Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Marriage and Family Therapy, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 48-53).

This thesis explores how law is performed in daily life through physical acts. I propose that the body expresses, generates and is intertwined with an understanding of legal normativity. That is to say that law is developed through embodied acts of communication. The thesis, which takes the form of a website, provides a lens through which to see how corporeality shapes our legal landscape. I use text, video and live performance to propose ways to engage with this landscape. I demonstrate that in even the most banal gestures there is a microcosm of norm generation and reproduction processes that can be highlighted by paying closer attention to our daily life practices.

Vi undersöker den narrativa stilen som Flower och Journey använder sig av. I denna narrativastil finns det varken dialog och text. Utifrån Flower och Journey skapade vi en designmetodsom ska finnas till som inspiration för utvecklare som vill testa denna stilen. Resultatet avundersökningen ger upphov till en designmetod som vi applicerar på vår gestaltning för atttesta den i en annan spel genre. Mycket av metoden är fokuserad på hur Flower och Journeygör då vi bara undersöker de två spelen. Vi skulle vilja göra en mer generell undersökning dåvi undersöker mer spel som också har ett narrativ utan dialog och text. / We study the narrative style that Flower and Journey uses. In this narrative style, there is nodialogue and text. Based on Flower and Journey, we created a design method that will be aninspiration for developers who want to test this style. The result of this bachelor thesis givesrise to a design method that we apply to our game idea this applies the method to anothergame genre. Much of the method is very focused on what Flower and Journey do when weonly examine these two games. We would like to do a more general study when we examinemore games that also have a narrative without dialogue and text.

This thesis explores the experiences of parents with disabled children living without a diagnosis. Through thematic and narrative analysis of an in-depth qualitative interview study with 26 parents of disabled children, and by considering absent diagnosis in the context of sociological and other relevant theory, this thesis contributes to knowledge about diagnosis and about the experiences of families of disabled children without a diagnosis. The process of diagnosis, categories of diagnosis, and the consequences of living without a diagnosis are examined. Using interview data, including parent narratives and personal reflections, this thesis tells multiple stories revealing a play of diagnosis journeys: that of the parent participants living without a diagnosis; that of the researcher’s exploration of diagnosis; and that of the sociological significance of diagnosis. The hermeneutic journey of the literature review process is described, as the domains of sociology and medicine have shifted shape over the years of the study. I make sense of the sociological relevance of the empirical data generated, with a particular focus on the sociology of diagnosis, ethnographic studies of paediatric genetic diagnosis, and research with families with disabled children. Despite the estimated high prevalence of disabled children without a diagnosis, there is, as yet, little research with families and to date absent diagnosis in this context has not been considered by the sociology of diagnosis. That the absence of diagnosis can hold a mirror to diagnosis, and how absent diagnosis acts to expose the meanings of diagnosis, is proposed. And further, to know the nucleus of diagnosis we must look at what happens in its absence, considering the space non-diagnosis leaves and the differentiality on which diagnosis abuts. I embrace a natural history approach to methodology describing the methodological journey. Further depth is added to thematic data analysis by using a narrative approach to consider parents’ stories, and by punctuating the thesis with interludes of self-reflexive accounts of the researcher’s own story of living without a diagnosis. Key themes from the thematic and narrative analysis are reported: parents commonly conducted an intensive quest for diagnosis; perpetuity was a feature of this process of diagnosis, although searching for and interest in diagnosis commonly decreased over time; parents were active contributors to the process of diagnosis; parents had difficulty making sense of living without a diagnosis, and themes of fracture and deferral were identified; parents’ narratives had features of the chaos, quest and restitution typologies reported by Arthur Frank (1995), with an unresolved quest narrative as the core typology across parent accounts; a common metaphor of stasis of movement was identified in parent narratives. Key areas parents perceived not having a diagnosis had impacted on were: aetiology (not knowing what caused their child’s disability and what the risk of recurrence was); prognosis (not knowing what to expect in the future from their child’s health and development); access to support and services (including formal services and informal parent-to-parent support); and managing social interaction (how to describe their child’s disability to others). Living without a diagnosis has material effects and the study’s findings are relevant for theory and practice in and beyond medicine.

