The next moment of joy I want to contemplate in my work on Participatory Narrative Inquiry is the joy of helping people feel that their perspectives on a topic have been represented, included, and respected, and not trampled upon or tucked away as those of people who have no right to be heard or understood.
I don’t have a deeply coherent reflection to tell you about on this topic, and I don’t want to pretend that I do. But I’m trying to avoid spending months on a single blog post (as I used to do), so I’m writing down what I have in my head about this right now.
What I have so far is a vague sense of connection between two facts.
- The process of marginalization excludes people from access to money, power, and self-determination; and it excludes people from inclusion in what is considered to be the normal or default experience of a given community. These two forces intermingle and interact: if you have access, you must be normal; and if you are normal, you must have access.
- Because people tell and listen to stories at the edges of their experience (because that’s where it’s worth the investment of time and energy, and the risk), the process of collective narrative sensemaking usually involves some exploration of (and negotiation over) perspectives on which (and whose) experiences are to be understood (and represented) as central (normal) and peripheral (abnormal) in the community.
I think it would be naïve to connect these two facts together in a simple way. I could say, for example, that story work recenters marginalized experiences. But that’s not always true. Story work can recenter marginalized experiences, but it can also push them further into the margins – and that’s not always a bad thing. As in every other aspect of narrative life, context can upend content, rendering what seems true false and vice versa.
Moments of inclusive gratitude
I wondered if I could list some ways in which I have seen participants in PNI projects express feelings of gratitude for the way the projects (or facilitators) have centered their identities and experiences. As I did in my previous post (on being heard), I will list these expressions in the order I usually see them play out.
- I have been invited to participate in a project. It has not been kept secret from me, and I have not been told that I cannot participate in it. I am not yet certain what will happen when I do participate in the project, and I am a bit wary of being exploited or misrepresented. But I am interested in hearing more.
- I have been told:
- why the project is taking place, who is funding it, who is facilitating it, what they hope to achieve, and what they plan to do
- the part I am being asked to play in the project and how I can control it (e.g., how I can change or retract the things I say if I change my mind later on)
- who else has been asked to participate, what they have been asked to do, how they can control their participation, and how I am being asked (and am allowed) to interact with them
- how I can find out what is going on as the project goes on, how I can participate in the project beyond this invitation, and how I can have a say in what happens in the project
- how I can access everything the project has collected and generated when it is over
- I have been asked to choose an experience to tell about that is related to the project’s topic. I am not being interrogated. I can tell about any experience that is related to the topic – according to my own understanding of the topic, not to anyone else’s. I don’t even have to tell a story that answers any of the questions I have been given. The last question in the list (or some other instruction) gives me permission to tell any story that matters to me about the topic.
- I have chosen a story to tell. I don’t have to tell it in any particular way. I can tell a deeply personal story, full of emotional details, or I can tell a surface-level story that reveals almost nothing about myself or my feelings. I don’t have to tell a “good” story. I can shape the story in any way I want to.
- I have been asked some questions about the story I just told. The questions are interesting, and they make perfect sense to me. In fact, they are helping me to think about the experience in a new way. Also, I don’t have to answer the questions. I can skip any or even all of them if I want to. I have also been given a chance to say anything I want to about the story. I can explain what it means to me, why I told it, what I learned from it, what I want to happen to it, whatever.
- I have arrived at a sensemaking workshop. I have been asked to work with the gathered stories and answers – all of them – in collaboration with some other people. From the way the facilitator has given us the stories and asked us to work together, I can see that the things I do and say here today are going to have a formative – maybe even a transformative – effect on the outcome of this project. I am excited to get started.
- We have finished our sensemaking workshop. I have learned a lot, both about the topic and about the other people in the workshop, and we have built something together that I will remember for a long time. I am looking forward to seeing the report that describes what we accomplished.
- I have been given the project report, and I have been given a chance to provide some feedback and comments on it. I have some things to say, and I am pleasantly surprised to find out that the project facilitators are still listening.
Of course I can’t say that I’ve seen people express these feelings in every project I have ever worked on. Far from it. But this is the goal I work towards. When I do see participants expressing feelings like these, I know I am doing this work right, and those moments, scattered and sparse as they are, bring me joy.
How to find more of this joy in your own work
How can you increase the joy of inclusion in a PNI project you are facilitating? Pay attention to the conditions, characteristics, and needs of the various participant groups you are inviting to join the project. Don’t treat everyone as if they had the same experiences, perspectives, and concerns. Think about story sharing not just within each group also among the groups.
