“You Have No Story, Yet!” The Role of the Online Community in Shaping Women’s ‘My Stories’ About the Journey to Motherhood

This article offers a folkloristic analysis of telling personal experience stories in the Estonian Midwives Association’s Family School discussion forum (www.perekool.ee), focusing on the Conception, Pregnancy and Childbirth sub-forums. In the article women’s My Stories about their journey to motherhood are under discussion. The central question is how the practice of telling these stories is shaped and affected by the peculiarities of the online community, its communication space, traditions, and daily operation. The article seeks to answer this question in relation to the following topics: accepted and non-accepted topics and experiences; the message of the stories; the structure of the stories; vocabulary competence; and the style of storytelling. From the theoretical perspective, the focus is on participatory storytelling, that is, on the interplay of the specific online environment, narrator, story, and group, as well as the process by which the teller and the audience co-create the stories.

Investigating ‘care leaver’ identity: A narrative analysis of personal experience stories

People who spent time in public care as children are often represented as ‘care leavers’. This paper investigates how ‘care leaver’ is discursively constructed as a group identity, by analyzing 18 written personal experience stories from several charity websites by people identified or who self-identify as care leavers. Several approaches to narrative analysis are used: a clause-level analysis based on Labovʼs code scheme; the identification of turning points; an analysis of ‘identity work’; and an analysis of subject positions relative to ‘master narratives’. The findings from each of the methods are then combined to reveal how intertextual, narrative-structural, and contextual factors combine to constitute a common care leaver discourse. This forms the basis for a characterization of ‘care leaver’ group identity as ‘survivors of the system’. The findings also reveal how ‘care leaver’ as type, including stereotype, influences how identity is constructed in the personal experience narratives.

American Legends, Anecdotes, and Personal Narratives

Legends, anecdotes, and personal narratives express important dimensions of human experience and values. At times of difficulty, uncertainty, and threat, these narratives help people express worries and seek answers to disturbing questions. Related to rituals, games, and pranks, legends frequently appear on the Internet. The concept of ostension—enactment of legends—sheds light on legends’ relationship to ritual, especially in the context of the legend quest. Legends about gender, empowerment of women, suspicion of corporations’ nefarious activities, and natural and political disaster reflect society’s contemporary concerns. Folklorists benefit from further study of diverse ethnic groups’ legends and personal experience stories in American culture. With new forms of ostension emerging through use of the Internet and other technology, it is important to monitor and analyze expressive behavior online.

“Hello Central, Give Me Doctor Jazz”: Auto/Ethnographic Improvisation as Educational Event in Doctoral Supervision

Through exchanges within a doctoral supervision, the authors explore a range of dilemmas and challenges for reflexive inquiry. These include the problematic business of naming, the impossibility of objective separation of self from research, the merging of researcher subjectivities, and differences between performance and performativity. We note the educational potential in what can conventionally be considered “unprofessional” approaches to qualitative inquiry: neologisms, personal experience, stories, conversations, music, poetry, paintings, and film. We engage in reflexive interactions with each other and with such “data.” This was undertaken in the spirit of jazz improvisation—an unrehearsed performance—something that “happened,” an unplanned educational event but also an agency enabled by structure.

Uskon performatiivit kokemuskerronnassa

The article is focused on the construction of a relationship between religious faith and personal narratives. The hypothesis advanced is that the maintenance of religious convictions within charismatic Christianity takes place thorough sharing personal experience stories, in which the course of everyday life is interpreted biblically. The article is based on interview material. The interviewees are members of the Word of Faith congregation in Turku. The congregation represents the Faith Movement originating in North America, which was brought to Finland via Sweden (Livets Ord) at the beginning of the 1990s. The writer combines the ideas of socio-psychology of religion (mainly role theory) and narrative research, which applies the idea of performative speech in speech act theory.