scholarly journals Disability as Difference - A Fictional Representation

Author(s):  
Jonathon Breen

This study presents three perspectives about how the life experience of individuals with disabilities is profoundly affected by the attitudes of others. A first perspective is presented by three individuals who had sustained significant, traumatic injuries. They each shared with me their experiences with acceptance and the attitudes of others. A second perspective comes from me, as the author of this article. As a person with a virtually lifelong disability, I have interpreted those experiences through a lens mediated by my own relationship to disability. These interpretations have informed a third perspective, that of a fictional representation of the role that the attitudes of others play in the lives of individuals with disabilities. That representation of attitude is presented as a one-act play. Within an oral history framework of narrative inquiry, the play offers a synthesis and restorying of the meanings inherent in each of these individual stories. Its purpose is to provide the reader/audience with a more intimate understanding of disability, demonstrating the relationship between others’ perceptions of disability and its apparently significant and categorical difference from the mainstream. Finally, the implications of this perception of disability as difference are made specific within the context of the ongoing employment challenges that continue to confront individuals living with disabilities.

Author(s):  
Brahma Prakash

Folk performances reflect the life-worlds of a vast section of subaltern communities in India. What is the philosophy that drives these performances, the vision that enables as well as enslaves these communities to present what they feel, think, imagine, and want to see? Can such performances challenge social hierarchies and ensure justice in a caste-ridden society? In Cultural Labour, the author studies bhuiyan puja (land worship), bidesia (theatre of migrant labourers), Reshma-Chuharmal (Dalit ballads), dugola (singing duels) from Bihar, and the songs and performances of Gaddar, who was associated with Jana Natya Mandali, Telangana: he examines various ways in which meanings and behaviour are engendered in communities through rituals, theatre, and enactments. Focusing on various motifs of landscape, materiality, and performance, the author looks at the relationship between culture and labour in its immediate contexts. Based on an extensive ethnography and the author’s own life experience as a member of such a community, the book offers a new conceptual framework to understand the politics and aesthetics of folk performance in the light of contemporary theories of theatre and performance studies.


2021 ◽  
pp. 194084472199108
Author(s):  
Michelle Lavoie ◽  
Vera Caine

In this paper, we explore, name, and unpack the possibilities that printmaking, as an art form, holds in visual narrative inquiry. We also explore the relationship between visual narrative inquiry and narrative inquiry, a relational qualitative research methodology that attends to experiences. Drawing on two different ongoing narrative inquiry studies, where we engage with either trans young adults or refugee families from Syria with pre-school children, we explore how printmaking practices facilitate processes of inquiry. The etymology of the word “frame” helps us understand framing as a process that is future oriented and reflects a sense of doing, making, or preforming. In this way, framing allows us to see otherwise, to respond to and with participants, and to engage with experiences in ways that open new possibilities of inquiry.


2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-40
Author(s):  
Ryoko Okamura

Abstract This article examines the relationship between the Japanese American redress movement and the oral interviews of two Japanese immigrant women, known as Issei women. Focusing on the shared images of Issei women in the Japanese American community and the perspectives and self-representations of the interviewees in the oral interviews, it explores how cultural consensus produced stereotypical, collective images of Issei women as submissive, persevering, and quiet persons. As the redress movement progressed in the 1960s to the 1980s, the Japanese American community conducted oral history projects to preserve memories and legacies of their wartime experiences. There are dissimilarities between the original audio recordings and the published transcripts regarding the perspectives of Issei women. This article shows how the community’s desire to preserve idealized images of Issei men and women reduced the accuracy and nuances in the women’s self-representations and the complexities of family relations. Also, contrary to the collective images, Issei women demonstrated how they were independent, assertive, and open individuals expressing their perspectives, complicated emotions, and importance in the family.


Author(s):  
Robert B. Perks

For decades, oral historians and their tape recorders have been inseparable, but it has also been an uneasy marriage of convenience. The recorder is both our “tool of trade” and also that part of the interview with which historians are least comfortable. Oral historians' relationship with archivists has been an uneasy one. From the very beginnings of the modern oral history movement in the 1940s, archivists have played an important role. The arrival of “artifact-free” digital audio recorders and mass access via the Internet has transformed the relationship between the historian and the source. Accomplished twenty-first-century oral history practitioners are now expected to acquire advanced technological skills to capture, preserve, analyze, edit, and present their data to ever larger audiences. The development of oral history in many parts of the world was influenced by the involvement of sound archivists and librarians. Digital revolution in the present century continues to influence oral history.