This PhD thesis explores the phenomenon of resilience in people with spinal cord injury (SCI). The purpose of this research is to understand how resilience is experienced and given meaning in people with SCI, as well how resilience is fostered, how it impacts upon health and well-being, and how it can be managed to achieve maximum benefits with regard to health and well-being. It is the first in depth narrative investigation of resilience in people with SCI. Using both life story interviews and the process of timelining, participants stories were collected. Following this they were then analysed using dialogical narrative analysis (Frank, 2010, 2012). This enabled participants stories to be examined with regard to their effects on resilience and health and well-being. The analysis shows that firstly, due to the intangible nature of resilience, participants had trouble in articulating exactly what resilience meant to them. Instead, resilience was shown through participants stories which could be grouped into four different narrative types: loss, adaptation, posttraumatic growth (PTG), and life-as-normal. Together, these narrative types constructed resilience, and as such, resilience in people with SCI has four facets or faces , like a four-sided dice. The process of resilience in people with SCI worked by participants drawing upon the different narrative types at different times depending upon the demands being placed upon them. The loss narrative was drawn upon immediately following injury, and was concerned with the narration of the physical, psychological and social losses participants incurred following SCI. The loss narrative fostered resilience by enabling participants to talk about their losses, enabling participants to survive the hardest time of their lives. The second narrative type was the adaptation narrative. This narrative type focussed upon rehabilitation in both the spinal unit and in the community. This narrative type built resilience via progression through rehabilitation towards a quality of life comparable to pre-injury levels. The PTG narrative was concerned with the ways in which participants had developed following SCI and built resilience by shifting the focus onto the positives to come out of participants experiences of SCI. The life-as-normal narrative was used by two participants across their entire life story and enabled participants to continue with their lives with minimal disruption. It built resilience by placing disability in the background and therefore making it unimportant. This thesis then concludes with the empirical, theoretical, methodological and practical implications arising from this research. The potential for resilience to help improve the health and well-being of people with SCI is discussed, as well as the ways in which resilience can have a maximum benefit on health and well-being of people with SCI.

