Online seminar series - New Methodologies: Narrative, Time, and Everyday Experiences - Session 1

Narrative Inquiry: Using Brandom's Inferential Semantics to Understand "Story-World"

Organised by Dr Brian McDonough, Solent University

Narrative inquiry, a methodology for studying stories of lived experience, has been developing inter-disciplinarily since its emergence in 1990s (Clandinin et al., 2007; Kim, 2016). It engages sociality, temporality, and locality with reflexive and recursive research processes (Clandinin and Caine, 2008).

Narratives, the locus of the methodology, are treated as stories with underlying story-structure (Bruce et al., 2016; Boyd et al., 2020). On the other hand, any narrative with a story structure depends on a primarily unarticulated or underarticulated world that the narrator implicitly claims.

Inferential semantics, developed by the philosopher Robert Brandom (2000), helps to specify this claimed world, where everything said entails commitments inferentially related to each other, and consistently to wide webs of other commitments, including what could be said otherwise, what was said earlier, and what can be expected to say next. One inescapably and implicitly claims herself living in such a world, always unfinished and dynamically shaped by the commitments one makes.

Storytelling is a particular way of making these commitments to claim the validity of the entire world, the “story-world,” that is incompletely revealed through stories one takes as one's own. This research project clarifies the distinction between “story-structure” and “story-world” and argues that certain goals held dear by narrative inquirers can be approached through forms of talk that are non-narrative, yet invoke the story-world and are taken by the speaker as sharing her lived experience. Specifically, the author analyzes three forms of talk of an interviewee in consistency and integration: metaphors and the movements of metaphors, the patterned avoidance of story talk, and the form of writing consciously determined and named by her as “stream-of-consciousness.” What the author calls ‘the coordinating principle’ emerges as the interviewee’s transcending sense of self, which deliberately coordinates the revelation of her story-world without story-structure. While the concept of story-world develops as a methodological innovation and empirical instantiation, it begs for further articulation in more narrative inquiry projects.

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Call for contributors

This online seminar series centres on innovations in research methods and methodologies and is open to scholars with novel approaches to researching narrative, time, and everyday experiences.

Drawing on how we can best understand peoples’ experiences and the places and organisations people encounter, this interdisciplinary seminar series brings together scholars from social and human sciences who have developed or adapted new methodologies for understanding everyday life, with a particular focus on making sense of narratives and time.

Contributors who have a novel method or approach to doing research are particularly welcome, as well as those with unique approaches to unravelling the stories of peoples’ lives, by showcasing the rhythms or flow of human activity, or even its measurement, such as the ordering, sequencing, or close examination of everyday life.

If you are interested in contributing to the series, please email brian.mcdonough@solent.ac.uk.