ABSTRACT
Richardson (1985) intertwines narrative writing with sociological analytic writing in a research-reporting genre which she called “the collective story.” The collective story “gives voice to those who are silenced or m argin alized” and “displays an individual’s story by narrativizing the experiences of the social category to which the individual belongs” (Richardson, 1997, p. 22). To Richardson, the collective story is notjust about the protagonists’ past but also about their future. Although Richardson (1997) emphasizes the similarity of experiences of “m em bers” of a certain “social category” (identified according to certain similar conditions or experiences; e.g., can cer survivors, battered women), we want to emphasize the fluidity and nonessentialized nature of such social categories and how the rhetorical decisions m ade in the writing of the collective story contribute to the fore grounding of similarities of experiences, while de-emphasizing dissimilari ties. On the one hand, we want to show in our collective story our uniqueness as individuals each having a “unique trajectory that each person carves out in space and tim e” (Harre, 1998, p. 8). On the other hand, we want to show in our collective story how the “narrated experiences” of each of us are not isolated, idiosyncratic events, but “are linked to larger social structures, linking the personal to the public” and the biographical to the political (Richardson, 1997, p. 30).
