Narrative analysis

Narrative data allows a researcher to “access the world of the storyteller”

(Etherington, 2004, p. 80). But, as understandably noted by Riessman (2005), narratives “do not speak for themselves or have unanalysed merit; they require interpretation when used as data” (p. 2). This section concludes the chapter on methodology by outlining the ways the data were analysed. Narrative analysis of the data took place upon every research encounter and underlays the methodologies in the articles. It is especially well presented in Article 4 in a comparative analytical vein. In order to be interpreted upon the collection, the data were grouped according to their types: visual material was watched through, textual data were digitalised, the audiovisual narrative data were transcribed and translated into English where it was necessary. All the data were stored in two copies on two hard drives.

What is to happen next, according to Donald Polkinghorne (1995), is the locating of “common themes or conceptual manifestations among the stories collected as data” (p.13). He suggests looking for two kinds of clues during narrative analysis: a) concepts derived from previously known theories, which are applied to the data; b) concepts derived from the data. When interpreting the former, confirmation bias is to be paid attention to (Greenwald, Leippe, Pratkanis

& Baumgardner, 1986). It was already explained in detail in the beginning of Chapter 2 that the cloud of themes kept transforming and how the previously known theories and themes were fuelled through the narrative data from one research encounter to another. Further in this section I will specify the analytical processes the data underwent after each fieldwork episode.

In case studies Have you heard? and Shop around the corner the fragments of the told stories were examined against spaces they related to, being often already very site-specific. It was asked how they could perform a meaningful and mutually enriching, even if temporary, relationship when paired up with the space.

In Article 1, the artistic and spatial components of such a pairing are discussed more prominently, while Article 3 focuses rather on the stories themselves. In the Margin to margin sub-cases the narratives were also interpreted in the contexts of participants’ places and histories, but more globally, taking that site and situation-specific story and letting it travel the world with the objective of gaining a voice and audience and, in order to resonate, compare itself to and find similarities with other life stories from faraway (see Articles 2, 4 and 5). Making creative sense of the obtained data occurred through brainstorming, mind mapping, writing and other creative exercises. The data was dealt with from an ethical perspective, and personal narratives processed with respect and consideration of what to include and what to leave out of the further process, in other words making sure that the

“discussions about ethics complement those on aesthetics” (Rendell, 2007, p.

152). The narratives shared by the communities bore both artistic and academic value in all cases.

Video-editing is a crucial part of narrative and visual data analysis and, perhaps, the most ethically sensitive, too. Onsès and Hernández-Hernández (2017) suggest to step away from understanding the video-editing process as stable and the video as truthful data for analysis, instead approaching it as a complex multifaceted process of knowing:

…an ontological (what reality is depicted), epistemological (which knowledge is generated), methodological (how entanglements are visualised), and ethical (how the actors’ performances generate subjectivities) researching move (p.

67).

During the third phase of fieldwork, initial narrative analysis through video-editing was carried out by our documentalist on the spot. I understand this video-editing as narrative analysis in two ways. Firstly, through editing, a storyline, a narrative is being built in order to communicate an event or encounter. Secondly, all of the explicit verbal narratives and tacit bodily narrations of that event, as well as implicit narratives captured visually from the environment come together as a complex set of data for analysis. In the case study Margin to margin, the objective was to produce short field journal videos “on the go” in order to ensure the transparency and active communication between the communities and wider audiences. The more thorough re-editing of the material for different contexts, such as exhibitions, was due later, upon the completion of fieldwork. This initial process of dealing with data rather urgently, with “wide brushstrokes” prompted fast transcription and analysis and allowed for initial sense-making. Editing of narratives in any form, visual or written, is a subject for ethical consideration, as it implies a degree of data manipulation and decisions on what to keep and what to leave out by one researcher or a small group of researchers. These choices are similar to what Ricoeur (1984) refers to as memory and forgetting. He warns against “a crafted form of forgetfulness” where social actors lose the power “to narrate themselves” (Ricoeur, 1984, p. 448-449). Mindful of this authorship issue, my colleagues and I resorted to the said fast narrative analysis through video editing in order to be able to consult with the research participants and ensure their ethical representation.

The video interviews conducted with the Leith Walk shop owners and employees in Edinburgh (four interviews with six participants) and visual notes of the shops and the street were compiled in a documentary film Silk Road, a 30-minute reflection on transculturation phenomena taking place in contemporary Europe, with a focus on material culture (Figure 8).

A video-recorded dialogue, a sharing of memories, between two of the traders in Cork, alongside audio-recordings of the other participants’ memories of the street and the visual notes of the shops and the neighbourhood were compiled in a documentary film homonymous to the name of the project Shop around the

corner, a 16-minute essay on neighbourhood, site-specific art and storytelling (Figure 8).

Figure 8. Stills from the documentary films Silk Road (Edinburgh, UK) and Shop around the corner (Cork, Ireland).

The rich audiovisual data collected during the four research encounters of Margin to margin was edited in the following final videos:

a) seven field journal videos published in the project’s video channel during the fieldwork: 29 minutes in length, on average around 4 minutes each;

b) three videos as a part of Conversations with the edge sub-project curated by Dr Sarantou, where the research participants sent video messages to their counterparts in other locations, also published in the project’s video channel during the fieldwork: 14 minutes in length altogether;

c) three videos for the final exhibition of the project: Collaborative felting video of 18 minutes; Conversations with the Edge video of 38 minutes; and Life Story Mandalas video of 1 hour 3 minutes (Figure 9).

Figure 9. Stills from the exhibition videos Life Story Mandalas and Conversations with the Edge screened in Helinä Rautavaaran Museo, Espoo (Finland) and Yarta Purtli Gallery, Port Augusta (Australia).

