ABSTRACT
Narratives both define us and connect us with others – bringing the past into the present, shaping how we understand the future and ourselves. For narrative scholars, stories are central to the way humans make sense of their experiences, and the study of narrative is the study of the way people construct and experience the world (Connelly and Clandinin 1990; Bruner 1990; Huber et al. 2013). Drawing from a variety of philosophical, methodological, and analytical traditions, the field of narrative inquiry is focused in generating, analysing, interpreting, and constructing narrative accounts. Narrative research is typically focused on documenting the particular over the general, exploring individual cases in depth rather than aiming to summarize broad patterns across people (Bruner 1990; Garro and Mattingly 2000; Clandinin and Connelly 2000; Chase 2011; Schwandt 2007; Riessman 2008). As a result, narrative research tends to capture the complexity of human experience and represents the ‘messiness of lives’ (Squire 2012: 2011; Mishler 1986).
