Narrative Inquiry: An Interview With Michael Bamberg

Carolin Demuth: Michael, your work over the past decades has contributed significantly to our understanding of identity, particularly, narrative identity. Can you talk a little bit about the story of how you first got interested in the topic?

, through positioning theory (Bamberg, 1997(Bamberg, , 2003 and analysis of narratives (Bamberg, 2011a(Bamberg, , 2012, to identity construction in talk-in-interaction (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008;Bamberg, 2011aBamberg, , 2011bBamberg, De Fina, & Schiffrin, 2011), he has contributed varied strands to applied linguistics, psychology, and identity theory. Has been heavily in- But then we also lay these characters out in terms of "how is this character different from others?" in stories, in particular how is the character a protagonist versus antagonist. But then there is also a valuing of these characters, in terms of how they differ, [e.g.] in terms of gender. If you want to tell a story that has the romantic plot, then traditionally, typically, it is a hetero story -not anymore, it doesn't have to be -but it is typically the story where males are characterized, drawn out, differently from females. And these differences are brought to the fore, and in a way embraced and celebrated. Of course there's a change, in particular recently, in how these plots are formed and the roles these characters are playing, so to speak. So the characters are designed in terms of differences and sameness, different in terms of their ethnicity, of their gender, their age, local, regional background [etc.]. And they are also drawn out in terms of similarities, in-group characteristics, if you want to call it.
And the third territory here, along which characters are designed is in terms of agency: how agentive are they characterized or how passive, in what kinds of passive roles are they placed so to speak. If you want to draw out a hero, then this hero is kind of almost planning what he or she -typically he in the tradition of heroic actions -is doing next: the plan, the intention is there, and then the intention leads to actions and changes in the world. So, the characters are drawn up highly transitive, in that sense. In the victim story or in a suffering story, we draw out the characters typically in an inagenative way as somebody who is the victim of typically the actions of others, but it can also just be happenings or bad luck or fate, thunder storms and snow, where these consolations are put in a way that the character is placed into conditions, as a recipient. I also call these three territories dilemmas because the speaker has choices to place these characters into these three territories or arenas or spaces in different ways. This of course also happens when we talk about ourselves but I think that is a variant of general story-telling, and it might be a special variant, but I think nothing particular is happening here that is not already visible and done in story-telling about others, and also in fictional story-

telling.
But what comes in here, and I really would draw up an important difference between identity researchers who put all their money on self reference and on stories where people reflect on themselves -is that in all storytelling, there is a practice in story-telling, and we relate not only with words something that is making a difference -and also that is analyzable, and in particular now that we have visual means where we also can go into the visual means of story-telling and bring this into the package that we can use when we analyze and work with stories analytically. think we started to tackle this difference between big stories and small stories or narrative practices. Let me just clarify this a little bit: the small story approach, or the narrative practice approach, assumes that stories typically occur in mundane everyday situations. When we interact, when we talk, that's where we at times, not all the time, we launch into storytelling mode or we break into story-telling mode. And we mark this also: 'Oh I remember' or 'Oh that reminds me' or 'Let me tell you the story of what…', but not all the time do we mark it; sometimes we just launch into them, but it is very typical. I mean if you look at the bodily reactions also that we have on video tape, even in 10 year olds, when somebody is taking the floor with a small story, the others lean back and then towards the end, again move forward -and this happens already, two, three, four seconds before the story teller ends the story -the others move in and there is a signaling, a bodily signaling, that 'I'm done with my story, the floor is open and I want some reactions to the story'. So these are the kinds of situated interactive contexts within which stories have their function. And they do, with regard to identity research now, they do identity work; and we can go into this in a little bit more detail.