Ce travail de thèse s’appuie sur l’analyse du discours des patients que je rencontre dans le cadre de la consultation médico éthique. Les objectifs principaux sont de comprendre le contexte de la demande d’euthanasie et le cheminement intellectuel du patient qui en vient à structurer la pensée de l’euthanasie jusqu’à la formuler et en faire la demande à son médecin, d’analyser le délai entre cette structuration de la pensée et la demande concrète au médecin, ainsi que le moment où il l’aborde avec sa famille, de déterminer le moment de la rupture biographique de l’histoire de la personne qui conduit à l’élaboration de la demande, de réaliser une analyse anamnestique de la demande, à la recherche de facteurs spécifiques qui motivent celle-ci (extérieurs, environnementaux, religieux, convictions personnelles, expérience vécue, existence d’une déclaration anticipée).La consultation médico éthique de l’institut Jules Bordet a été créée en 2012. Elle a été la première du genre en Belgique francophone et est accessible à toute personne désireuse d’exprimer ses volontés mais également son questionnement concernant la fin de vie. Dans ce cadre, l’analyse prospective de 75 dossiers, avec entre autre enregistrement des entretiens, a permis de récolter un certain nombre de données et d’information concernant différents points qui se retrouvent dans l’élaboration de la demande d’euthanasie et en particulier le contexte menant à celle-ci, le rôle des médecins traitants et le rapport qui existe ou non avec le suicide. A partir de ces éléments, trois questions se sont imposées à savoir :1. Existe-t’il un profil type du patient en termes de personnalité qui demande l’euthanasie ?2. L’existence d’une affection grave et incurable est-elle à l’origine de la demande ou est que celle-ci est réfléchie en dehors d’un contexte médical ?3. L’euthanasie est-elle équivalente à un suicide ?De l’analyse des données et de l’expérience acquise en clinique, je démontre qu’il n’y a pas de profil type de patient, que la réflexion à propos de l’euthanasie n’est pas systématiquement associée à un contexte médical et que l’euthanasie n’est pas assimilable à un suicide. La demande d’euthanasie n’obéit pas à une construction sociale et reste intimement liée à l’identité narrative de la personne. Un élément important est la position de résistance qu’adopte le patient face à une fin de vie qu’il redoute, moins parce qu’elle survient inéluctablement que parce qu’elle pourrait survenir dans de mauvaises conditions, qui elles-mêmes sont évitables. Ensuite, une réflexion portant sur les concepts de souffrances physique et psychique, sur la question de la clause de conscience de la spiritualité, le Serment d’Hippocrate, est proposée de même qu’une comparaison entre la Belgique et la France. La formation des médecins concernant les différents aspects de la fin de vie reste un élément essentiel de la pratique et garantit un dialogue constructif et respectueux des volontés de chacun. Après 15 ans de dépénalisation, cela demeure un enjeu majeur.Le débat concernant l’euthanasie ne peut se clore. Bien au contraire, il doit perdurer malgré les avancées et les acquis et ce, face à des positions liberticides et moralisantes qui ne cesseront pas de surgir. / Doctorat en Sciences médicales (Médecine) / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This study was designed with the aim of exploring from a qualitative point of view the communicative abilities of people affected by dementia. From among the different discourse genres, narratives were selected as these appear frequently in conversation and at the same time are a complex activity in which different cognitive and social skills interact. In spite of their apparent simplicity, they require an extended effort by the teller, who needs to choose an appropriate point in the conversation when the narrative can be introduced, recall all the necessary details and organize them in a comprehensible order, possibly employing a series of devices to hold the audience's attention. The focus on the investigation of communicative disorders was chosen with the aim of gaining a better understanding of what is normal or neurotypical in narrative discourse production. As a possible cause for impairment in communication I opted for dementia because it is a major health issue of which we have only a partial understanding. In particular, inconsistencies in the diagnostic practices have been pointed out, revealing an urgent need for a more accurate description of the behavioural symptoms. The data under examination have been collected in informal conversations with sixteen people affected by dementia. Further information on the communicative behaviour of the person affected by dementia was elicited from a family member by means of a semi-structured interview. The application of a simplified version of Labov and Waletzky's (1967) framework of narrative analysis, integrated with insights from Conversation Analysis, and contributions from anthropology, social sciences, narratology, as well as cognitive psychology, yield a number of results. Although a certain amount of variation was observed in the behaviour of the participants, the overall results seem to reflect findings from previous research and show how the progressive deterioration of the ability to retrieve and encode autobiographical memory is reflected in the diminishing ability to structure narrative discourse. Complex or canonical narratives seem to become frequent as dementia progresses, narratives become more fragmented, and contain more pauses and fillers, confusion in the chronological organization and confabulation, which is often fitted into previously established storylines; stories and story chunks are frequently repeated, then are reduced to brief comments that are scattered throughout discourse, so that they are no longer recognizable as narratives, but only as traces. The findings also add information on this process, such as that the ability to provide all the necessary details of orientation seems to be compromised since the early stages of the condition, as well as the ability to plan the narration, due to impairment of the executive function. Speakers in the moderate to severe stages displayed either a tendency to withdraw from the conversation or the opposite tendency to rely on a number of repetitions of small stories, story chunks and formulaic expressions, and on confabulation, in order to provide their contribution to the interaction. Some instances of potentially disordered behaviour displayed by mildly impaired participants have highlighted that both the interactional outcome and the frequency with which they appear in discourse can help make decisions on the level of acceptability of apparently deviant linguistic expressions. This may contribute to the description of the early symptoms of dementia. More research is urgently needed on the discourse abilities of neurotypical elderly speakers, as well as more collaboration between the clinical and linguistic field.

Since work by Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Paul Ricoeur, there has been sustained interest among philosophers in the view that narrative plays an essential role in how we understand our lives and selves or--more radically--in how we constitute ourselves as full persons. At one extreme, MacIntyre and Taylor argue that our desires and commitments are hierarchically organized, in the best case unifying our lives into narrative quests. At the other extreme, Galen Strawson has attacked narrativity as far from universal, as well as spurious when taken as an ideal. Thinkers such as Marya Schechtman, Peter Goldie, Daniel Dennett, and David Velleman defend conceptions between these extremes. After examining this background in detail, my dissertation offers an interpretation of Heidegger that supports a revised conception of narrative's role in self-understanding. Whereas existing theories are driven by master metaphors of the self as author, the self as a character, or of lives as stories, I argue that the relationship between the self and narrative is better understood through a notion of reading. Heidegger scholars disagree as to whether the notions of authenticity and historicality put forward in Being and Time support a narrative conception of the self. In my view, Heideggerian "everydayness"--how we are, prior to any reckoning with authenticity--amounts already to a version of the narrative self. Just as readers mid-story understand characters by projecting where they are going, we understand who we are by projecting provisional plotlines for our futures. Such understanding is made explicit in textual narratives, which preserve the structure of lived experience better than any other form of description. Literary narratives, especially certain kinds of experimental rather than "realist" ones, most accurately represent the structure of existential possibilities. Heidegger's notion of truth as disclosing provides a frame which makes the anti-naturalist implications of narrativity more coherent. By bracketing Heidegger's controversial notion of authenticity, conversation with recent work in Anglo-American philosophy on narrative and the self is facilitated. My revised conception of the narrative self establishes a basis for further work on how we use narrative to understand and organize our lives.

