ABSTRACT
The social sciences have struggled with the problem of how to reconcile an analysis of individual lived experience and analysis of large-scale social influences on experience since their inception. John Dewey's pragmatic ontology of experience emphasizes its continuity, but acknowledges within that continuity moments of precarity, difference, and self-delusion occur. Marxism's emphasis on discontinuity occurs at the level of appearance – that ideology gives some social relations the appearance of natural inevitability. This appearance is always a cover story that obscures the way institutional coercion is necessary to maintain structural social inequality. Narrative inquirers frequently remark upon the importance of understanding how context influences the practice of teaching, nursing, counseling, being a student, being a person and so on. Narrative inquiry permits those contextual influences to be highlighted, examined, and at times transfor.
