FLIRTING WITH THE BOUNDARIES: ARTISTIC SPACES, SOCIAL SCIENCE SPACES AND NARRATIVE INQUIRY

Narrative inquiry is a subset of qualitative research design, which is increasingly flourishing in constructing knowledge, especially in the field of social sciences. Nevertheless, narrative as an approach to doing social science research is still in the making and this leaves the narrative researchers with multiple meanings and ambiguities in relation to using narrative inquiry in scholarly research. Significant questions are raised regarding the possibility and the applicability of using narrative as a mode of social inquiry. Often, it is argued that narratives inhabit artistic spaces as well as social science spaces and hence, application of narrative as a method of inquiry is questionable. The main focus of this article is to explore how far narrative inquiry represents artistic worlds in terms of its main characteristics and the criteria which are significant in considering it as a social science inquiry. The main argument is that narrative inquiry inhabits dual spaces; the social science and the artistic. It critiques the idea that narrative research is mere fiction and concludes that it should rather, be understood as an alternative mode of knowing the world, to the widely accepted, formal, positivistic ways of coming to know.

Introduction

Within the current framework of human science, there are multiple types of ontologies, epistemologies, ethics and methodologies, which reflect different paradigms; positivism, post positivism and critical theory (Heron and Reason, 1997). The notion of paradigm here refers to the basic set of beliefs that guide action while ethics are related to the question of how one will be as a moral person in the world. Epistemology is related to the questions of how one will know the world as well as the relationship between the inquirer and the known. The basic questions about the nature of reality and the nature of human beings in the world are addressed by ontology. It is through methodology that we try to focus on the best means of knowing about the world (Denzin and Lincoln, 2003). Based on these varying perspectives, epistemologies, and ontologies, different disciplines have come out with diverse ways of making sense of the world.

Within this context, the narrative construction of knowledge has begun to play an increasingly important role in the field of qualitative inquiry, especially in the field of human science. Before going any further, it is important to raise the question, what do we mean by narrative inquiry? The meaning of narrative itself as well as narrative inquiry has always been flexible and different authors seem to make sense of narrative inquiry using varying lenses. In this article, I describe narrative inquiry as a subtype of qualitative inquiry. Agreeing with Chase (2005), I believe that narratives can either be written or orally constructed during field work, an interview, or during a natural conversation. Adding a little bit more to Chase, I contend that narratives are jointly constructed by the researcher and the respondents during any particular act of constructing knowledge, within the process of researching.

The Narrative Turn and the Storying Man

The recognition of the significance of narrative in human life seems to have a long history. For instance, Hans Vaihinger has mentioned that human beings live their lives by means of 'functional stories' in 1876 (Mahony: 1991:1). At present, support for narrative understanding as a major mode of making sense of human life and experience appears to be permeating many fields of scholarly inquiry. As Lieblich et al., (1998) mention, narrative studies are flourishing among a wide spectrum of disciplines during the recent history of research, as a means of understanding the personal identity, life style, culture and historical world of narrators. This increasing interest in narrative in the field of social science research may have sprung basically, from the understanding, that people are meaning-generating organisms and that they are storytellers by nature. Polkinghorn (1988) and Sarbin (1986) speak at length about the storied nature of human conduct. According to Polkinghorn (1988), human experience is meaningful and human behaviour is generated from and informed by this meaningfulness. He therefore explains that the study of human behaviour needs to include an exploration of the meaning systems that form human experience. He moves on to claim that narrative is the primary scheme by means of which human existence is rendered meaningful, a fundamental structure of comprehension that bestows meaning on life and human action.

Similarly, shaping of human experience by narrative has been the main focus of Bruner (1987), in his shift to narrative psychology from cognitive psychology. Bruner notes that "Story telling is life making: we are our stories: a life as led is inseparable from life as told" (Bruner 1987:31). In Bruner's point of view, human beings are the stories they tell about themselves. Accordingly, ";we represent our life; (to ourselves as well as to others), in the form of narrative" (1996:40).

Thus, the growing reflections on the embedded nature of story telling and human life, the development of the narrative perception of life, together with other epistemological and methodological debates about knowledge construction have lead narrative inquiry to flourish in the social sciences. Especially in the West, narrative inquiry seems to attract increasing attention as a mode of social inquiry. However, I perceive narrative inquiry is still in the process of developing as an approach of constructing knowledge. Researchers who are new to narrative inquiry will find it a rich way of constructing knowledge reflecting multiple methodologies. Nevertheless, there is the possibility of understanding narrative as a diffuse tradition with ambiguities in relation to its legitimacy in presenting the 'truth' of the world (Chase, 2005). Frequently, the ability of narrative research to represent the'scientific' and'standard' ways of knowing the world is questioned. One of the major criticisms raised against narrative inquiry is that it is more art than scholarly research. Hence comes the question of the legitimacy of narrative research in constructing 'accepted' world knowledge. Especially, those who advocate the positivistic world view and the standard ways of going about research, claim that narrative inquiry is a sloppy way of constructing subjective knowledge, and that it lacks validity and reliability. The basic premise of this kind of criticism is the idea that narrative research is more art than scholarly research.