But now, you asked, isn't there something that big stories also accomplish, also do in terms of identity work. Big stories, the tradition that we started to tackle 10 years ago, are based on the assumption, that we have a life -self that was always there, and maybe changing, but it is part of the story, of the story -singular here, that is you; or that your life is the story that you tell. I think this is actually reducing ourselves to walking stories, to walking narratives. The person and personhood is a walking narrative, and then for us as researchers, in particular in psychology, but in other social sciences as well, we tap into this by letting them tell their story; and this is in no way different from traditional approaches to personality where we use a questionnaire in which we have our participants answer the kinds of questions that we think are relevant to this type of identity. So we are stepping outside the normal everyday existence within which stories are told, within which they surface, and assume that there is something that is organizing our life, that we assume is the kind of basic underpinning of being in the world. And I find this highly problematic. If you ask, for instance, 13-year-olds to tell their stories, their life stories, they look at you and say "What are you talking about?" or they say "Well, you know, I was born, and then I went to school" -so they may be able to give you stages. Or if you ask a 70 year old citizen who grew up in the rural parts of China, or has been working all their lives on the conveyer belt, and you go in with a microphone, and say, can you tell me the story of your life, they also will look at you in disbelief and say "What are you talking about? I have been working here all my life, that is me, that's my life". So you will not get these book-form life stories with chapters. These are, when you get them as a researcher, highly stylized forms that have been exercised and practiced, and this is the way they have come to existence; but they are in no way necessarily running -in the sense of determining -someone's life. They are stylized forms, and that doesn't mean that they are not interesting or irrelevant. I think they are what they are: highly reflected, retrospective ways of letting one's life pass by oneself, and then drawing some conclusions. So with regard to that, I don't think they are sitting inside the person. They are ways of making sense, but there are other ways of making sense that are taking place in front of our eyes.
And my call to identity research is simply "Let's work with ordinary stories first, and then later on you may also want to look at these highly stylized forms that may come in the form of biographies or autobiographies, where there are interesting things to read and to re-reflect on, how these things come to existence. So, I'm not totally doing away with these big stories, these reflective ways of making sense of one self -I don't want to call them irrelevant; but they are an outcome of the identity work in small stories -becoming formed continuously in everyday conversations with small stories in their midst. And those stories in there I think are highly interesting, they are really telling, and they also may consolidate in these big stories and these reflective life stories; and as I said, these are forms worthwhile studying, but I don't understand why -this is a rough estimate -60 or 70% of research on identity is using big stories and not focusing on the real formative small stories that are going on in mundane, everyday situations. between inside and outside is at least a problematic one, maybe even a false one. So at the end I bowed out of it because they wanted to nicely pit my position that identity is something that is formed in interactions in social situations, and not inside a self. So, I said no I can't do this because that is not what I believe. And then a former student of mine took that position but he also felt it was very misunderstood. So, this contrast of interaction as something that is outside -and there is something that is inside, becomes really even more than problematic, because it is based on a misconception of what language is -what language is, what interaction is. The assumption that seems to run through this is that we have an interiority, wherever that comes from, and sometimes it's a nativist assumption that is running through this or an evolutionary assumption that is running through this argument, that this interiority then in situ and in vivo is expressed. And typically with emotions, right, the emotions are inside, language is placed in the mind or in the brain. So, whenever emotions and language are expressed, they are visible in behavior, but before that they are not visible. Nevertheless as psychologists, we can enter what is invisible, what is hidden, the interiority, by having people talk about it, when they unpack it, in particular in talk or in behavior: that's where the interiority or aspects of it become visible. But, again, this traditional view I think is very close to an experimentalist point of view, that we position the person in experimental conditions, in the dark room out of context, we pull them out of who they are in everyday mundane situations; and only in those special conditions can we find out what is inside. I think this conception is running now through modern psychology in brain research -that we believe we can look into the brain and get answers to what is happening when people are in real everyday contexts. But again, what is running through this is this assumption of this monologic self, that we are who we are, when we are with ourselves. When we are in our social contexts, when we are with other people, then we are not our real selves anymore, then we wear masks. Then it is society that deforms us. So, this is a way of placing behavior, language in particular, but also interactions, into a context outside, that is different from who we really are.
