This thesis is a narrative inquiry of laughter in a University Lab School preschool classroom that describes the many situations in which children laugh as well as laughter's importance for the children, for me, and for all of us as a whole within the context of our classroom. To date, there is a paucity of research on children's laughter, especially in young children. The majority of research that has been conducted has been quantitative in nature, with few attempts to comprehensively describe the many situations in which laughter occurs. For my study, I felt it crucial to look at, document, and describe preschoolers' laughter, taking into consideration the many facets of their school day including free play, story time, playground time, and snack time. My sample included all of my 14 preschoolers, who ranged in age from 3 years to 4 years, 4 months at the outset of the study. I also deemed it important to look at what these laughter-producing situations meant to me and the children in my classroom, including what deeper worth laughter for all of us, how we used it in the classroom, and how it helped me to grow both personally and professionally through my research. / Master of Science

Considering the rise of transgender representation and discussion across many media platforms (television, film, print, social networking, etc.), how does such burgeoning and diverse exposure affect transgender individuals and communities? This project explores the ways in which transgender communities have developed and investigated potential for alternative and community-created representations of transgender experiences. With a particular focus on the utility and versatility of digital spaces, this project investigates the potential of web comics in harnessing both digital space and graphic narrative in creating alternative representation and discourse. The ensuing work, Maps, follows the journey of a cast of queer and transgender characters on a journey through the American South in search of family and justice.

Thesis advisor: Richard Kearney / This work addresses an important phenomenon in the contemporary philosophy of narrative and coins it as a term. Trigger-narratives denote myth-like stories that ignite certain mass social participation. Juxtapose to five well-established philosophical concepts of narrative this work demonstrates that while trigger-narratives share formal characteristics with all, they fail to be meaningfully and comprehensively subsumed under any. I use three protagonists as comparative case studies to illustrate trigger-narratives: Rosa Parks (US), Mouhammed Bouazizi (Tunisia) and Daphne Leef (Israel). The sociopolitical reaction to trigger-narratives exceeds them in content and in size. Yet, these protagonists continue to serve as catalysts and perennial symbols of the transformative events that follow their protesting acts. Trigger-narratives are not lived-narratives. They do not disclose what Arendt’s refers to as a unique who or MacIntyre’s unity of a human life. They do not answer the ownmost rhythm of Heidegger’s Being-toward-death or operate like Ricoeur’s or Kearney’s concepts of testimony. The protagonist perspective is rarely heard or seriously considered. Unlike historical narratives trigger-narratives are not the product of research. They form quickly and in their aftermath they resist change. Trigger-narrative protagonists draw their power from being portrayed as context-less, weak and uncalculated while historical leaders draw power from descriptions of authority, skill, and deliberation. Trigger-narratives have the effect and/or aspiration of metanarratives. They aim at a new order. However, they spring from articulated singular accounts rather than form an all-encompassing tacit sub-current narrative. Adding a sixth sociological concept of narrative I refer to issue-narratives. Trigger-narratives congeal around an issue. But they instill a far greater expectation for change. I conclude that: 1. trigger narratives are closest to fiction 2. They operate through a condensation of Ricoeur’s mimetic cycle configuring and refiguring reality in a rapid rotation that ossifies them into a mobilizing form, and that 3. Interpreting trigger-narratives through the perspective of world-creating myths illuminates many of their typical characteristics in a unifying, comprehensive manner. The study points to two new research directions: 1. trigger-narratives’ aftermath operations (specifically rituals and newly erected institutions).2. Further interdisciplinary cooperation between contemporary political philosophy of narrative and the sociological methodology of frame-analysis. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Resilience is the process by which protective factors enable a child to achieve desirable outcomes despite the presence of adversity in their lives. It develops through the child's interaction with their ecosystem; their family, school and wider community. A resilient child has internal resources, external supports and the interpersonal skills required facilitate this interdependency. Narrative theory suggests that when a child's prevalent narratives focus on protective factors rather than risk factors this will form a resilient self-identity. This thesis combines resilience literature and narrative theory by exploring the process of developing children's resilience through enhancing and creating protective focussed stories through narrative therapy. The narrative methodology Narrative Oriented Inquiry (NOI), (Hiles and Cermak, 2008) is used to gather and then explore the stories told by three children, their parents and their teachers. The children who had been identified by their teachers as needing to become more resilient were engaged in a short series of narrative therapy sessions with the aim of changing the nature of the stories they held about themselves from stories based on risk factors to those based on protective factors. The process was further supported through inviting the child's parent and teacher into the therapeutic sessions. This thesis makes a unique contribution by exploring how children's resilience can be promoted through use of narrative therapy in professional practice. The implications for educational psychology practice and resilience research are discussed. A number of limitations to the research design and so the conclusions made are discussed, these primarily focus on the unknown impact of the narrative therapy on the children's behaviour beyond the sessions and the complex nature of the dual researcher/practitioner role. The thesis explores the efficacy of NOI for research of this type. The processes NOI offers allow 'the told', 'the teller' and 'the telling' to inform a deep understanding of the stories shared. Interpreting the stories through the six interpretative lenses offered by NOI enabled the researcher to compare the stories told by each participant and to compare the stories told by different participants before and after the narrative therapy. The thesis offers suggestions for further development of the advice around its use and discusses the contribution NOI could make to educational psychology practice.

