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Abtract:

Since the inception of the “narrative turn” in the 1990s, narratives have been widely used as research tools to investigate a variety of social issues: from identity construction to multilingualism to online activism. Researchers doing narrative analysis rely on different traditions such as text based, biographical and interactionist perspectives. The latter are the focus of my talk. Indeed, I will discuss the shift from text to practices in narrative analysis and the implications of approaching storytelling from a practice-oriented perspective (, De Fina 2021, De Fina and Georgakopolou 2008). I will first lay out some antecedents to this approach: in particular I will concentrate on conversation analytic insights on telling everyday stories and on the dimensional model put forth by Ochs and Capps (2001). I will argue that these and other ethnographically oriented perspectives have informed present day interactionist models by presenting an alternative to defining stories exclusively from the point of view of their structural make up and by pointing to participants orientation and participants practices as central to the analysis of how stories are produced and managed concretely. I will then discuss how a practice- based perspective implies paying attention to different storytelling genres and I will illustrate some characteristics and functions of different types of narratives such as for example canonical stories, accounts told in interview, chronicles, and other kinds of digital stories in order to show the varied ways in which they are used to make meaning In the case of narratives in interview, I will also discuss researcher positionality and the importance of including a reflexive component it in the analysis of data.