From Notes to Narrative

From Notes to Narrative

Author: Kristen Ghodsee

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-05-10

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 022625769X

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Ethnography centers on the culture of everyday life. So it is ironic that most scholars who do research on the intimate experiences of ordinary people write their books in a style that those people cannot understand. In recent years, the ethnographic method has spread from its original home in cultural anthropology to fields such as sociology, marketing, media studies, law, criminology, education, cultural studies, history, geography, and political science. Yet, while more and more students and practitioners are learning how to write ethnographies, there is little or no training on how to write ethnographies well. From Notes to Narrative picks up where methodological training leaves off. Kristen Ghodsee, an award-winning ethnographer, addresses common issues that arise in ethnographic writing. Ghodsee works through sentence-level details, such as word choice and structure. She also tackles bigger-picture elements, such as how to incorporate theory and ethnographic details, how to effectively deploy dialogue, and how to avoid distracting elements such as long block quotations and in-text citations. She includes excerpts and examples from model ethnographies. The book concludes with a bibliography of other useful writing guides and nearly one hundred examples of eminently readable ethnographic books.


Tales of the Field

Tales of the Field

Author: John Van Maanen

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2011-07

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 0226849643

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Once upon a time ethnographers returning from the field simply sat down, shuffled their note cards, and wrote up their descriptions of the exotic and quaint customs they had observed. Today scholars in all disciplines are realizing how their research is presented is at least as important as what is presented. Questions of voice, style, and audience--the classic issues of rhetoric--have come to the forefront in academic circles. John Van Maanen, an experienced ethnographer of modern organizational structures, is one who believes that the real work begins when he returns to his office with cartons of notes and tapes. In Tales of the Field he offers readers a survey of the narrative conventions associated with writing about culture and an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of various styles. He introduces first the matter-of-fact, realistic report of classical ethnography, then the self-absorbed confessional tale of the participant-observer, and finally the dramatic vignette of the new impressionistic style. He also considers, more briefly, literary tales, jointly told tales, and the theoretically focused formal and critical tales. Van Maanen illustrates his discussion of each style with excerpts from his own work on the police. Tales of the Field offers an informal, readable, and lighthearted treatment of the rhetorical devices used to present the results of fieldwork. Though Van Maanen argues ultimately for the validity of revealing the self while representing a culture, he is sensitive to the differing methods and aims of sociology and anthropology. His goal is not to establish one true way to write ethnography, but rather to make ethnographers of all varieties examine their assumptions about what constitutes a truthful cultural portrait and select consciously and carefully the voice most appropriate for their tales. Written with grace and humor, Tales of the Field will be an invaluable introduction to novices just learning the fieldwork trade and provocative stimulant to veteran ethnographers. "Engaging and well written."--H. Ottenheimer, Choice


Analyzing Narrative Reality

Analyzing Narrative Reality

Author: Jaber F. Gubrium

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1412952190

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Considers both the texts and everyday contexts of the storytelling process with accompanying guidelines for analysis and illustrations from empirical material.


From Me to We

From Me to We

Author: Jason Griffith

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-08-19

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1317290070

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With this practical book, you’ll learn effective ways to engage students in reading and writing by teaching them narrative nonfiction. By engaging adolescents in narrative, literary, or creative nonfiction, they can cultivate a greater understanding of themselves, the world around them, and what it means to feel empathy for others. This book will guide you to first structure a reading unit around a narrative nonfiction text, and then develop lessons and activities for students to craft their own personal essays. Topics include: Engaging your students in the reading of a nonfiction narrative with collaborative chapter notes, empathy check-ins, and a mini-research paper to deepen students’ understanding; Helping your students identify meaningful life events, recount their experiences creatively, and construct effective opening and closing lines for their personal essays; Encouraging your students to use dialogue, outside research, and a clear plot structure to make their narrative nonfiction more compelling and polished. The strategies in this book are supplemented by examples of student work and snapshots from the author’s own classroom. The book also includes interviews with narrative nonfiction writers MK Asante and Johanna Bear. The appendices offer additional tips for using narrative nonfiction in English class, text and online resources for teaching narrative nonfiction, and a correlation chart between the activities in this book and the Common Core Standards.


Notes from the Edge of the Narrative Matrix

Notes from the Edge of the Narrative Matrix

Author: Caitlin Johnstone

Publisher:

Published: 2021-03-11

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9780645022124

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We each inhabit two very different worlds simultaneously: the real world, and the narrative world.The real physical world of matter, of atoms and molecules and stars and planets and animals wandering around trying to bite and copulate with each other often has very little to do with the narrative world, which is made of stories and mental chatter. Powerful people have long understood that if you control the stories people tell about themselves, then you can control their resources and their reality. From priests to politicians, CEOs to the architects of war, all have deeply understood the importance of maintaining control of the narrative. We have reached a crisis point where the disconnect between narrative and reality is threatening all life on earth. The narrative world is getting more and more chimerical while the real world is headed toward disaster due to the military and ecological pressures created by our status quo. There are only a few ways this can possibly break, with the most obvious being mass scale ecological disaster or nuclear war. There is also the possibility that the human species goes the other way and adapts, and wakes up to the way narrative has been used to manipulate us into consenting to our own extinction. Throughout recorded history, all around the globe, wise humans have been attesting that it is possible to transcend our delusion-rooted conditioning and come to a lucid perception of the narrative world and reality. There are many names for this lucid perception, but the one that caught on most widely is enlightenment. We all have this potential within us. It has been gestating in us for many millennia. As we approach our adaptation-or-extinction juncture, we are very close indeed to learning if that potential will awaken in us or not.This book rests on the meniscus of that possibility.