The data reported on throughout Section 3.2. are summarised in Table 3 in relation to the respective articles and case studies.

Table 3. Summary of research data, methods and outcomes.

In this chapter on research methodology, I explained my research design through the two overarching methods of ABR, reflexive research and the applied research strategies. Ethical considerations were also outlined with care, alongside formal ethical procedures and clearances. Further, the data collection and analysis methods were put into the context of the fieldwork and complemented by the numeric data.

Chapter 4 serves as a “process chapter” that will guide the reader through the more tacit and fluid processes that occurred in the field and thereafter.

4. MEDIATIONS

This chapter serves as a transition vehicle from the understanding of the methodology of the study towards the concrete findings the research resulted in.

Here I attempt to reflect from a distance on the research processes and encounters in order to make sense of them in a more holistic way and with a perspective on representation and dissemination of research and artistic outcomes, placing my curatorial practice at the centre of this study. The chapter will explain the ways I approached, explicitly or tacitly, the mediation of complexities between the different actors, narratives, places/spaces and practices that were a part of this process of inquiry. This chapter will also introduce in depth all of the three case studies.

In his lecture at CCA Glasgow, Ingold (2018) points out a linguistic connection between the words curiosity and curate which both originate from the Latin curare,

“to take care of”. He builds a parallel between the common origin of the words and the phenomenon in art, research and curatorial practices that is based on care participants better through narratives and art-making, “narratives of care”

(Sarantou 2014, p. 194) would emerge more and more clearly through their stories.

The storytellers in my study narrated and performed care towards their immediate places and communities and those far away, the timespaces of their memory worlds, the fellow storytellers, and even towards me and my colleagues as we came to join them for a short moment in time. This becomes clear in Article 3 through the narratives of care shared by the immigrant shop owners in relation to their local community, both their fellow migrants and the natives of Edinburgh, that further translates into mutual familiarity and sense of belonging. The participants also practised care through their art and craft, importantly recognising that they are “making the self in the act of making” (Fry, 2011, p. 208). In the processes described in Article 2 this manifested on two levels. The tangibility of familiar art materials—raffia for weaving, textiles and paint, wool for felting—ensured suitable environments for art-making where the participants comfortably recognised their makers’ selves, while the actual processes of making enabled the explicit oral narration of those makers’ selves and other stories.

Throughout the study I have been occupied with the challenges of curation and representation. Despite the pre-field planning, it was initially challenging to put

into words the intangible circumstances that were created in order for these narratives of care to emerge. And upon the completion of the fieldwork, how was I to further curate all of the experiences of my study in order to recount them in multiple contexts with due care? And, in fact, how do these experiences curate my own professional and personal life ahead?

Despite being intrigued by Ingold’s poetic triangle of curiosity-care-curation, I choose to use the word mediation instead, due to possible “top-down”

connotations of the term curation, as well as its association predominantly with the field of art history and the gallery space (e.g. see the critique in Oprea, 2017). The concept of mediation is likely to be used in the context of conflict resolution (e.g.

Winslade, Monk, & Cotte, 1998). Art mediation, in its turn, implies the processes helping an artwork to enter the public gaze (e.g. Jefferies, 2013; Sitzia, 2016). In the context of this research, it can be understood as both of the above.

In marginal in-between contexts, where individuals, communities and places have to constantly negotiate their roles, identities and external relationships, a need for interpersonal mediation is to be anticipated. As a researcher steps into the field, she contributes an additional, though temporary, destabilising factor to the life worlds of her research participants (Kimpson, 2005). The processes they go through together during fieldwork are likely to unearth even more realities causing internal or external conflicts that the researcher is to foresee and meditate ethically, reflexively and empathically through the creation of safe spaces.

This fieldwork, apart from being carried out through arts-based methods, also produced artistic outcomes that further entered physical and digital spaces of public display. The transition of such outcomes from being conceived narratively, through production and becoming spaces, towards the encounter with audiences is also a process of dynamic mediation implemented by the researcher. This mediation fluctuates from navigating the storytelling in every encounter, through to collective creation and immediate presentation of artistic outcomes in public spaces described in Articles 1, 2 and 3, to further recreation of the encounters in physical and digital spaces as discussed Articles 4 and 5.

My field is the space where a story and a storyteller meet an “active listener”, the researcher, through the medium of arts in a place in time, all of the elements are crucial, none of them more or less significant that the others. Throughout the fieldwork, the researcher is given inputs that are further transformed into outputs.

Narratives, together with the narrated identities, are an input during data collection, both for the researcher and the narrators themselves. They become an output upon the analysis and representation. Identity work happens and the newly made sense of identities becomes an outcome not only when analysed by the researcher, but also while narrated by the research participant. Reflexivity aids these transformations of narratives and identities.

Place is an input, a starting point for the research encounter. Together we practise it into a shared space, which then becomes an output. Artistic practice is a vehicle to get us all through this journey resulting in artwork as an outcome.

Mediation is all the processes in between. Figure 10 visualises the relationships between the research inputs and outputs described here.

Figure 10. Visualisation of research inputs and outputs.

In Section 4.1. I will talk about the processes of mediation that took place throughout the different stages of my research journey: how the mediation of narratives, spaces and audiences was performed.

Section 4.2. will introduce the communities and cases in greater detail inviting the reader to view them now from the position of familiarity with the methods implemented with them and the data they contributed. In the description of the case studies more occurrences of mediation processes will be demonstrated.

4.1. MEDIATION OF NARRATIVES, AUDIENCES AND SPACES