Faith, Politics, and the Parable of the Kosher Deli: Explorations of Narrative in a Congressional Hearing

This paper takes a discourse analytic approach in exploring how a short narrative, delivered in the testimony of a panel-witness during a 2011 US congressional hearing investigating potential violations of religious liberty in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (commonly known as “Obamacare”), shapes and reflects the larger political conflict over the legislation. Exploring the so-called “parable of the kosher deli” from a structuralist, functionalist, and post-structuralist perspective reveals several key elements of how narratives can function in such a context. The choice of genre not only facilitates communication via a culturally familiar structure, but also positions the communicator reflexively, and in strategic fashion. This choice also provides an efficient means for glossing over the adversary’s most significant concerns: because parables are abstractions meant to reflect back on real situations, one can choose which elements to incorporate, and which to ignore about those situations in one’s interpretation. Additionally, I observe how the parable is an effective means for positioning an opposing side (Davies and Harré, 1990), as the narrative takes aim at not only the government, positioned as an illegitimate disciplinarian, and an inappropriate judge, but also at advocates of the legislation generally, characterized as “off-topic” or else blind to the most important issue. Finally, from a post-structuralist perspective, I note that the narrative, reflecting the general stance of the majority members of committee overseeing the hearing, construes the opposing side as a “generalized other” (Benhabib, 1992), ignoring the role of individual experience, needs, motivations, and desires in the attempt to make a case for broader exemptions to the proposed legislation. Such a move short-circuited any possibility of “elaboration” (Cobb, 2006) in which both sides might have worked toward a mutually agreeable narrative which contained both of the moral perspectives presented. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:I would like to thank Sara Cobb as well as the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Exploring Healthcare Professionals' Use of Narrative Mediation Approaches to Address Disclosure and Apology in the Aftermath of Medical Errors

Despite the overwhelming evidence that suggests that patients, families and health care systems benefit from offering appropriate disclosures and apologies to patients and families following the aftermath of medical errors, few health care organizations in the U.S. invest in providing systemic training in disclosure and apology. Using a narrative analysis this paper explores the cultural barriers in the United States healthcare environment that impede health care providers from engaging in restorative conversations with patients and families when things go wrong. The paper identifies a handful of programs and models that provide disclosure and apology training and argues for the unique contributions of narrative mediation to assist health care professionals to disclose adverse events to patients and families to restore trust.

How To Start A War: Eight Cases of Strategic Provocation

A leader intent on starting a war must develop a compelling narrative for their domestic constituency and the international community. For some, strategic provocation – defined here as the use of deceptive tactics to instigate violence against one's own state – has been a reliable means of initiating war under the guise of self-defense. Eight cases of strategic provocation reveal a basic pattern of its use, and some possibly unwelcome truths about state leaders' methods. As international institutions increasingly scrutinize states' interventionist agendas, the use of deceptive narratives is likely to continue. Despite known indicators of strategic provocation operations, warning of such operations has not typically prevented warfare.

Divine Tyrannical Power and Joban Use of Irony to Resolve Conflict

Sara Cobb begins her book, Speaking of Violence by stating that “stories matter. They have gravitas; they are grave. They have weight. They are concrete. They materialize policies, institutions, relationships, and identities.”[1] Applied to the book of Job 1—2, one can ask, how grave is the story of Job? What conflict does it create? What is at stake in this conflict? What does the story concretize? In this paper I point out that there are two narrative approaches to reading Job's conflict with God. One is that Job does not resist divine power and the other is that he does. If we take it that job does not resist divine power, we implicitly begin fostering stories that can create docility/passivity in the face of imperial power. If we argue that he resists divine power, we create stories that enable people to stand up for their freedoms/rights, hence fostering the idea that conflict cannot be solved by docility but by confronting the powers-that-be, which create conflicts in the first place. In this paper, I argue for the later position.[1] Sara Cobb, Speaking of Violence: The Politics and Poetics of Narrative in Conflict Resolution (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013), 3.

Rewriting Institutional Narratives to Make Amends: The French National Railroads (SNCF)

