation process in clinical contexts
8. Narratives in negotiating gender identity, age identity, ethnic
identity, etc.

Sample bibliography

Bamberg, Michael and Alexandra Georgakopoulou 2008. “Small stories
as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis”, Text &
Talk 28/3: 377–396.

Bamberg, Michael, Anna de Fina and Deborah Schiffrin (eds). 2007. Selves
and identities in narrative and discourse. Amsterdam – Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.

De Fina Anna and Alexandra Georgakopoulou. 2008. “Introduction:
narrative analysis in the shift from texts to practices”. Text &
Talk 28/3: 275-281.

De Fina Anna, Deborah Schiffrin and Michael Bamberg (eds). 2006. Discourse
and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Georgakopoulou, Alexandra. 2007. Small stories, interaction and
identities. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Labov, William. 2006. “The transformation of experience in
narrative”, in: Adam Jaworski and Nikolas Coupland (eds.). The
discourse reader. (2nd edition) London: Routledge. 214-226.

Ochs, Elinor and Lisa Capps 2001. Living narrative. Creating lives in
everyday storytelling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.