Inventing the New Negro

Inventing the New Negro

Author: Daphne Mary Lamothe

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2008-07-25

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0812240936

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It is no coincidence, Daphne Lamothe writes, that so many black writers and intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century either trained formally as ethnographers or worked as amateur collectors of folklore and folk culture. In Inventing the New Negro Lamothe explores the process by which key figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Sterling Brown adapted ethnography and folklore in their narratives to create a cohesive, collective, and modern black identity. Lamothe explores how these figures assumed the roles of self-reflective translators and explicators of African American and African diasporic cultures to Western, largely white audiences. Lamothe argues that New Negro writers ultimately shifted the presuppositions of both literary modernism and modernist anthropology by making their narratives as much about ways of understanding as they were about any quest for objective knowledge. In critiquing the ethnographic framework within which they worked, they confronted the classist, racist, and cultural biases of the dominant society and challenged their readers to imagine a different set of relations between the powerful and the oppressed. Inventing the New Negro combines an intellectual history of one of the most important eras of African American letters with nuanced and original readings of seminal works of literature. It will be of interest not only to Harlem Renaissance scholars but to anyone who is interested in the intersections of culture, literature, folklore, and ethnography.


Narrative Change

Narrative Change

Author: Hans Hansen

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2020-07-28

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 0231545487

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Texas prosecutors are powerful: in cases where they seek capital punishment, the defendant is sentenced to death over ninety percent of the time. When management professor Hans Hansen joined Texas’s newly formed death penalty defense team to rethink their approach, they faced almost insurmountable odds. Yet while Hansen was working with the office, they won seventy of seventy-one cases by changing the narrative for death penalty defense. To date, they have succeeded in preventing well over one hundred executions—demonstrating the importance of changing the narrative to change our world. In this book, Hansen offers readers a powerful model for creating significant organizational, social, and institutional change. He unpacks the lessons of the fight to change capital punishment in Texas—juxtaposing life-and-death decisions with the efforts to achieve a cultural shift at Uber. Hansen reveals how narratives shape our everyday lives and how we can construct new narratives to enact positive change. This narrative change model can be used to transform corporate cultures, improve public services, encourage innovation, craft a brand, or even develop your own leadership. Narrative Change provides an unparalleled window into an innovative model of change while telling powerful stories of a fight against injustice. It reminds us that what matters most for any organization, community, or person is the story we tell about ourselves—and the most effective way to shake things up is by changing the story.


Time and Narrative, Volume 1

Time and Narrative, Volume 1

Author: Paul Ricoeur

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1990-09-15

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780226713328

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In the first two volumes of this work, Paul Ricoeur examined the relations between time and narrative in historical writing, fiction and theories of literature. This final volume, a comprehensive reexamination and synthesis of the ideas developed in volumes 1 and 2, stands as Ricoeur's most complete and satisfying presentation of his own philosophy.


Houston, We Have a Narrative

Houston, We Have a Narrative

Author: Randy Olson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-09-15

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 022627098X

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Communicate more effectively about science—by taking a page from Hollywood and improving your storytelling skills. Ask a scientist about Hollywood, and you’ll probably get eye rolls. But ask someone in Hollywood about science, and they’ll see dollar signs: Moviemakers know that science can be the source of great stories, with all the drama and action that blockbusters require. That’s a huge mistake, says Randy Olson: Hollywood has a lot to teach scientists about how to tell a story—and, ultimately, how to do science better. With Houston, We Have a Narrative, he lays out a stunningly simple method for turning the dull into the dramatic. Drawing on his unique background, which saw him leave his job as a working scientist to launch a career as a filmmaker, Olson first diagnoses the problem: When scientists tell us about their work, they pile one moment and one detail atop another moment and another detail—a stultifying procession of “and, and, and.” What we need instead is an understanding of the basic elements of story, the narrative structures that our brains are all but hardwired to look for—which Olson boils down, brilliantly, to “And, But, Therefore,” or ABT. At a stroke, the ABT approach introduces momentum (“And”), conflict (“But”), and resolution (“Therefore”)—the fundamental building blocks of story. As Olson has shown by leading countless workshops worldwide, when scientists’ eyes are opened to ABT, the effect is staggering: suddenly, they’re not just talking about their work—they’re telling stories about it. And audiences are captivated. Written with an uncommon verve and enthusiasm, and built on principles that are applicable to fields far beyond science, Houston, We Have a Narrative has the power to transform the way science is understood and appreciated, and ultimately how it’s done.


Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality

Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality

Author: Dell Hymes

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2003-09-02

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 113574565X

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This collection of work addresses the contribution that ethnography and linguistics make to education, and the contribution that research in education makes to anthropology and linguistics.; The first section of the book pinpoints characteristics of anthropology that most make a difference to research in education. The second section describes the perspective that is needed if the study of language is to contribute adequately to problems of education and inequality. Finally, the third section takes up discoveries about narrative, which show that young people's narratives may have a depth of form and skill that has gone largely unrecognized.