Again, I think what this metaphor between internal and external does is placing the wrong emphasis on -in particular in psychology -on the monologic, the person who seemingly speaks to himself when they are trying to figure things out: the reflective self. And interestingly Hubert Hermans calls this the "dialogical self". But it is ultimately a very monologic way of splitting up the self. And this is only possible because in modernity we have a metaphor giving us the impression that we can find ourselves by going deeper into ourselves, but who is the finder of this finding process, and who is the one that is reflected on? Again, I'm not trying to take this away, I think self reflection is a very important achievement in modernity, and this is exactly I think what has become, now part of our modern education processes, that we want all learners become more reflective of the practices in which we are involved; and in order to do that, we have to engage in self-reflection. But the context within which self-reflection makes sense is that we are, first of all, considering the interactive social situations within which we are embedded. Now, we reflect on those, and in that process, we also can remove, take a third person perspective so to speak on ourselves, and look at ourselves: what has led to my action. And this again I think is the metaphor that runs deeply through big story research; but it also runs through this whole distinction between interiority and exteriority, and unfortunately it turnes what is called within this metaphoric approach, the exteriority, into a byproduct; and storytelling in our everyday interactions into something that also happens -but, you know, it's not really that relevant or interesting. It is the interiority from where all this happens, from where all this comes. This to me is the central point, and this is an outcome of essentializing and existentializing self and identity, from where a lot of these kinds of problematic issues have emerged over the last forty/fifty years with regard to narrative -and over the last hundred, hundred fifty years with regard to psychology.
Europe's Journal of Psychology 2016, Vol. 12(1), 14-28 doi:10.5964/ejop.v12i1.1128 Carolin Demuth: That brings us to the next question. There are narrative identity researchers who refer to self stories as a form of experiencing the world, especially in the realm of phenomenological analysis. What role do phenomenological aspects have in your approach?

Michael Bamberg:
In my own reflections on narrative and qualitative inquiry, I think this is where the notion of experience has proven to be very important for the narrative turn, and, in the turn to narrative, for making use of narratives. It appears to be the case that stories and experience have a lot in common. Let me step back for a second and get back to the notion of reflection, and enter this issue from there. Because when I tell a story of yesterday as part of an ongoing interaction, so this is a short story of what happened yesterday, and then we continue our conversation. This making something from yesterday relevant to the here and now, the ongoing conversation, is of course also a reflective piece, it is stepping out of the conversation right now and bringing something in from a previous time. So there is some form of reflection, but this is different from sitting down in the dark room or on the couch and reflecting on my whole life. Each small story, each event in which we make something past, possibly even something futurist, fictive, relevant to the here and now of the ongoing conversation, has reflective aspects. In that sense there is an overlap between talking about yesterday or something that being reworked through other experiences that were previous, or through new experiences that are similar. So, how has this particular sequence of events that happened, how have they been stored and restored in memory, over time? And then, equally important -or possibly more important: in a particular situation, you bring this up, you make what you think has happened, what has been stored and reworked, you try to make this relevant, for a particular interactive situation, like on the couch if you are asked to talk about your mother -and you try to make something relevant from way back to the here and now. And of course, typically this happens in a more interactive situation, because something has been talked about before. and you know where the conversation is going, typically, and that's where you bring this in, for a particular reason. So you, first of all, put this into the language that we are habitually speaking.
In Maori, you would 'language', as a verb, this particular experience very, very differently, culturally, historically, as you would do this in German or in English -languages that place the subject in sentence initial position. So, with a language already comes also a particular 'perspectivizing' of whatever the experience was. But now with the telling of it, you are working up particular parts of the sequence of events, you pull them out and plug them that, let's work with that, let's work with the micro-cues, that you use in the process of telling, fitting something previous into the here and now and making it relevant, is where we should start. How is it told and why, and those are the kinds of analytical questions that I think we would want to start with; and then we can carefully, if you want to, bring ourselves back to the notion of experience. But what experience nowadays is, has been so wildly problematized, in particular when it comes to traumatic experiences or experiences that are grounded in some larger experiences. Let's not go into more detail here, but my point is that our belief that we are getting from the stories that people tell to their experiences has become a highly problematized assumption. However, I nevertheless trust that in our analysis of story-telling practices we are much closer to the experiential world of our participants than when we take them out of their everyday context and subject them to answer questionnaire-like questions that either confirm our hypotheses or disconfirm them. And again, I don't want to say that big story research is a bad approach, but it is not the best approach if you are interested in the experiential world of people and in particular if you look at how they are dealing with whatever it is that they think their experiences were. And this would be in the everyday processes of story-telling.
Carolin Demuth: Your approach can be broadly located within the field of discursive psychology. Do you see any differences to other approaches within discursive psychology, e.g. approaches that take more a conversational analysis approach, for instance?

