ABSTRACT
The authors engaged in multiple conversations about the relational ethics which guided the living of narrative inquiries. In the late 1980s, D. Jean Clandinin and Connelly began to explicitly conceptualize a research ethics for narrative inquiry. In 1990, Connelly and Clandinin attended more directly to ethics in narrative inquiry drawing most heavily on Nel Noddings' work. Ethical concerns needed to be reframed as concerns of 'relational responsibility'. When Clandinin and Vera Caine laid out touchstones for judging the quality of narrative inquiries, they identified the first touchstone as relational responsibilities. Ethical understandings in narrative inquiry are marked by living in relational spaces that bring forth researchers' and participants' lived ethical understandings, complexities, and tensions. The notion of narrative unity is borrowed from MacIntyre and is defined as a continuum within a person's experience which renders life experiences meaningful for the unity they achieve for the person.
