Book Description

"The seeds of the book were sown by a number of events, beginning over a decade ago, which foregrounded questions around the relationship between narrative and social change. The Centre for Narrative Research (CNR) at the University of East London hosted two international conferences on 'Narrative and social change' and 'Narrative and social justice', in 2007 and 2009; these topics were selected for sponsorship by the British Psychological Society's Qualitative Methods section. The 2012 Narrative Innovations summer school in Prato, Italy, organized by CNR alongside narrative researchers from Monash University, Australia, and Linkoping University, Sweden, which brought together graduate students from many countries, pointed up young narrative researchers' growing interests in social change. CNR and other narrative researchers' life story work with refugees, starting in 2015 in the so-called 'Jungle' refugee camp, in Calais, northern France (Africa et al., 2017), was an attempt to act on our social change interests in a more applied way. This work strengthened some of our ideas about the value of even minimal possibilities around personal narrative, as Bhabha's (2010) formulation of the 'right to narrate' suggests. A series of UK National Centre for Research Methods-funded events, in 2016, involving CNR, the Thomas Coram Research Unit at University College London, Edinburgh University's Centre for Narrative and Auto/biographical Studies, and visiting colleagues from South Africa and the US, also contributed to the book's making, by exploring participatory narrative research, addressing the involvement of research participants alongside researchers in all steps of the research, from defining research problems and doing the research, through to analysis, writing up and research dissemination"--