KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
D. Jean Clandinin, PhD
professor, Faculty of educAtion, University of Alberta
Potentials and Possibilities of Narrative Inquiry
In this talk, Dr. Clandinin will highlight important concepts, tensions and possibilities in narrative inquiry. Working with the ideas of narrative inquiry as relational inquiry, she will open up some of the tensions in engaging in narrative inquiry through a reflective turn on studies in which she is currently engaged. The two studies, one engaged with by living alongside children, families and teachers, in order to study curriculum making both in and outside of school, and the other engaged with by hearing the stories of youth who left school early, offer her pause to reflect on the relational in narrative inquiry.
D. Jean Clandinin is Professor and Director of the Centre for Research for Teacher Education and Development at the University of Alberta. She is a former teacher, counselor, and psychologist. She is the coauthor with F. Michael Connelly of four books (including Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research) and many chapters and articles. Jean edited the Handbook of Narrative Inquiry: Mapping a Methodology (Sage, 2007) and co-authored Composing Diverse Identities (Routledge, 2006). Jean has received numerous awards from the American Educational Research Association (including Early Career Scholar in 1993, Division B’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001) and from the University of Alberta (Kaplan Award for Excellence in Research, 2001; Killam Professorship, 2003; Killam Mentoring Award, 2009) and other national awards (Whitworth Award). She and her colleagues are finishing narrative inquiries into the experiences of early school leavers and she is continuing work with Huber, Murphy, Mitton, and Murray-Orr on a narrative inquiry into children’s, families and teachers’ curriculum making.
Kenneth Gergen, PhD
Senior Research Professor, Swarthmore College, USA
Mary Gergen, PhD
Professor Emerita, Pennsylvania State University, USA
Perspectives on "The Narrative Turn": Where It's Been, Where It's Bound"
In hopes of stimulating productive deliberation, the speakers will draw from some 25 years of work with narrative issues to focus on four major concerns: the ideological saturation of narrative study, the functions of narration in social life, stories told vs. stories lived, and the societal utility of narrative scholarship. Reflection on these issues will also be used as a stimulus to generating new directions of inquiry and practice.
Kenneth J. Gergen is a Senior Research Professor at Swarthmore College, and the President of the Taos Institute. He is internationally known for his development of social constructionist theory and practices, and for his relational views on human action. His work on narrative has played a major role in both these ventures. Among his major works are Realities and Relationships, The Saturated Self, and An Invitation to Social Construction (2nd ed.). His most recent work, Relational Being, Beyond Self and Community (Oxford University Press) represents a unifying view of the relational self and its implications for practice. Gergen is the Associate Editor of Theory and Psychology, a position in which he has also served for the American Psychologist. He has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He is currently exploring issues in qualitative inquiry, representation as performance, cultural psychology, Buddhist psychology, dialogic and practices, and the acculturated brain. He also holds honorary degrees in both the U.S. and Europe. He collaborates with his wife, Mary Gergen, in many of these pursuits. Their collaborative work in narrative, dialogue, qualitative inquiry, performance, and the Taos Institute (www.taosinstitute.net) is especially noteworthy. Mary and Ken also collaborate in the publication of the Positive Aging Newsletter (www.positiveaging.net), currently distributed to thousands of subscribers in five languages.
Mary Gergen is an independent scholar and Professor Emerita of Psychology and Women's Studies at Penn State University, Brandywine, where she taught for 22 years. Her major interests have involved feminist theory and social constructionist ideas, and this involvement has been manifested in a variety of publications and presentations, most especially in Feminist Reconstructionism in Psychology: Narrative, Gender, and Performance (Sage, 2001) and in an edited volume with Sara N. Davis, Toward a new Psychology of Gender: A Reader (Routledge, 1997). She has been active in narrative studies for many years, both in terms of theoretical issues related to narratives and topically, with the study of gender and narrative form. Gender issues have evolved into a special concern with aging, which began in 1990 when she published "Finished at 40" in The Psychology of Women Quarterly and has continued to the present with review chapters on positive aging, such as “Positive Aging: Reconstructing the Life Course” with Kenneth J. Gergen. Also with Dr. Gergen, she has co-created a website on positive aging, an electronic newsletter, which is now available in many languages for thousands of subscribers ( http://www.PositiveAging.net), and workshops on the topic. She has edited Social Construction, A Reader, and written Social Constructionism, Entering the Dialogue with Kenneth Gergen. She is also a founder and Board member of the Taos Institute, a non-profit educational organization dedicated to the advancement of social constructionist ideas in professional practice and life. During her stay at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in 1988, she began experimenting with performative presentations and their research applications; today these interests are shared, as well, with Kenneth Gergen.
Ruthellen Josselson, PhD,
Fielding Graduate University, USA
“Bet you think this song is about you":
Whose Narrative Is It in Narrative Research?
Who “owns” the narrative in narrative research? Whose experience is being represented and for what purpose? This talk will explore the murky area between re-presentation and representation and the implications of the murkiness for both the participant and the researcher. Narratives are frozen moments of lives in process and it is to processes that our research is addressed. What are the implications for the participant as we move from the static to the dynamic and interpretive? In what ways is narrative research “about” the participant? And what do we do when our participants may not find themselves mirrored in our work? These are the questions that this talk will address.
Ruthellen Josselson, Ph.D., ABPP is a Professor of Clinical Psychology
at The Fielding Graduate University and was formerly a Professor at The
Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Visiting Professor at Harvard
University. She is the author of Playing Pygmalion: How People Create
One Another; Revising Herself: The Story of Women's Identity from
College to Midlife and The Space Between Us: Exploring the Dimensions
of Human Relationships. She has co-edited eleven volumes of the
Annual, The Narrative Study of Lives and is a founder of the Society for
Qualitative Inquiry. She received both the Henry A. Murray Award and
the Theodore R. Sarbin Award from the American Psychological
Association and a Fulbright Fellowship.