Record Details

Narrative materiality and practice: A study of born-free negotiation of periphery and centre

Literator

 
 
Field Value
 
Title Narrative materiality and practice: A study of born-free negotiation of periphery and centre
 
Creator Kelleher, William
 
Subject sociolinguistics; narrative research; linguistic ethnography; geosemiotics; interaction Born frees; narrative; small stories; community of practice; trajectory; geosemiotics; axes of intersubjectivity.
Description This article explores a small story narrative, the community of practice and the orientations of a group of ‘born-free’ participants as these interact with the material discourses of the Gautrain station in the business district of Sandton in the Gauteng, South Africa. ‘Born frees’ are young people born after the end of Apartheid. They are of interest in social studies because of the enormous demographic, familial and educational changes they represent. The discussion of the article concerns, firstly, the genre of account, and the relation between story and trajectory. Trajectory and the spatial coordinates of the story are introduced to understand what Sandton and its material discourses represent for these participants. The Gautrain station is then approached through geosemiotics. Thirdly, the negotiation of social space implicit in the co-construction of the small story is analysed through axes of intersubjectivity applied to participant orientation and narrativisation. Methodologically, this article follows a new narrative turn that sees narrative as practice. It seeks to introduce materiality to analysis. As storytelling, from this perspective, is embedded within physically co-present texts, signs and representations, the methodology was to map samples of participant talk against a site. This allowed participant stories, isolated using qualitative audio annotation, to be situated in the exact place of their telling, and for analysis to include artefacts of the semiotic landscape, which is to say textual or visual ensembles such as notices, posters and billboards that are displayed in urban public space and that represent a circulation of wider discourses.
 
Publisher AOSIS
 
Contributor National Research Foundation Oppenheimer Memorial Trust
Date 2019-08-29
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — qualitative; narrative; interactional; ethnographic —
Format text/html application/epub+zip application/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/lit.v40i1.1573
 
Source Literator; Vol 40, No 1 (2019); 9 pages Literator; Vol 40, No 1 (2019); 9 pages 2219-8237 0258-2279
 
Language eng
 
Relation
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://literator.org.za/index.php/literator/article/view/1573/3052 https://literator.org.za/index.php/literator/article/view/1573/3051 https://literator.org.za/index.php/literator/article/view/1573/3053 https://literator.org.za/index.php/literator/article/view/1573/3050
 
Coverage Sandton; Gauteng Contemporary Born Frees
Rights Copyright (c) 2019 William Kelleher https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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