Abstract
Reviewed by: Belén Rojas Silva, University of Paris Descartes, France
Are we brave enough to imagine beyond the boundaries of ‘the real’ and then do the hard work of scoping reality from our dreams? (Imarisha Walida)
By way of introduction to this work, I will refer to another project which Andrews is involved in: the co-authored book What Is Narrative Research? (Squire et al., 2014). There, narrative is defined as a group of signs, whose assemblage can take various forms (e.g. textual, visual). Its peculiarity is that it produces meaning within specific social and political conditions. Hence, narrative is vulnerable to the limitations that each context imposes concerning its understanding and dissemination. For Andrews, investigating such narratives involves collecting existing materials – or producing them in the research process – which are analysed (categorised, interpreted) under the premise that it is not the story in itself that is examined but its ‘narrativity’. Indeed, it is this characteristic of stories that is emphasised and developed in Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life.
Andrews proposes that there is a strong, albeit non-prescriptive, connection between imagination and the ability to craft stories. This link is visible not only in intellectual or artistic efforts but also in daily life. Indeed, a potential shared by all humankind is the capacity to weave together stories involving the past and the future, and imagination raises this ability toward unforeseen levels of complexity. Thus, when narrative and imagination come together, the stories combine ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ (or ‘not yet real’) elements, invoking temporalities and spatialities, and directly impacting on understandings of the self and of otherness.
In such a way, stories can be considered a manifestation of our creative freedom and desires, bringing forth expressions of our thoughts on the present day reality and our notions of possible transformations. According to Andrews, within the framework of narratives, the real and the unreal do not exist in opposition, but come together in a relation that stretches our references to time and space. Thus, one can consider that what happens in the present does not necessarily correspond to the boundaries of the possible. In that sense, our references to space can be weakly related to ‘geography’ and strongly determined by our affective experiences and the memory of the senses. Equally, our stories can defy the temporal linearity of ‘before’ and ‘after’, developing new coherent plots.
Thus, Molly Andrews’ work informs us about our capacity to travel in time, as well as the potentialities of this journey suggesting that, in tandem with our imagination, revisiting our past will entail not only learning about ourselves and our current circumstances but also an evaluation of counterfactuals and the consequences these might have for our futures. Of course, this journey is not limited to temporal coordinates but involves the spatiality in which we are situated and an analysis of the connections between our past and present perceptions about it. This possible fluidity that emerges throughout the creation of narratives is linked to the training of memory as an act within the present – that connects reminiscences and oblivion, past and future – and whose vitality does not lie in its verisimilitude or coherence, but in its openness to resignification. Consequently, the transformative impact of narratives will not be considered an end point or a result, but a dynamic process.
Regarding the relationship between narration and imagination, it is also important to consider the variety of histories and images that circulate today through the media, internet and human mobility in its multiple forms. They act as resources for the imagination and the construction of meanings attached to other places and the people who inhabit them. According to Andrews, these processes involve our knowledge as well as our imagination. Both are linked to the particularity of our locations and also to the possibility of de-centering ourselves. On this matter, she references Emmanuel Levinas to evoke the possibility of self-awareness offered by the encounter with otherness, and the necessary openness and recognition of one’s own difference that this exercise requires.
Hence, once the axis of the relationship between narration and imagination has been developed, Molly Andrews presents us with a stimulating understanding of the link between daily life and imagination, expanding on three concrete examples: aging, education and politics, and a corresponding way of conceiving the production of knowledge within the framework of narrative research.
Andrews proposes, on the one hand, that there is no possible opposition between imagination and everyday life, understood as the surrounding ‘reality’. On the other, imagination sketches alternative scenarios – other ‘realities’ to the everyday life in which it is deployed – including other definitions for what we were, are, and could be, both at an individual and collective level. In this sense, imagination is no longer an individual capacity, not because it is not localised in individuals, but because it is considered a social tool, as it allows us to be in contact with others in other spaces and times, opening up new terms for the constructions of bonds and alliances.
Furthermore, in Andrews' approach, these premises are closely tied to the production of knowledge in narrative research. Taking the unusual example of magic, the author shows that the possibilities of connecting knowledge and imagination must face the challenge of “a tension between a willingness to believe, to be transported to somewhere new, on the one hand, and a critical scepticism on the other” (p. 14). In this sense, the encounter in the production of narratives requires the suspension of doubt and empathy. Conversely, analysis demands the establishment of the ‘right distance’ to interpret the story collected and – at the same time – reflect about the spectrum of our beliefs as researchers, the constraints such beliefs impose, and the underlying understanding of otherness they entail.
In this way, we have to confront a fundamental question at the centre of the exercise of reflexivity in narrative research: how are our boundaries of the feasible constructed and what is the threshold of their flexibility? This gesture of self-questioning would render explicit the particularity of this definition. Nevertheless, Andrews' approach would falter, if it were limited to this gesture of auto-recognition. On the contrary, the author states: “Ultimately, good research demands that an investigator is willing to make herself vulnerable. Suspending disbelief, we might learn something about another way of viewing life. In the process, we might learn something about ourselves as well” (p. 112).
It is my belief that Molly Andrews’ work evidences another sensibility in the context of knowledge production. This sensibility compels us not only to observe other contents of social life humbly but also to look at them through different lenses. How else would it be possible to use our own biography to interact with the personal accounts of others, through methods ranging from research interviews to everyday dialogue?
Although this is not developed, Andrews’ work implies a feminist perspective on situated knowledge: “partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversation in epistemology” (Haraway, 1988, p. 584) and on situated imagination, which “has two seemingly contradictory relationships with knowledge; on the one hand, imagination constructs its meaning while, on the other hand, it stretches and transcends them” (Stoetzel & Yuval-Davis, 2002, p. 316). Consequently, she proposes that imagination – from and about everyday life – can account for the human capacity to weave together stories; not as direct descriptions of events, but as creative productions shaped by knowledge about reality and by the desire to change it.
In conclusion, without being a handbook on narrative research, Molly Andrews’ work certainly invites us to consider this approach within the social and human sciences, by exploring its fundamental concepts and presenting concrete contexts and problems for its application. Written in clear and accessible language, this book’s appeal lies in its exhortation to rethink the potential of narrating positions in relation to the interstices that are opened in situated readings about the present and the past, and in relation to the purpose implicit behind each imagining, of considering other ways to live.
Hence, the remaining question is – given that this is an approach rooted in everyday life and considers the opportunity to stretch our references to generate alternatives for the ‘not yet real’ – what is the potential of micro stories to become counter-narratives? In other words, what is the possibility of their becoming “the stories which people tell and live which offer resistance, either implicitly or explicitly, to dominant cultural narratives” (Bamberg & Andrew, 2004, p. 1), in this way, enabling new practices for other ‘possible worlds’ and, even more, for other ‘common worlds’?