In this narrative study, I explored the creative process of songwriting from learners’ perspectives. Much literature regarding the creative process in songwriting is taken from the perspective of the instructor. In this study I have focused primarily on how the participants experienced songwriting from their perspective. I examined whether the participants’ backgrounds impacted their perceptions of songwriting, whether participants valued songwriting, whether meanings emerged from the songwriting process, and what strategies emerged through the process. Qualitative methods were used in gathering data, which included interviews, journals, conversations, observation field notes, e-mails, and songwriting artifacts. The data were coded through a cyclical series of transcription and analysis and slowly a research story began to emerge (Saldaña, 2009). The seven participants were worship and music majors at a southern Christian University in an undergraduate songwriting survey class. Through narrative I endeavored to restory their songwriting experiences based on the themes that emerged through the codifying process. Narrative analysis revealed that participants constructed meaning through the process of songwriting. The backgrounds of the participants helped in shaping the subjects of their songs often involving hardships. Participants storied the tension between the initial stage of songwriting and the revisions to follow. Songwriting became a narrative expression of their experience of spiritual awakening. Through reflection during the songwriting process they found greater connection with God. In the process the participants constructed their songs using tone painting to shape their melodies to express their lyrics and metaphors to enliven their lyrics. Participants made use of various recording devices to capture initial ideas before they forgot them, and noted a preference for working with pen and paper in the songwriting process. Where much of previous research focused on songwriting approaches and methods of instruction, this study found that participants enjoyed the meaning making aspects of songwriting and the spiritual connection with God that it brought them.

This research project is aimed at creative practitioners in art and design who choose to engage in postgraduate research and who recognise narrative to be an important aspect of their work. While the goal of narratology has been explicitly declared as an interest in understanding narrative in all its forms, this project responded to a perceived absence of art and design centred perspectives in the general literature on narrative. A general attitude has developed throughout the course of the twentieth century resulting in a view that narrative has become a dead issue for contemporary practitioners. Findings from the investigations conducted as part of this project demonstrate a contrary view and show that definitions of narrative tend to be weak unless anchored in specific practices or disciplines. The lack of scholarship to support contemporary art and design research practitioners produces a problem by giving the false impression that narrative is largely irrelevant to practice. It also inhibits new scholarship when what currently exists is poorly categorised. The research question asks how it is possible to support the creative practitioner doing postgraduate research to better articulate their position on narrative in a way that contributes to scholarship in the arts and consequently to knowledge about narrative in general. The thesis argues that approaches to narrative traditionally associated with the discussion of art continue to be relevant today but only account for practice in a marginalised way. It posits that theorisation of narrative in the social sciences provides additional opportunities for creative arts practitioners. In psychology, sociology and anthropology the focus has tended towards localised or personal narrative in accordance with the disciplinary interests in those fields. If small stories, in contrast to the great narratives of history or literary art, can be regarded as the prototype of narrative, then artists can draw on other academic resources which better reflect their own disciplinary interests. Having established narrative to be more relevant than it might otherwise appear in the existing traditional scholarship, the thesis proceeds to make use of my practice as a case demonstrating narrative possibilities to be considered in relation to the work of practicing artists. Since my work operates across fields of art and design it was necessary to use a mix of methods to reveal the understanding of narrative in the different cases. Finally, the thesis proposes a narrative framework which categorises narrative in creative practice in five classes which incorporate the work, its reception, and the social space in which it is experienced. In addition, the practitioner's perspective is a distinct class. The purpose of the framework is not to describe narrative in all the forms that could ever be imagined by creative practitioners. Instead it offers a way of thinking about narrative that is derived from practice and structured relative to theories traditionally used to discuss narrative and art.