Michael Bamberg:
As I mentioned already, one of the aims of situating stories in our story-telling practices is looking at when people actually tell stories and move from there, what these stories are, what these stories do in the interaction, but also what these stories do in terms of bringing off a sense of who I am that I'm practicing in story-telling -and again, not only in story-telling when I thematize the self but also in story-telling about my children or whatever, where I clearly position myself with my values and my orientations. The original point that I already mentioned was that I think we are more than walking narratives, it is wrong to reduce people to narratives or personhood to narrative. So that is on that extreme. The other extreme would be to say identity doesn't exist, or it's an epiphenomenon, and what we are really interested in are just the conversational practices that we engage in, the turn-taking machinery that is keeping interaction going.
I think there is more, there's something, I don't want to call it in the middle, but I think we can learn from these two extreme positions because in the process of 'inter-acting', of being in social situations where we present, display a sense of who we are, we come across, we are affirmed, we react to, this is where we exactly also practice and turn these practices into more and more habits or into rituals of identity work, that become metaphorically speaking 'us'. So, the way I approach a position that is different from these two extremist positions is by highlighting the story-telling practices that we engage in -but not that these practices ultimately result in the oneand-only story that ultimately becomes or replaces me. Rather, we are these practices within which we fashion, refashion, rework, navigate, construe a sense of who we are. But also there is this building process and this process of continuous change, that makes it possible to talk about, retrospectively, potential major transformations; but usually there are these small little things in everyday routines that are not always the same, that make who we are, that are forming a sense of who we are, that are forming, or that are answering, or that make it possible that we can answer the question, "Who am I?". So, I think this is where we can learn in particular from those analysts who work with fine grained situated conversations or interactional data, and more and more also turn to visual data since we have the technical equipment to analyze what is actually going on in these micro-processes in terms of a mutual understanding, in terms of something that some people call the inter-corporeality within which, we as bodies and as minds and brains and as persons, identities, all kind of form or bring ourselves off -I think that's the best metaphor that I can use at this point in time -a sense of self is brought off and is renewed, but there is a continuous process within which this takes place.
Carolin Demuth: There has been quite a bit of discussion and critique within the last few years that qualitative research in general and discursive psychology in particular put a too strong focus on language, and there is a lot of discussion about materiality in which social interaction is embedded in, the material world as well as embodiment.
To what extent do you take that into account in your approach?
Michael Bamberg: This is a really interesting question. I used to say that without language, well I still do say this [laughs], without language, what we call being human, wouldn't be the same. Now, that's easy to say, I think that's relatively safe. Still, I mean the question here that is behind it, is what is the role of language in having become a language or languaging animal in our genealogy and also in our socio-genesis? How important is language? But I think there are more and more approaches now that try to place language into the body -that we resonate with ourselves when we speak, so to speak -this also then can be pushed into the level of content, and we haven't gone into that today; the issue of narrative as form and narrative as content, and using narrative in order to make sense of form and content and ourselves -but where the body I think is becoming more of an analytic object.
And the body has been disregarded, disrespected maybe even, in psychology, and the tradition of psychology, because traditionally it was the soul and then the mind that formed the centerpiece of being human. The body again was more the outside, keeping the inside, in particular the mind and our secrets, all hidden. Now, I think, and maybe that is erroneous, that the change in putting more emphasis on what we do with our bodies, has come from technology, that we see bodies more as -in interaction -as doing identity work, as presenting a sense of self and we also have more access to intercultural, visual images these days.
So, what we can do now is break down and display bodies in interaction in slow motion, or in fast forward. We can stop the tape, rewind it, go over it again; and having done this in the last twenty years more and more and with better precision is almost like what in the sciences was the magnifying glass or ways of looking at things that were invisible to the human eye before. Now we have behavior, bodily behavior -and within this, language behavior, under the microscope, under a different microscope; but we can look at the micro-cues that are being, in a way, exchanged when people are doing social work, and in this social work, do identity work. I mean presenting a sense of who we are and hearing and seeing who the other is, and making sense of this as something that works together toward a mutual understanding. So, this is I think where bodies have become much more and much easier of a target of recent analytic frameworks within which language is put into a new frame of doing lin-find out about their understanding of the institution, within which they work, the classroom within which they operate, the interplay between classroom and outside the classroom, the students' lives so to speak, this realization catapulted narrative inquiry into the public domain. Narrative inquiry became the major tool to use narratives, storytelling as a way of trying to find out or better understand particular segments of private and public lives -how people meet their partners on the web, how they make sense of themselves and others in intercultural social situations.
