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Member rate £492.50
Non-Member rate £985.00
Save £45 Loyalty discount applied automatically*
Save 5% on each additional course booked
*If you attended our Methods School in the last calendar year, you qualify for £45 off your course fee.
Monday 6 – Friday 10 February 2023
Minimum 2 hours of live teaching per day
09:30 – 12:00 CET
This course provides a highly interactive teaching and learning environment. It is designed for a demanding audience (researchers, professional analysts, advanced students) and capped at a maximum of 12 participants so that the teaching team can cater to the specific needs of all.
By the end of this course, you will:
Molly Andrews is an Honorary Professor of Political Psychology at the Social Research Institute, University College London, and co-director of the Association of Narrative Research and Practice (formerly the Centre for Narrative Research). She is currently a Writing Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies, and in 2019–2020, was the Jane and Aatos Professor in Studies on Contemporary Society at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.
Her monographs are Lifetimes of Commitment: Aging, Politics, Psychology and Shaping History: Narratives of Political Change (both Cambridge University Press), and Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life (Oxford University Press). She has co-edited Lines of Narrative (2000 Routledge Taylor & Francis), Considering Counter Narrative (2004 John Benjamins), Doing Narrative Research 2008/2013 Sage), What is Narrative Research (2014 Bloomsbury) and Routledge International Handbook on Narrative and Life History (2016 Routledge).
Molly serves on the Editorial Board of five journals which are published in four countries. Her publications have appeared in Chinese, German, Swedish, Spanish, French, Czech, German, Norwegian and Finnish.
By exploring the role of narratives in activating political processes, this course aims to strengthen your analytical capacity. You will explore the movement between levels of narrative analysis and the potential to integrate biographical, social and historical elements into the interpretive process.
Narratives are not just the means by which individuals breathe public life into personal experience. They are a primary tool through which individuals recognise and affirm themselves as members of a group. Narratives thereby often act as a catalyst for raising political consciousness.
Thus, narratives can play a vital role in de-individualising that which is personal; rendering experience into narrative form can help individuals become more actively engaged in shaping the conditions of their lives.
In this session, we use different kinds of political talk to explore the relationship between micro and macro narratives of political change.
Counter-narratives only make sense in relation to something else: that which they are countering. The very name counter-narrative identifies it as a positional category, in tension with another category. But what is dominant and what is resistant are not, of course, static questions. Rather they are forever shifting position. Discussion of counter-narratives is ultimately a consideration of multiple layers of positioning.
We will also discuss master narratives, how to identify them and how they operate. We then explore the complexity for narrative analysis when trying to consider the inter-relationships between stories of which we might not even be aware.
We explore the limits and possibilities of narratives in which individuals turn to language to communicate the inexpressibility of experiences they have endured. The central dilemma for many survivors of trauma is that they must tell their stories, and yet their stories cannot be told. Traumatic experiences often defy understanding; testimony of those who have survived can be marked by what is not there: coherence, structure, meaning, comprehensibility.
The actual emplotment of trauma testimony into conventional narrative configurations – contained in time – transforms them into something they are not: experiences which are endowed with a particular wholeness, which occurred in the past, and which have now ended.
We also consider the relationship between language and silence in traumatic testimony.
We learn how imagination operates in the stories which people tell, hear, see and live in their everyday lives. We discuss the role of imagination in helping us ‘see difference’, not only between ourselves and others, but between ourselves and who we might be, or might have been.
We also explore the situated nature of ‘imagination’ and its critical role in everyday life.
We aim to consolidate the week's learnings and discuss any issues arising during the week, with reference to students’ own data.
This class is open to anyone who wants to learn more about political narratives. It focuses on methodology, epistemology, and analysis. If you have your own data to bring to the class, please do, although beginners are also welcome. A couple of hours of reading will be set for each day.
For background information, watch Kesi Mahendran’s 16-minute film The Persuasive Power of Political Narratives.