Learning to listen: Storytelling infused with stigma
By Dr Carol Ballantine
Stigma is a troubling barrier to good research. It presents a double challenge to the researcher: an ethical one (research might subject stigmatised individuals and groups to harm) and an epistemological one (stigma creates silences, making it hard to gather data). In my Ph.D. research with African migrant women living in Ireland, I wanted to explore life experiences of gender-based violence, particularly the stigma that surrounds those experiences. How could I ensure that my research participants were not inadvertently exposed to more stigma because of my inquiry? And how I could practice ethical research, but still interrogate the most private and taboo topics, including violence, rape, and personal and collective feelings of shame?
To some extent, I found my answers in narrative research and feminist methods. Formal inquiries of investigation, such as truth inquiries or Ireland’s recent Inquiry into the Mother and Baby homes, often take legalistic views of survivor testimony. In the case of the recent inquiry in Ireland, the commissioners made an ethical argument for burying the 500 testimonies they gathered on confidentiality grounds, expressly defining confidentiality as equivalent to secrecy. But this is a thin view of ethics. The narrative is a fundamental human urge, and when researchers invite individuals to tell their stories we are making a commitment of sorts to honour those stories. To be sure, this is a tricky, challenging business, but that is no reason to silence even those who have chosen to speak. It behooves us as researchers to find ways of respecting the individual and allow them to see how their input informs our research.
My Ph.D. study was small – smaller than I had hoped it would be, because of course, people do not necessarily want to relive traumatic experiences, especially not when they are at the mercy of the Irish state as refugees and asylum seekers are. I used that small scale to get playful, to explore different ways of telling stories that would feel good and produce new and insightful information. Those individuals who volunteered to participate in research about violence and stigma wanted their stories to be heard and trusted me to steward them.
I treated narratives – especially first-person narratives of victimisation – as precious things which belonged first and foremost to the narrators themselves. One way that I did this was to share my emerging analysis with research participants and ask for their reflections, including in a validation workshop. Another way was to work with an artist friend, who took the anonymous interview transcripts, assembled them, printed them as chapter books on high quality paper, and bound them in beautifully embossed single-edition hardback books. In doing this, I acknowledged the authorship of the research participant, and returned their stories to them, gently encouraging everyone to continue experimenting with narration, in whatever way felt safe.
Despite the care I took with participants’ narratives, I had to acknowledge that, in inviting people to tell stories, we are inviting all the harms of hermeneutic injustice into our research.
I had a particular interest in stigma, and a desire to create non-stigmatising spaces – however, stigma is always there, in society and hence among people participating in research as interviewers and interviewees. I documented participants repeating stigmatising narratives, even as they described the harm that stigma had caused to their own selves.
From conducting this study, I identified principles that I believe can be applied to much qualitative research into stigma and stigmatised issues. The most fundamental of these is that research participants are agents and owners of their own stories. It was hard to recruit people to share their personal experiences of violence: those who came forward did so deliberately. They used the research space to experiment with telling their stories safely, and they continued to maintain strategic silences at other times and in other places.
Understanding topics that are socially silenced is a challenge, but not an insurmountable one. Stigmatising beliefs and attitudes infuse the words and stories of everybody in a society seething with categorical judgments: researchers need to guard carefully against this and review their own writings for it. Despite the risks of exposure and social shame, the human drive to narrate remains strong, because we believe in the power of stories, and with good reason. Storytelling always underpins social change, and it will continue to do so. People who volunteer to share their own stories for the purposes of social research act out of a belief in narrative power: researchers can make use of creative narrative approaches to respect this power.
Article details:
The Reaffirmation of Self? Narrative Inquiry for Researching Violence Against Women and Stigma
Dr Carol Ballantine
First Published August 23, 2021 Research Article
DOI: 10.1177/10778012211024269
Violence Against Women
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