All this I think contributed to this huge wave of adopting narrative into the social sciences as a major tool to investigate, to do inquiry. But that's also where now a lot of confusion came with this, and this takes us back to the discussion we had before, because some people argue that those segments of life just like the individual personal life are narratively organized. So, some people build narrative into life per se and argue: life is a narrative, that is, narrative is organizing what is happening out there; it is organizing your experience. The next one is, how you store your experience, narrative is helping you to store experience, to organize and reorganize experience, to make relevant and then to narrativize it. So, some colleagues within the social sciences have placed narrative and these different parts of what we can call now the narrativization process to become the central organizing forces for human life. In contrast, and as I try to make clear, I'm trying to locate narratives where people actually break into narratives and tell stories; and I start working from there. Outliers of this position that expands the notion of narrative seems to be holding that everything is narrative, and wherever you jump in, you find aspects of a process of narrativization. That's what I have characterized in my own writings as the "narrative über Alles" ["Narrative above all"] position -that I don't think ultimately holds water. I don't think it is helpful. I think it leads to a position where anyone can say anything in their analytic work and maintain that they are doing 'narrative inquiry'.
Well, ok, but how so? Exemplify it, lay it out, and that's I think, having used this metaphor of this continuum, from everywhere to actual story-telling practices, that those who venture more to the extreme of essentializing narrative and making it a precondition to human existence, building it into not only human communication but even to being human per se, that it leads to a way of shortcutting the kinds of justifications for the questions that researchers are asking and then also for methodological approaches, the tools that they bring in where is it that they actually credit narrative story-telling, to the sense-making abilities that are approached, that are being researched.
So, I haven't answered your whole question -now bringing this into qualitative inquiry, I think, the relationship between qualitative inquiry and narrative inquiry within this range of different perspectives makes it even more problematic. Because qualitative inquiry also is a conglomeration of a number of different ways of asking meaningful research questions and finding ways of answering these meaningful questions. And interestingly, the American Psychological Association (APA) has just put together a task force, and we meet in two weeks actually, for the first time, in order to -and this is an interesting and problematic thing -in order to define guidelines for the publication of qualitative research, and guidelines for the publication of qualitative research obviously also One last word, when I teach qualitative inquiry, and I just put together a sequence of thirteen kind of TED talks, small talks, that I want to make available to the public. I'm trying to bring qualitative inquiry into twenty-first century learning strategies. We have changed from, I think largely at least, from the focus on teaching practices to learning practices and within the learning practices that are replacing lecturing and the transfer of information, qualitative inquiry has become a very powerful instrument to actually show and document how learning practices nowadays can be more productive and more useful for learners in the twenty-first century. And within qualitative inquiry, the way I teach it and the way I have also outlined it in some of these small talks, is that observing is still the queen of qualitative inquiry; so that we have to first of all problematize our everyday modes of laying eyes on others and describing what we see. So, in other words, we have to learn to ask: what is going on when we fashion descriptions in inquiry as researchers, and what kind of interpretative cultural procedures are at work when we describe? It is as simple as that. And from there I think a skill set can be developed within 'the qualitative mindset', as we call it, that can be transferred and moved into narrative inquiry. Narrative inquiry also as a highly interpretative discipline where there are interpretative strategies at work that we again have to bring out and then make available for criticism, for reflection. Description, observing, and interpretation of narratives are the pillars, I think, for qualitative inquiry.
Now the question is: how are we able to bring some standards into this that mark and demarcate what is good quality from what is less quality; I think because we all agree that certain of these ways of doing inquiry are better than others -not everything is the same here -but, we are in highly contested territory, and entering this, I first thought 'I'm not going to go there', but then I thought 'why not?', this is definitely a terrific learning experience.
And at the next Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in Urbana Champaign, this will hopefully be discussed, as one of the core themes. But I hope that we also can bring this back to narrative inquiry and identity analysis, and I hope that one of the next places we can do this is the International Psychology Conference in Yokohama, in July 2016.
