Preliminary Programme

In my talk, drawing on Susan S. Lanser's (1985, 1996) works, I would like to expose the limits of mainstream understandings of the ‘Narrator’. My ultimate interest is to destabilise the absolute binaries between sex, sexuality and gender, and try to redefine them for queer narratological purposes. I will argue for the relevance of the categories of sex, gender and sexuality in relation to the Narrator's identity beyond the mainstream features, such as person, location within or outside the narrated events, and reliability. I shall analyse the function of the sexualised gender of the Narrator in life span narratives because the location of the genre may function as the necessary shift for the researcher to become aware of the traps of visibility in the field work encounter. This attempt at relativising and shifting the boundaries of those categories will inevitably expose the problematic exclusionary binary of text and context as the masculinist anchorage for the profound conceptual silencing of the sexuality of the Narrator. Once one starts interrogating the textual non-signification of gender instead of going along with the hetero-normative assumptions about the Narrator's 'unmarked' sex, it may become possible to see the sexuality of the Narrator as a potential source of narrative tension, and as such a moment of empowerment in constructing the Self through a non-exclusionary relational mode of articulation. (Show less)

Currently there are an estimated 300,000 orphans in South Africa as a result of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. They are directly affected by the death of their parents, but they do not know how to talk about it. This creates a state of confusion which prevents them from developing to their full potential.

In 2001 the Sinomlando Centre for Oral History and Memory Work in Africa, a research and development programme located at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, conducted a pilot study in the Durban area to assess the impact of the methodology of the memory boxes on AIDS-affected households. This includes interviews of family members and caregivers in the presence of the children. The story of the family is transcribed, edited and given back to the children and their caregivers. The children are also invited to create a “memory box” in which they put the family story and various objects which remind them of their sick or deceased parents.

The basic assumption of the methodology of the memory boxes is that children who remember their parents in a positive way after they have become ill or have died, are in a better position to cope with the hardships of their condition. In this way they develop what psychologists call resilience.

Independtly from the family visits, the Memory Box Programme runs camps during which groups of ten to twelve orphans receive life skills. Memory work is an important component of the programme. The children are invited to tell their stories with the help of a taperecorder and to listen to them as a way of affirming their identities.

Since 2002 the Memory Box Programme has trained community workers from more than forty NGOs and CBOs, mostly in KwaZulu-Natal, in the methodology of memory boxes.

In this paper I shall examine the various ways in which the children are involved in interviews. In some cases relatives or caregivers are the main interviewees. The children only make occasional comments. In other cases, the children are interviewed directly. The paper will assess the value of this methodology both in terms of the contents of the interviews and of the process in which the children take part. (Show less)

The starting point for this paper is that the employees narrated memories about the organizational change should be recognized, heard and valued as an important resource in organizational development and research. The employees plan and develop interesting projects that they implement locally. The problem is that employees projects do not usually diffuse, but stay isolated from the rest of the organization. Especially the managers are unaware of them and so they do not benefit the organization by and large.

In this paper I will present a research of a Change Laboratory project, which was carried out 1998-1999 in one of the University Hospitals in Finland. The Change Laboratory method is theoretically based on the Activity Theory and its methodological background derives from the Developmental Work Research. The paper includes the analytical process and the results of six narrative interviews. The nurses were interviewed in their work environment, in a hospital ward. Documents were also collected from the ward to find out the historical context of the change project.

The paper is guided by following research questions: How the employees remember change and narrate it? How organizational narratives can be studied theoretically? And how the stories of the employees can be “put in use” in developing and researching organizations?

The principal aim of the research was to explore the consequences of the change project by creating narrative research methods. The study had three methodological dimensions. First was to develop an interview method, by which collective information about change can be produced, second to develop a new way of doing evaluation study and third to create a narrative method by which the change projects can be studied longitudinally. The practical aims of the study were to provide the organization better understanding of change, to support the sustainability of the organizational change efforts and in general to find out how organizations can make use of narratives.

According to the research results narratives constitute a valuable data for analysing the change project and its consequences. In the study I discovered that the interviewees set great store by being able to discuss about the change project, about their own ideas and to get feedback of the change efforts they had made. As a result of the study I constructed a map, which is a representation of the employees stories and also a tool to model the change process. Furthermore I wrote a theoretical metanarrative of the change project, in which I use analytical concepts and for example analyse different processes and mechanisms of organizational change.

The results of the study serve as a creation of a research method for a larger research project. The research has been expanded to other health care organizations in Finland. As well as the nurses, a variety of other actors, such as internal developers and leaders in the organizations have been interviewed to constitute a multifaceted insight of the different change projects under study. (Show less)