2006 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcos Fábio Freire Montysuma

Neste trabalho refletimos sobre a produção e os usos das fontes e dos instrumentos metodológicos que orientam as ações na condução do trabalho do historiador que lida com o que se convencionou chamar História Oral. Buscamos discutir a singularidade do trabalho de campo, envolvendo a relação entre o pesquisador e as pessoas ouvidas, como condição de uma ciência que lida essencialmente com o indivíduo. Abstract In this article we reflect upon the production and uses of sources and methodological tools which guide the actions of the historian who deals with the field conventionally referred to as Oral History. We aim at discussing the singularity of field work, bringing into play the relationship between the researcher and people who are listened to – a vital condition for a science that essentially deals with the individual. Palavras-chave: Fontes. Metodologia. História Oral. Key words: Sources. Methodology. Oral History.


2008 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 280-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luiza Akiko Komura Hoga

Adolescent maternity involves relevant factors associated with each family, culture and society. This research aimed to describe the experiences in the trajectory of adolescent maternity. The oral history method was used, obtaining the narratives of 21 adolescent mothers living in a low income community located in São Paulo City, Brazil. The following descriptive categories emerged from the narratives: Pregnancy: an event in the initial phase of the relationship; Insufficient knowledge and access to contraceptives, gender inferiority and God's will: the ways to look at pregnancy; To escape from family problems and define the life course: the personal meanings attributed to pregnancy; More gain than pain: the balance of adolescent maternity. Adolescent maternity in low income contexts involves very complex factors and requires an integral, integrated, personal and family centered care.


2002 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Harrison

This paper examines the ways in which photographic images can be used in narrative inquiry. After introducing the renewed interest in visual methodology the first section examines the ways in which researchers have utilised the camera or photographic images in research studies that are broadly similar to forms of narrative inquiry such as auto/biography, photographic journals, video diaries and photo-voice. It then draws on the published literature in relation to the author’s own empirical research into everyday photography. Here the extent to which the practices which are part of everyday photography can be seen as forms of story-telling and provide access to both narratives and counter-narratives, are explored. Ideas about memory and identity construction are considered. A critical area of argument centres on the relationship of images to other texts, and asks whether it is possible for photographs to narrate independent of written or oral word. It concludes with some remarks about how photographs can be used in research and as a resource for narrative inquiry. This necessitates a understanding of what it is people do with photographs in everyday life.


Author(s):  
Maggi Savin-Baden

This paper presents a study that used narrative inquiry to explore staff experiences of learning and teaching in immersive worlds. The findings introduced issues relating to identity play, the relationship between pedagogy and play and the ways in which learning, play and fun were managed (or not). At the same time there was a sense of imposed or created values systems that introduced questions and challenges about what learning became or meant in these spaces. The issues identified by this small scale study may offer some purchase on concerns which appear to be emerging with the digitisation of our lives.


2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul S.C. Taçon

In 2002, an investigation into the rock art of Waanyi country was undertaken in conjunction with ongoing archaeological excavation. Various subjects, styles and techniques were documented, associated oral history from Waanyi elders was recorded and the relationship to archaeological deposits was assessed. A large number of rainbow-like designs, in red or red-and-yellow, were recorded, along with a magnificent and very large red-and-yellow Rainbow Serpent. These and other images are discussed in relation to the travels of Ancestral Beings, stories and uses of coloured pigment and the use of local stone for both tools and the situating of important spiritual sites. Links to a network of other communities across northern and central Australia are highlighted. It is concluded that colour played a fundamental role in both expressing and maintaining relationships to places, Ancestral Beings and other groups of people. Important local differences can be seen in comparison to the ways in which colour has been used by Aboriginal people elsewhere. The research highlights ways in which the study of colour can prove valuable to archaeology globally.


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