Professor Alexandra Georgakopoulou (King’s College London) 

Small stories research has recently been extended in my work as a paradigm for critically interrogating the current storytelling boom on social media, which includes the designing-spree of stories as specific features on a range of platforms. This algorithmic engineering of stories which integrates them into the spatial architecture of platform affordances has led to the hugely popular feature of Stories on Snapchat and Instagram (also Facebook and Weibo):  sharing through Stories has now overtaken sharing through feeds. Drawing on a digital ethnographic tracking of such story-facilities, a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the platforms’ views and ideologies about stories, and a narrative-semiotic analysis of female Influencers’ Instagram Stories, I have uncovered specific directives (cf. preferential conditions, prompts) to users for what stories they will share and how. These directives are attestable in the dialectic of the values underlying the design of stories, the story affordances and the practices that they commonly lead to. In this talk, I focus on the directive for authenticity. ‘Being authentic’ online is currently synonymous with ‘telling authentic stories’, within a widely circulating users- and brands-oriented agenda of making the most of the ‘power of stories’. What are the key-elements then of this digital authenticity as a discourse for posting stories and how are they shaped by the stories’ technological and algorithmic design? How do Influencers’ stories work with and around this imperative for presenting authentic selves and lives? And how does this all fit (or not) with longstanding narrative analyses of the links of stories with authenticity that have stressed either the referential (i.e. credibility and accuracy of events) or the performative (i.e. the teller’s construction of a taleworld ‘reality’)

 

All welcome but email us for Zoom link: ioe.ccmseminars@ucl.ac.uk

 

Dear all,

The next in the series of fortnightly CCM seminars will be held from 1-2pm, on Tuesday 28th January, in Room 639, 20 Bedford Way, WC1H 0AL. The presenter this week is Ibrahim Alkhateeb who will be presenting his research on Performative Narrative Analysis.

Abstract

In this seminar, I will be narrating my own data analysis story. I will try to take you through the difficulties I had faced in utilizing an analysis method that complies with the conceptual framework I have chosen in my research. Consequently, these difficulties have led me to adopt a performative model in doing narrative analysis to the religious conversion stories I had collected. I will demonstrate that in two parts. First, I will try to briefly take an overview of how narrative analysis has developed in the field. Then I will illustrate how performative narrative analysis works by looking at an example from my data.

Doctoral Workshop with Anna De Fina, Professor of Italian Language and Linguistics 

(Georgetown University)

 

Using Narrative as a Research Methodology 

 

CCM Doctoral Seminars

Room 709a Monday 3^rdJune, 10am-2pm

Dear PhD students,

 

We are very happy to announce that Professor Anna De Fina, of Georgetown University, will be joining a departmental workshop for PhD students on Monday 3^rdJune 2019. Professor De Fina, an expert in narrative analysis, will open the workshop before moving on to facilitate discussions on the readings detailed below (please also find them attached). In the second part, Ibrahim Alkhateeb, a doctoral student who is employing a narrative lens, will share data from his research for discussion.

The workshop is open to 25 doctoral students from CCM.

 

Should you be interested in participating in this event, we would like to invite you to submit a 150 word abstract synthesising your research project and explaining your interest in the topic of this workshop. The deadline for the submission of your abstract is 27^thMay 2019.

Details of the activities are provided below.

Programme 

Part I (10:00 – 11:15)

– Opening Remarks. 

– Reading/discussion groups.

 

De Fina, A. Who tells which story and why? Micro and macro contexts in the narrative. Text & Talk, 28: 3 (2008), 421-442

De Fina, A. What is your dream? Fashioning the migrant self. Language & Communication, 59(2018), 42-52

 

Coffee break (11:15 – 11:30) 

Part II (11:30 -12:45) 30 mins + 45 min discussion

– The Narratives of Anglophone Male Muslim Converts in Saudi Arabia

Ibrahim Alkhateeb, UCL Institute of Education

Abstract

Conversion to another faith has been widely investigated in social sciences, especially in the fields of sociology (Galonnier, 2015; Moosavi, 2015), psychology (Lindgren, 2004; Kose, 1996; Peek, 2005) and religious studies (Hermansen, 2014; Nieuwkerk, 2014; Roald, 2012). However, in linguistics and language studies, it has not been the focus. In my work, I am investigating how the identities of Anglophone male expatriate converts in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) are enacted in their narratives. More precisely, I am trying to answer the following research questions: How are these male converts’ experiences performatively enacted within the context of life story research interviews in the KSA? What are the commonalities that performatively emerge in their stories? What does this reveal about the complexity of male Islamic converts’ experiences in the KSA and intersectionality, particularly with regard to the indexing of salient aspects of identity that are invoked by these converts?

I understand identity in a Butlerian sense, where identity is understood to be performatively enacted by repeating, conforming and sometimes subverting of concealed forms of the self in discourse (Butler, 1990). I found that by adopting narrative research and looking at how they position and align themselves with their story worlds in their narrative, I will be able to understand how their identities are performatively enacted. In the workshop I will share some of my interview data and illustrate how I am going to analyze them using Baynham (2011, 2015) and De Fina (2003). 

 

The presentation will focus on how the researcher has chosen to use, define and apply a narrative lens to his work; pieces of data will be shared with participants.

Discussion time will aim to: a) address issues arising from the presentation; and b) link with discussions from Part I of the workshop. 

Lunch time (12:45 – 13:30) 

 

Part III (13:30-14:00)

– Plenary & Anna de Fina’s Concluding Remarks

 

Should you have any questions regarding the workshop, please don’t hesitate to contact us per email: ccmstudentseminars@gmail.com

Please find slides from I. AlKhateeb’s presentation below

Presenter: Ibrahim Al Khateeb

Date: 9^th October, 2018

 

 

1. Where does the term come from?

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