So, I think those are places where these issues need to be discussed; and this is an exciting time, and I find things are going in the right direction rather than that there are dangers and problems and issues that we have to resolve.

I think it's an open territory and I think it is fascinating.
Carolin Demuth: This brings me to my very last question: What are some future directions that you see for the field of narrative inquiry?
Michael Bamberg: I am thinking a lot about that. We possibly can use this question also to divide again a little bit of traditions that are currently on the market so to speak. I think there is one tradition to take narrative out into the fields, partly as a method or as a tool, or something that is inspiring to other disciplines. There is a big discussion in the medical humanities of the role of narrative and even in educating physicians. There is a big discussion of the role of narrative in legal discourse and in legal persuasion; and again, I think in educating lawyers and educating the public also about this. Narrative marketing and narrative branding are, I think, fascinating and I'm trying to get into this as well, in particular with visual narratives: how we can use them in terms of appealing to an audience emotionally but also productively [laughs] not just for consumption to persuade them to consume or identify with a particular brand, but also to become critically involved emotionally, with branding processes and identity processes -personal branding.
Right now (November in 2015) we are going in the United States through a process where people are beginning to pick candidates of the two parties who will run against each other next year in the presidential election. And this is where story-telling, I mean it's just unbelievably at the forefront, and it hasn't been, I think recognized by the media yet. Just a couple of days ago, one of the forerunners of the Republican party has told his story -it is a redemption story -his story of having been a child with a lot of anger problems and having overcome these problems and having become a major figure in a medical discipline. And now presenting a sense of self that is calm, that is comfortable, that is peaceful -so this is an interesting narrative. Now the press, the media has tried to, like with every political candidate, go after this to corroborate the story. And now this life story or this way of trying to come across with this life story as a particular kind of person, has been pulled into doubt. And to me, this is worthwhile a debate again -what are the facts? Or, is it just important to say: this is the way the person who is marketing himself, who is branding himself this way, this is the way the person makes sense of himself, so let it be there and let's work with what this person has to offer, whether this is a true story or not a true story, but this is a way he would like to see himself and make sense of himself. This is at the issue right now, of personal branding and also in apologizing -something that I have been looking at in the past. I can go on with narratives' role in education, in marketing, in teacher identity, in all brands of life. So, narrative has become a really highly publicized tool of doing this type of inquiry, and that is one direction I think narrative inquiry will continue to become even more popular, more interesting, more applied. I think that is where a number of new journals have come up; it is an exciting area, and I definitely want to be involved in the future, in the personal branding of myself maybe even as well [laughs], but, help people do this, the narrative marketing. So, this is a section of life I think where narrative will expand. Now, the other -I think that's also where I would like to say this is where narrative inquiry as a specialized form of inquiry should center -is to reformulate the questions that I also just went over from my own perspective, and this is the discussion of "what is narrative?" -This discussion focuses on how narrative is used for identity research in socio-linguistics, in psychology, in sociology and anthropology, and neighboring disciplines. Furthermore, how is it moving from here into these more applied disciplines like narrative marketing and branding? What are the dangers? What are the problems? Should we confine it more? Should we open it up? These are the kinds of discussions that I definitely would like to see more discussed and published within the journal of Narrative Inquiry.
These are ways of centering on issues that we, I think, as a relatively small community, should also, in a way, control. I mean not control in terms of: this is right, and this is wrong; but enable a discussion within which we find agreements and disagreements, and can widen it -but not too wide -into those applied areas, because the applied areas all provide many ways of publishing applications of narrative inquiry in these fields. So, there are lots of journals, even journals that have narrative in their title, but narrative inquiry itself, I think, is where we might want to provide a forum to center on the discussions of how we work with narrative. What is good work? What is productive work? What is helpful for disciplines? And also what is helpful for expanding the term narrative -or narrowing it in particular ways? And this is, I think, where discussions could take place that we did not get into today: what are differences between 'identity', 'narrative identity' and 'forming a narrative sense of self'? How is the question of 'who am I?' answered by use of different narrative approaches? This is an area of narrative inquiry, that I would also typically invest myself in the next five or ten years, and I think it's a growing debate here, and also potentially a very productive one.
Carolin Demuth: Narrative inquiry remains a fascinating field and there is still lot of potential for very interesting future research. Thank you very much, Michael, for taking the time for this interview.