In 1940, France, threatened with total annexation by Nazi Germany, signed an armistice agreement with Germany that placed the French government in Vichy France and divided the country into an occupied and unoccupied zone. The Armistice also requisitioned the rolling stock of the SNCF—French National Railways—which became a significant arm in the German effort, transporting soldiers, goods, and over 75,000 deportees crammed into merchandise wagons toward Nazi extermination camps. Between 3,000-5,000 survived. Of the roughly 400,000 SNCF employees, Nazis murdered a couple of thousand for resistance or alleged in subordination. Railway men who resisted the Germans also often has to resist their employer as well. After the liberation of French at the end of WWII, the company—not simply the brave individuals -- received France’s Medal of Honor for its alleged role in the ultimate defeat of the Germans. This medal, along with other postwar propaganda in the form of films and books, instilled a singular narrative about the company’s heroic wartime role. This narrative continued uninterrupted until the 1980s. Those who returned, along with the relatives of many who did not, increasingly challenge the company’s simplified wartime narrative. In the 1990s, lawsuits against the company began in France and continue through 2016 in the United States. In response, the SNCF made efforts to intertwine story of deportation with the company narrative of resistance. One key forum for this attempt was a colloquium held in 2000 at the Assemblée Nationale in Paris.That colloquium is examined here through the lenses of three forms of narrative analysis: structural, functional, and post-structural. Each analytic frame illuminates different challenges to that colloquium’s attempts at revising history through altering a mystified institutional narrative. Through the analysis of this case, the author establishes the power of these analytic frameworks when examining problematic discursive spaces that hold in place master narratives and limit moral work.

Narrative Conflict Coaching

Conflict coaching is a relatively new concept, derived from the domain of executive coaching. The concept has gained a foothold in the conflict resolution literature. There have been references made to a narrative practice of conflict coaching but it has not been articulated as fully as it might be. Here we seek to describe such a practice in relation to Foucault’s concept of the care of the self and Deleuze’s concept of the event. We also outline Deleuze’s approach to the reading of time as chronos and aion and show how these different readings might be put to use. A set of guidelines for narrative conflict coaching are proposed and transcribed conversation is provided as a case study to illustrate the process in action. In this conversation, the conflict coach asks questions which lead the client through an exploration of the series of events that make up the conflict story, the externalizing and deconstructing of this conflict story, and the opening of a counter story as a basis for the client’s preferred future conduct in relation to the conflict.

How to Construct a Common Narrative from among the Competing Accounts: Narrative templates as cultural limiters to narrative transformations

Narrative approach to interethnic conflicts considers them as competing stories. In this con-nection, it is argued that for effective conflict resolution the competing narratives should un-dergo certain transformations that could bring them towards their convergence into a common one. However, discussions of narrative transformations to conflict resolution often fail to differentiate between surface narratives and underlying schematic narrative templates. In this regard schematic narrative templates which are deeply entrenched with patterns of collective memory and identity can serve as “cultural limiter” which restrains the process of narrative transformations. This thesis is illustrated through the narrative analysis of the BBC Russian Service video report “Karabakh: Two Versions of the Story” (aired on 18th April, 2011). In the analysis of the BBC video report the author employs some procedures which are suggested by the model of “chronotopic” method.

Coherence Co-constructed: Using Coherence for Analysis and Transformation of Social Conflicts

Narrative coherence is a much-debated subject, primarily because different approaches to coherence leave us with an either/or predicament. We can either pay attention to rather modernist approaches that attempt to map meaning structures in a given text to locate points of coherence; or, we can pay attention to critical approaches that suggest even seeking coherence results in confirming with dominant discourses and narratives in a given context. This article is an attempt in reconciliation between these two approaches to provide an alternative approach to the question: what makes texts cohere? Using a political rally ad Turkish Prime Minister used to counter the protests that took place in Turkey during the summer of 2013, the article demonstrates how coherence is constructed as a relationship between a text and an audience based on semiotic markers that refer to historical and ideological narratives.

Space, Place, & Symbol: Utilizing central places to understand intergroup conflict dynamics

This article will present a new way of capturing highly dynamic intergroup differentiation processes through applying a spatial perspective. Drawing from my experiences collected during several field research visits to Bosnia aimed at assessing Post-Dayton intergroup relations, and inspired by the works of Doreen Massey, Michel De Certeau, and Rom Harré, I will suggest that one key to understanding how groups interpret the behavior of other groups lies in the meaning groups ascribe to the place of their interaction. With the rules of a place limiting the range of actions social agents can chose from, an understanding of ’normal’ behavior is established; which in the same second positions all other possible acts as outside the local moral order. Thus making the right to interpret a central place a favorable position and the interpretation of such a place into a strong positioning act influencing the terms of future interactions. Deciphering the dominant political meanings of central places on which intergroup interactions take place therefore becomes a promising way of understanding intergroup positioning processes. Approximating to the meanings local groups ascribe to central places, however, is in need of a thorough interpretational framework; one possible framework, based on analyzing the symbols that are used in the interpretational acts themselves, will round up this spatial approach to understanding intergroup interactions.

Exploring the Nature of Narrative Analysis in Maps: the Case Study of the Georgia-South Ossetia Conflict

The use of narrative analyses has been used to further our understanding of conflict. While maps have been recognized as objects of power and identity, study of them as narratives has until recently been under-developed. This paper will present exploratory narrative study of maps and mapping associated with a conflict case study; Georgia and South Ossetia in the Caucasus. Texts and stories embedded into Western cartographical maps will be examined using structuralist, functionalist and post-structuralist analyses.