| Doing narrative research with interviews for exploring the teller’s identities remains a default methodological and epistemological choice in the social sciences. This is despite sustained critique of its tendency towards representational accounts, the privileging of specific kinds of stories, and the resistance of analysts to treat interviews as interactional data. Set in this context, interactional analysts who have worked with ordinary conversational stories (drawing on conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics and socially minded linguistic approaches) have often found themselves in no (wo)man’s land, sharing with social scientists the interest in narrative (and its role in the construction of identities) and sharing with CA (some of) its analytical apparatus but ultimately not sharing the focal concerns of any of the two. The need to move away from the canonical assumptions of interview-based narrative analysis is well recognized and small stories research (see Georgakopoulou 2006, 2007; Bamberg & Georgakopoulou 2008) is an illustration of this. At the same time, a wholesale shift of narrative analysis in the social sciences away from interviews and towards ordinary conversational data seems unlikely. And for those still interested in the cross-fertilization between CA and narrative analysis, interviews are the main site where issues of potential synergies can be raised and explored.Taking the above as its point of departure, this panel invites a dialogue between conversation analysts and narrative analysts of both interview and conversational stories. Our view is that there is potential for coming together at every stage (i.e. data collection, method, description, analysis and interpretation). There is also much scope for CA to speak to interview-based narrative analysis around some of its current epistemological concerns (e.g. the researcher-researched co-construction). |