This dissertation sought to answer four research questions in relation to the master narrative of modern parenthood, themes of untellable tales of parenthood, how parents make sense of their identity in light of possessing untellable tales, and mechanisms parents utilize to cope with and make sense of their untellable tales. What emerges from this dissertation is a much needed, in-depth illustration of the multi-faceted, myriad pressures modern parents face. Furthermore, the results of the data analysis show the lengths parents will go to, to try and live up to the expectations placed upon them in modern society. Finally, this dissertation illuminates the (often) creative ways parents embark upon sense-making and coping strategies to continue to work each day to raise the next generation for future success. Through inductive, open-coding, qualitative analysis the findings related to each research question illustrate many varied, and rich themes. The master narrative of modern parenthood was discovered to contain ten separate narrative threads that weave together to create a rich tapestry of how parents are expected to be responsible for Determining the Future Success of the Child. Five of the narrative threads dictate the roles parents are expected to play within their daily parenting: Provider, Protector, Teacher, Biggest Fan, and Enforcer. Additionally, the master narrative of modern parenthood instructs parents to perform each of the roles in with: Unconditional Love, Selflessness, Attention, Enjoyment, and Perfection. When analyzing parent untellable narratives for emergent themes, it became clear the master narrative was closely entwined with what makes tales of parenthood untellable. The themes that emerged within untellable tales of parenthood were that of: Inadequate Provider, Inadequate Protector, Inadequate Teacher, Inadequate Biggest Fan, and Inadequate Enforcer. Furthermore, tales of parenthood can be deemed untellable because they illustrate a parent performing the various roles of parenthood with the opposite of the master narrative performative expectations. As a result, performative themes of untellable tales were found to be: Selfishness, Frustration, Inattention, Too Good, and Unconditional Love. Possessing untellable tales of parenthood did not disable parents from making sense of their parental identity. Instead, untellable tales were utilized by the parent to explore his or her identity and make sense of who he or she was or wished to be as a parent. This identity exploration manifested within four themes of identity sense-making that emerged during data analysis: Identity Under Construction, Identity Unintelligible to Others, Identity Outlier, and Identity Undecided. Within each of these identity sense-making themes, parents worked to accept/reject their untellable tale of parenthood and understand the stability/fluidity of their parental identity. Finally, when seeking to understand how parents cope with and make sense of their untellable tales of parenthood two large themes emerged: Cognitive Strategies and Communicative Strategies. Within the theme of Cognitive Strategies, parents embarked upon Internal Narrative Reflection and Internal Narrative Reframing to internally work through, assess, and understand their untellable tale of parenthood while not risking outsider judgement, or identity defamation. Communicative Strategies parents utilized for coping and sense-making purposes were found to be: Tell the Untellable, Tell a Therapist, Write the Untellable, and Tell and Alternative Tale. Through these Communicative Strategies parents could reap the benefits of sharing their untellable tale (sometimes creatively) to get listener feedback, emotional validation, and support that then helped the parent cope with and make sense of the challenge presented within the untellable tale and/or the challenges of parenting more generally.

The scientific study of wisdom is a contentious field. There is little agreement among dominant research programs concerning how to conceptualize and measure the elusive phenomenon of wisdom. The current study argues for a narrative analysis of this concept given that autobiographical stories offer a contextually rich vista into real-life manifestations of wisdom. Presented here is a qualitative investigation of autobiographical wisdom narratives from 8 individuals distributed across parameters of age, gender, and degree of wisdom. Results point to the possibility that relatively wise persons define wisdom more elaborately, participate in more sophisticated autobiographical reasoning processes, and engage with master narratives in a more evaluative and critical manner than relatively unwise individuals. These features did not appear to differ across levels of age and gender. This study validates a narrative approach to the science of wisdom, and suggests that stories may be central to advancing our understanding of this concept.

The scientific study of wisdom is a contentious field. There is little agreement among dominant research programs concerning how to conceptualize and measure the elusive phenomenon of wisdom. The current study argues for a narrative analysis of this concept given that autobiographical stories offer a contextually rich vista into real-life manifestations of wisdom. Presented here is a qualitative investigation of autobiographical wisdom narratives from 8 individuals distributed across parameters of age, gender, and degree of wisdom. Results point to the possibility that relatively wise persons define wisdom more elaborately, participate in more sophisticated autobiographical reasoning processes, and engage with master narratives in a more evaluative and critical manner than relatively unwise individuals. These features did not appear to differ across levels of age and gender. This study validates a narrative approach to the science of wisdom, and suggests that stories may be central to advancing our understanding of this concept.

Narratives about life-changing events like cancer have become more common in today’s society. The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether gender patterns in society can also be found in pathographies about cancer, and further to investigate how gender is expressed in these cancer related narratives. Questions were posed on characteristics of the autobiographical cancer narratives, how gender is constructed by the authors of these narratives, and what these narratives say about gender structures’ liability to change in the individuals affected by this disease. The material consisted of two Swedish pathographies about breast cancer, written by women, and two Swedish pathographies about prostate cancer, written by men. These works were published in the first decade of the present century. Narrative interpretation was used as the analysis method. The results show that gender patterns expressed in these narratives mainly follow conventional standards. Gender structures appear to be resistant to change in men and women diagnosed with cancer. The narratives by the women authors appear though to be somewhat more open to using the notions of manhood than was sees in narratives by the male authors regarding norms of femininity.

This study primarily aims to examine the ways in which the social and cultural meanings are utilized to construct a narrative around a product. Thus, a narrative analysis is employed by conducting a case study on Tupperware products, mainly due to the recognition that a comprehensive narrative, which is elaborated by social and cultural meanings, is constructed around Tupperware products because of the unique retailing technique.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 210-211). Also available on the Internet.