Narrative Inquiry as Decolonizing Methodology: Contributions, Controversies, and Concerns

Catalog description

This course is a doctoral seminar in advanced qualitative methods. In this course we will draw upon readings from psychology, cultural studies, education and anthropology to gain a rich sense of the affordances and constraints of various approaches to narrative research. We will also examine the potential of narrative research to serve as a decolonizing methodology. Students will have the opportunity to connect what we are learning in the course to their own area(s) of interest and research questions through class discussions, written papers, and oral presentations. This course is organized around 5 broad themes: (1) narrative inquiry and narrative cognition; (2) perspectives on decolonization, the history of research as colonial project, and story/counter story telling in research; (3) approaches to the collection and analysis of narrative data (descriptive narrative inquiry); (4) narrative as a tool for analyzing multiple forms of data (explanatory narrative inquiry); and (5) approaches to data representation and display.