Redefining our Understanding of Narrative

Abstract

This paper is born out of my concern about the increasing use of narrative as merely a different methodology. I argue that narrative as methodology ultimately depoliticizes the potentiality of narratives. Narrative simply becomes one of the many methods that belong to qualitative inquiry. We generally discuss narrative as story-telling. We also focus on doing good narrative analysis. In this paper I recast in narrative in language of cosmology so as to highlight the libratory potentiality that narrative affords persons who strive for a new and different world. I discuss narrative in terms of being in the world. I also unpack the implications that attend to this emergent way of understanding narrative for qualitative inquiry. The paper ends with a discussion of how our narrativeness complements a world that is increasingly seen as complex and quantum.