Why Narrative? Which Narrative? Struggling with Time and Place in Life and Research

Abstract

Describing how my way of being in the world hindered or advanced my research, I suggest that a researcher’s quality of life and mode of narrative inquiry may be closely related. The outcome seems to hinge on the inquirer’s relationship to time and place in life and research. As all human beings, researchers use narrative to structure temporal complexity, only to find that this use contributes a complexity of its own. Efforts to overcome either pervade our lives as well as our forms of inquiry. I specify how such efforts endanger narrative inquiry, both in research and teacher education, and I struggle to find a language that accommodates a contextualized, narrative self as it reaches out to culturally shared conditions.