And think about power. You might not want to think about power, but you must, because when you ask people to share stories, you are entering into the realm of power. The ancient and universal ritual of story sharing is deeply connected with social negotiations over who gets to speak, about what, when, how, to whom, for how long, and with what effect.
So if one of your participant groups has more power than another group – say A can fire B, but B can’t fire A – you can’t just ignore that fact. You must think about how your project will represent the experiences of the lower-power group as real, normal, expected, acceptable, and worthy of attention. Otherwise you will run the risk of increasing tensions between the groups, which is probably not your goal.
Working at the margins
Another set of half-formed thoughts has to do with how PNI projects work at the edges of what is considered to be real, normal, acceptable, or expected in a community. I can think of three ways in which I have seen PNI projects bring about change: through movement, expansion, and paracentering.
Movement
The most obvious approach to transformational change is to shift the circle of perceptions about what is real, normal, acceptable, or expected in the community. To do this, we can seek out stories on a specific margin of the community and bring them to the attention of the entire community. This tends to diminish the community’s attention to other stories, usually those that have harmed people or held them back.
An analogous technique in narrative therapy is that of re-authoring conversations, which draw a client’s (or community’s) attention to the positive stories (e.g., of strength and courage) that they have not been telling when they tell the larger story of their lives and experiences.
The idea of movement brings to my mind the Overton window and the book title One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.
Expansion
A second approach to transformational change is to expand the circle of what is considered real, normal, acceptable, or expected in a community. To do this, we can gather stories from everywhere in the circle and bring them to everywhere in the circle, shining a light on every part, aspect, or perspective of the community.
The idea of expansion brings to my mind the Hindu greeting “Namaste,” which means (roughly) “the sacred that is in me recognizes the sacred that is in you.” That is, we are all inside the circle of our species, which is inside the circle of all living beings, which is inside the circle of all things in the universe.
Paracentering
A third approach to transformational change is to grow a new circle on the margin of the original circle, one that has the confidence, self-awareness, and power to negotiate with the original circle. To do this, we can help specific groups share stories within their memberships, discovering insights they can use to communicate and negotiate with other groups. Then, instead of trying to shift or expand the original circle, we can help the community expand their understanding until they can see that their circle is made of circles. (And if we can’t achieve that goal, the new circle can still negotiate with the larger circle on terms that are closer to equal than they were before.)
The idea of paracentering brings to my mind the two-row wampum. This is a Haudenosaunee symbol that shows two groups of people rowing their canoes down the same river side by side. They don’t share a canoe, but they share the river.
(By the way, if you’re looking up the term “paracentering,” don’t, because I just made it up. The prefix “para” means “beside” or “alongside.”)
An illustration of movement, expansion, and paracentering
To take a single illustrative example across all three approaches, let’s pretend that we are members of a community in which a PNI project is taking place. Let’s say the project’s goal is to make life better for wheelchair users.
If the goal of our project is movement, we might elicit stories of experiences in which wheelchair users were treated with respect or disrespect, and we might help the community work with the stories to negotiate a new set of norms for how people in the community who do and do not use wheelchairs will interact, putting aside the ways of the past.
If the goal of our project is expansion, we might help the community find unexpected connections between different ways of getting around: wheeling, walking (alone, in groups, with children, with difficulty), biking, driving, and so on. We might explore the ways in which specific improvements could address common needs (e.g., for smooth sidewalks, or gentle slopes, or safe places to cross the street). Wheelchair users would be helped, but they would also be included in a way that didn’t represent them as abnormal.
If the goal of our project is paracentering, we might start by setting up some story exchanges within specific groups of people. One group would be wheelchair users, but there would also be some other groups: parents who walk with young children; people who jog, walk dogs, and ride bikes; and so on. At the end of each separate sensemaking workshop, we would ask each group to choose some stories and patterns that would help people in other groups understand their unique conditions and concerns. We would facilitate a round-robin exchange of these stories and patterns among the groups, then hold a final workshop that brought people together from all of the groups to look for insights and ideas that could help everyone.
I’d like to do more of one of these
Which type of change have I worked with most? Probably expansion, followed by movement, followed by paracentering. Which would I like to work with more in the future? Definitely paracentering. I feel like it has the most untapped potential of the three. If you would like to work with me on these ideas, let me know.
Okay, that’s all I’ve got on this type of joy. On to the next item on my list!