Narrative, Discourse and Pedagogy

• About Us
• Innovative research methodologies
• Discourse and the subject
• Partnerships and Collaborations

About Us

Narrative, Discourse and Pedagogy (NDP) is an interdisciplinary research unit in the College of Arts working at the intersections of the social sciences, the performative, visual and literary arts, and philosophy. The distinctive features of NDP are, on the one hand, its innovative social science research methodologies incorporating elements of the visual, literary and performative arts, and, on the other, its strong base in the conceptual work of poststructuralist philosophers such as Butler, Deleuze and Foucault. It works with concepts such as subjectification, governmentality, performative, and explores the discursive practices and relations of power through which particular social worlds are constituted. At the heart of this conceptual field lies the question what is it that makes for a viable life? The research within NDP focuses on specific, historically and institutionally situated lives and asks how it is that such lives are made, and how might they be made differently in order to bring about individual and social well-being. While a major focus is on individuals and groups deprived of viable lives, the focus is also on the ordinariness of everyday lives as they intersect with difference and with social change.

An example of this work at the intersections of the arts and social sciences with philosophy is the book arising from the work of NDP, which will come out in July:

Davies, B (Ed) (2007) Judith Butler in Conversation: Analysing the texts and talk of everyday life. New York: Routledge.

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Innovative research methodologies

The members of NDP have a reputation for their work in innovative methodologies. Bronwyn Davies' books Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales: Preschool Children and Gender and Shards of Glass: Children Reading and Writing beyond Gendered Identities developed a new approach to research with children examining children's fictional texts as well as teaching children to write new fictional texts. Bronwyn Davies and Susanne Gannon have recently published Doing Collective Biography with Open University Press. Collective biography is a new research methodology that works with memory and writing. Susanne Gannon has worked with autoethnography, poetic method and with play writing as forms of social scientific research and Bronwyn Davies has recently had a play accepted both for performance and for publication along with her analysis of the Deluzian principles informing such writing as a basis for coming to know place differently. Kerry Robinson and Tania Ferfolja work with performed ethnography, involving the writing of plays written out of ethnographic materials and performed in educational contexts in ways that open students up to difference. Sheridan Linnell uses the visual, literary and performative arts in her research on narrative and art therapy. NDP continues to develop innovative methodologies (such as writing as a method of inquiry, narrative inquiry, discourse analysis, performed and performative ethnography and other arts based modes of inquiry) both as technologies for undertaking research in the social sciences and as vehicles for exploring the relations between human modes of subjectivity and the creative arts. Other examples of published work using innovative research methodologies listed in the attached PDF file (PDF, 12 KB)

Discourse and the subject

A major strength of the research of NDP members is their research on, and theorising about, the nature of the human subject and the process of subjectification with a primary focus on discursive practices and relations of power. Research in NDP extends this work and further explores how human subjects are formed and re-formed through particular ways of making sense of the world and of their place in it and the modes of governmentality that shape what is possible in individual and collective lives. Individual lives are researched in terms of the performativity of particular lives, that is, as subjectivities made real in the process of producing them. The intersections between social structures and social discursive practices, human affect, embodiment, imagination, the literary and creative arts, are central in exploring aspects of subject formation and re-formation, particularly in relation to subjects who find themselves caught in discursive nets that are destructive for themselves and for others. Strategies for the development of ethical reflexivity in encounters with the other is a major focus of this work. Examples of such work on ethics from members include:

Davies, B. (2007) Re-thinking 'behaviour' in terms of positioning the ethics of responsibility, in A.M. Phelan and J. Sumsion (eds) Provoking Absences: Critical Readings in Teacher Education. Sense Publishers, Netherlands.

Davies, B. (2006) Identity, Abjection and Otherness: Creating the self, creating difference, in M. Arnot and M. Mac and Ghaill, The Routledge Falmer Reader in Gender and Education. Routledge 72-90.

Linnell, S. (2007) Towards ethical 'arts of existence': through art therapy and narrative therapy. PhD UWS.

Partnerships and Collaborations

NDP has a strong relationship with the Youth Research Centre at Melbourne University. The Director of YRC is Professor Johanna Wyn, who is an adjunct Professor attached to NDP. The major themes of YRC are youth transitions, youth health and well being and youth engagement and participation in education. Professor Davies has strong involvement in that Centre and acts as an advisor to many of its postgraduate students in her capacity as Professional Fellow at Melbourne University. NDP also has a strong involvement with Danish University of Education where Professor Sondergaard has a major bullying study established in Copenhagen that parallels the current proposal being developed for a similar study in Australia. Visiting scholars have been supported by the Endeavour program. We had Sarah Caewood, a visiting scholar from the Danish University of Education with us for nine months, funded by the Endeavour Scholarship scheme, and will have a new Endeavour scholar in July 2007, Katerina Zabrodska from the Czech Republic. There are numerous other strong international connections with Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and Sweden, details of which are available in the 2006 NDP report. Professor Andy Gilroy from the University of London is a member of our Advisory Committee.

Current ARC Research Grant Funding (PDF, 24KB)

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