Intercultural Experience in Narrative

Spirituality in expatriate experience and coping in mission

“…This inductive, interpretive and nonpositivist research approach is still rare in expatriation research. So far, this method has been used to study, among other things, the construction of expatriate experience and career cycles (Myers et al, 2017), expatriate identity formation (Kohonen, 2008), expatriate-local personnel communication in the MNC (Wilczewski et al, 2018) and expatriate adjustment and cultural learning (Gertsen et al, 2012;Wilczewski, 2019;Wilczewski et al, 2019). This approach is well-suited for exploring intercultural experiences because it allows for investigations into how a narrator constructs experience and how the processes he/she participates in are enacted in the storytelling process (Czarniawska, 1998).…”

Turning away from epistemic violence by capturing a lived experience of the other

“…When relating a personal story, the narrator organizes their experience and constructs their subjective reality, as well as cultural identity. This is why “stories unfold as an attractive object of study for exploring intercultural communication interactions and learning which require transformations of an individual’s behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, values, and so on, to better create meanings and function in social situations marked by cultural diversity” (Wilczewski, 2019, p. 61). In turn, the narrator’s lived experience and cultural perspective may be captured through a narrative analysis of their personal story by disclosing sense-making and sense-giving processes, and identity construction processes.…”

“…Such an analysis reveals how and what knowledge is created in a cultural encounter from the cultural other’s perspective. The high potential of narrative inquiry has been proven by empirical research in the social sciences as an alternative method to investigate the ways people ascribe meanings to events (Denzin, 1997), including our research agenda into intercultural experience (Wilczewski, 2019), intercultural learning (Wilczewski et al, 2019), and intercultural communication processes (Wilczewski et al, 2018) in multinational companies. The narrative approach allows the researcher to link content (meaning, values, beliefs) with context (familial, social, cultural, ecological), which remain key in Indigenous psychology (Kim et al, 2006).…”

“Don’t praise the day before the sunset”: Paremiology in the study of depressiveness

“…We apply a social constructionist approach to culture understood as a contextually (re)constructed phenomenon and a symbolic system of explicit and tacit assumptions and values shared by a community and passed to its new members through social interaction (Burr, 2006; Kirmayer & Ryder, 2016; Wilczewski, 2019).…”

“…The complexity of the phenomenon of depression still challenges studies that aim to better understand the mental schemes of depressed people and how they interpret figurative language, including proverbs. Despite intense research on the cultural roots of affective disorders in diverse ethnic samples, no study to date has explored what language data, specifically, commonly used proverb-like narratives on optimism and pessimism, may reveal about the interplay between culture and depression—in the same vein as, for example, narrative research allows access to personal experience (Hermans & Gieser, 2012) and intercultural experience (Wilczewski, 2019).…”