The following section of the article explores the embedded nature of narrative in artistic worlds. I frame my argument around the increasingly debated characteristic of blurred boundaries between narrative research and art.

Inhabiting Dual Spaces: Is it More Art than Research?

The term narrative has always been there in societies, providing expression to multiple aspects of human life and nature before it began to be significant in the field of research. People are more familiar with narrative as a creative means of constructing and reconstructing life, rather than understanding narrative as a refined mode of conducting research. Human beings more easily make sense of narrative as a form of art, rather than a mode of research. Hence, narrative inquiry cannot and does not escape dwelling in dual spaces: art and research. This leads us to the more fundamental question: are we constructing fiction or authentic world knowledge in doing narrative research? This article aims at exploring this particular issue in some detail, drawing on the main characteristics of narrative inquiry, considering the ontological, epistemological, methodological aspects as well as the issues related to the textual structure. This said, I emphasize that in narrative inquiry (or in any other inquiry) the epistemological-ontological divisions are, of course, questionable, since both these aspects are intertwined and they both reflect on methodology.

Multiple Versions of Truth or Truth-likeness

The notion of truth in terms of doing research very often brings into mind considerations about verification by appeal to formal verification procedures and empirical proof. It reminds us of the narrow epistemological question of how to know the truth, which worries the researcher right from the beginning of a research process. However, in the narrative approach, the researcher embarks on research with different views about the truth. In this section I argue that narrative researchers do not attempt to discover an ultimate truth. This argument is premised on two views that are prominent among narrative inquirers. First, the belief that narratives which are constructed by human beings about human experience, are time-bound, contextual and non-rational. Hence, constructing an ultimate truth out of stories, which are only human constructions, will not be authentic. Second, since the main vehicle of constructing narratives is language, narratives are always value-laden.

Like the artist, the narrative researcher believes that the knowledge claims construct about the world, about human experience, and life can not articulate and rational truths. This means, that human beings act within social-cultural contexts and hence actions are shaped by the contexts. In the meantime, narratives articulate temporary stories which occur within a particular place during a particular time. These stories are thus time-bound. Narrative inquirers assume that knowledge, which is constructed through stories, is personal as well as social. Therefore, rather than aiming at finding the truth regarding a particular issue, narrative researchers seek explications that are context sensitive and particular. Accepting narrative ways of constructing knowledge means understanding that the world has not got fixed rules for assigning meaning to human behaviour. The narrative inquirer does not attempt to find 'the' truth in a fluid world with multifaceted realities (Emihovich, 1995). For him, the act of knowing is a process, constructed and reconstructed from personal and social meanings which are shared and conveyed through narratives. The fundamental issue behind this is that the narrative researcher believes that human beings are story tellers who act and make sense of their actions within contexts. Hence, truths are constructed by people and truth is not supposed to be 'just there' to be discovered by the researchers.

Apart from the contextual, time-bound nature of narrative inquiries, the central role played by language in the construction of knowledge, results in multiple versions of truth regarding the kind of the knowledge that is created through narratives. As we all know, narratives are consciously constructed by human beings, using language. When narrators employ language, either written or spoken, in the telling of their stories, they convey only a representation of the experience they want to tell. They choose their own words, similes and metaphors. And also they can omit what they do not want to reveal, while the possibility is there to add what they desire to highlight in their narrative. Thus, stories constructed by the tellers are not value-free. The very idea of construction itself is not value-free. What is constructed or narrated is not the truth about any particular experience. Rather, narratives always comprise the truth which the individual teller or the tellers jointly wanted to reveal of the truth. Therefore, it is only truth-like. That means that narratives do not portray life as it is, but they construct only life-like portrayals.

Another argument here is that language fails to function as a picture or a map of an independent world. Rather, language operates constitutively, and is employed by communities of interlocutors for the purpose of carrying out relationships (Gergen, 1997). Hence, language always reflects social, cultural and political contexts within which it is used and shared. In the case of constructing meaning within research processes, the stories narrated by the respondents will inevitably be shaped by multiple other factors rather than the mere language exchanged between the researcher and the respondent. For instance, narratives constructed during the research process will be shaped by the researcher-respondent relationship, the selection of the kinds of stories the researcher wants to know, the stories the narrator is willing to tell, and the way the researcher understands the stories of the respondent. There is no guarantee that the teller's tale and the researcher's interpretation of the tale will construct similar meanings. The reason is that humans tell and understand narratives within the discourses that are available to them. Therefore, what is ultimately constructed as narrative is not the truth about any particular situation or experience, but a distilled selection of representations of the primary truth.

This particular characteristic of truth-likeness brings narrative research very close to artistic worlds in which, truth gains multiple meanings depending on the social, political and cultural readings of the artist as well as the audience. People are not rational but emotional, 'languaging' beings (Maturana, 1988:78). Human beings do select and give their own interpretations to texts they encounter in life. That is the very nature of man who uses language for making sense of the world. Therefore, the social scientist's ability to discover the truth is highly contested, especially in the present super-complex world.
