How Narrative Performance on Stage Made Transformation Possible: A Case Study

Abstract

A burgeoning literature on narrative identity has emerged during the last decades simultaneously with a "performative turn" in the methodology of qualitative social research; both changes indicate a move away from the paradigm of "representation" that emphasizes linear and singular interpretation of "facts" and toward an acknowledgment of the complexity of the social world preferring a dialogic space, open for multiple interpretations and voices. This article aims to explicate how a nonrepresentational narrative stage performance, "We Are All the Same," by a group of people who had suffered from mental illness opened up space that made transformation possible.

Verbal interjections and the making of Awillo Mike as a social representation of “lived lives and storied lives” in live music performance in Kenya

“…This is important because live music in urban settings is not just a form of leisure and entertainment but a site for affirming social belonging in terms of social and cultural values (Hoeven et al 2019;Ogunde, 2016). It is more of a social practice than individual (Lit, 2013). It represents and reconnects social practices and lived experiences of the audiences which are decontextualized due to urban life which is constructed as "disenchantment" (Ogunde, 2016).…”