Narrare Autumn Seminar: Keynote lectures

On Friday September 20, 2019, Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies hosts the fourth annual seminar for PhD students. The seminar provides a chance to meet PhD researchers from diverse backgrounds who work on or with narrative, but also to participate in Narrare’s ongoing endeavor of developing theories, methods and analytical tools for the interdisciplinary field of narrative studies. Our visiting scholars this year are Professor Molly Andrews and Professor Lois Presser. 

The seminar day consists of seminar workshops and two keynote lectures by our invited visiting scholars. The two workshop panels are for the participating PhD researchers only. The keynote lectures are open for everyone – all welcome! 

KEYNOTE LECTURES (FREE) 

10-12 AM (PINNIB 1096) 

 

Molly Andrews, University of East London: 

Using Personal Narratives to Study Social Change

Narratives are not only the means by which individuals breathe public life into personal experience, they are a primary tool by which individuals recognise and affirm themselves as members of a group, thereby often acting as a catalyst for the raising of political consciousness. Narratives can thus play a vital role in de-individualising that which is personal; rendering experience into a narrative form can help individuals to become more actively engaged in shaping the conditions of their lives. Using a range of different kinds of political talk, this session will explore the relationship between micro and macro narratives of political change. 

Molly Andrews is Professor of Political Psychology, and Co-director of the Centre for Narrative Research (www.uel.ac.uk/cnr/index.htm) at the University of East London. Her research interests include political narratives, the psychological basis of political commitment, political identity, and patriotism and intergenerational dialogue. Her books include Lifetimes of Commitment: Aging, Politics, Psychology Shaping History: Narratives of Political Change (both Cambridge University Press), and Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life (Oxford University Press). She serves on the Editorial Board of five journals which are published in four countries, and her publications have appeared in Chinese, German, Swedish, Spanish, Czech, and German. For the academic year 2019-2020, she is the Jane and Aatos Erkko Visiting Professor at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki. 

 

Lois Presser, University of Tennessee 

Dangerous Narratives: Narrative Criminology and ‘Why
We Harm’ 

Later than most other academic disciplines, the field of criminology took an explicit ‘narrative turn’ in the space of the last decade. The central idea of a burgeoning narrative criminology is that experiences of and resistance to harm are conditioned by narrative discourse. Thus narrative criminologists have discerned narrative bases of terrorism and counterterrorism, genocide, social drinking, drug use, drug trafficking and drug “wars,” partner violence and other assault, meat eating, and more. Narrative criminology avoids the individualism and especially the mentalism of other causal variables advanced within criminology (e.g., self-control, strain, rational choice). It sidesteps the question of whether narrators truly believe their stories or only present them to enable otherwise motivated harmful action. Both individuals and groups tell and live by stories, hence narrative criminology pertains to various levels of harm and participation therein. In this presentation I will discuss the theoretical and empirical development of narrative criminology, providing a diverse set of research examples from around the world, and describe my own contributions to the field in the form of a general theory of harm. I will lastly consider problems and opportunities facing narrative criminology. 

As a Fulbright Professor, located within the Faculty of Social Sciences at Tampere University and affiliated with Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies, I will conduct research and teach in the area of narrative criminology which I founded. I am a professor of Sociology at the University of Tennessee in the USA, a faculty I joined in 2002 after earning my Ph.D. in Criminology/Criminal Justice from the University of Cincinnati. I have published extensively in the areas of narrative, harm, identity, and restorative justice. My books include Been a Heavy Life, Why We Harm, Narrative Criminology (co-edited), Inside Story: How Narratives Drive Mass Harm and The Emerald Handbook of Narrative Criminology (co-edited). My Fulbright/Tampere project concerns the development of methods for pinpointing facts and understandings that have been rendered invisible in dominant cultural stories. My concern is with the logics taken for granted in, and the real constraints on people’s lives omitted from, hegemonic narratives.