Critical Narrative Inquiry and Theory Construction

This book provides a coherent approach to the often traumatic situations and increased risks faced by marginalized groups, using narrative inquiry as a means to construct theory that can capture the historical, political and cultural constraints embedded in life contexts. It is innovative in taking an emancipatory standpoint, an interdisciplinary approach, and proposing narrative inquiry-to-theory as a useful set of processes in discovering and fostering emancipatory strengths and encouraging life changes toward health and thriving. Methodologically, the book includes many techniques of narrative analysis consistent with Polkinghorne, Bruner, and Reissman, and adds complex insights from critical viewpoints including those of Hooks, Crenshaw, Sue and colleagues, Ricoeur, Foucault, Bourdieu, Said and Barthes. It offers a rigorous, pragmatic, comprehensive process for using people's stories as the basis for context-sensitive emancipatory theories that can then be applied in practice and policymaking in the health and human sciences.