Same facts – different stories
The research of Professor Michael Bamberg of Clark University takes a look at how dominant narratives emerge and how counter narratives get created and believed. Through the analysis of narrative practices, Professor Bamberg proposes that we can intentionally begin to present stories that enable social change, by looking beyond the story, to uncover and challenge the assumptions behind dominant narratives. From Research Outreach.
Storytelling is everywhere! We tell stories daily, from the simplest of stories about ordinary happenings to unexpected and unusual tales, and even up to dramatic events that may have life-changing consequences. In the process of telling, we craft the story by constructing characters, describing their actions, and putting the actions into sequences. When we listen to stories, we observe, try to make sense, and react with an evaluative position. We assume, surmise, speculate and place value vis-à-vis storytellers’ intent, and what we believe to be true.
Our stories are told using words and language habits that often imbue bias about people’s intent or specific actions.
Prof Bamberg explains that typically there is a dominant story (master narrative) that gets told against a background of assumptions which people believe to be true and which they use to make sense of events and of each other. Woven into these assumptions, are normative life experiences and shared meanings. These more dominant narratives with their background assumptions are used to infer the intent behind people’s action, and often are set within cultural, social, and political systems of power (hegemonic norms).
From this perspective, the dominant background assumptions made when people tell and listen to stories, can in themselves be quite silencing of other stories that might be told against a different set of background assumptions. These alternate assumptions – when told as counter-narratives – enable a different “truth” to be told and heard, allowing alternate lenses of understanding of the same facts of an event.
What is a version of truth and which version should we believe? How do we approach the analysis of different stories so that we can make sense of them?
Prof Bamberg says that stories are always linked to “the particular space and time” in which they are told. One way of approaching a story, is therefore to apply a “narrative practice approach” as a way to unpick or analyse a story. In this approach, the focus moves from trying to infer the storytellers’ subjective perspective, to analysing the “ethnographic interactive context” in which the story is told.
Recognising that there is a context in which a story is communicated and that the story itself serves a “social, relational, and situated” purpose for storytellers and their audience, allows a deeper understanding for how to interpret the story. This requires recognising that stories are fluid and dynamic and can be re-scripted and told differently, using the same overarching storyline or sets of facts.
What is plausible? And what is true?
How does an alternate storyline – or anything that counters dominant (and hegemonic) versions – get believed and potentially can replace dominant versions? Professor Bamberg says that presenting a plausible alternative story that challenges dominant and hegemonic assumptions, enables the space for a new understanding of events to emerge. Thus, contributing to better understand how master, counter and hegemonic narratives get constructed, and the contexts in which they are employed, opens up the possibility to create space within which social change can be accomplished through the crafting of counter narrative.
When a story is intentionally crafted and positioned to plausibly challenge the dominant assumptions of power relations and identities, social change can begin to happen.
Read the whole thing here.
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