Relational Agency and Identity Navigation in Life Stories on Addiction: Developing Narrative Tools to Analyze the Interplay Between Multiple Selves

Abstract

In life stories on addiction, in which dependence is experienced as an antagonistic force, agency manifests as enigmatic. As narrators in these stories usually describe how they lost their agency to a substance, we may ask who then takes over the agency and is the actor. Can material things act with agency? By taking influences from actor–network theory, Bambergs’ narrative positioning theory, Greimas’ narrative semiotics, symbolic interactionism, and critical discourse studies, I propose that addiction stories can be productively approached with an ontology that conceptualizes actors’ agency as relational. According to this ontology, individuals develop addiction in relation to heterogeneous attachments that form an enabling assemblage. Moreover, I propose that life stories on addiction are narratives in which narrators navigate their addiction by negotiating with multiple selves. These selves can be productively identified and analyzed from the perspectives of “story,” “interaction,” and “identity claim.” As a story, in which actors are positioned vis-à-vis one another, life stories on addiction can be approached as narratives that describe the confrontation between the trajectory of the self that is driven by addiction and the trajectory of the self that seeks mastery over one’s life. As an interaction between narrators and interlocutors, life stories on addiction can be examined as performances of interactive selves who do positive face-work to neutralize, rationalize, and justify their “deviant” behavior. And as identity claims, life stories on addiction can be considered embodiments of ideal or normative selves that are articulated in relation to the dominant discourses and master narratives of surrounding culture. By using examples from life stories on addiction, the article aims to clarify with what kinds of concepts and narrative tools we can analyze the interplay between multiple selves in addiction stories.

Study of Educational Trajectories Through Biograms and Semantic Exploration, an Approach to Narrative Studies

“…To do this, we should take into account similar research that had been done previously by other authors and the suitability of the various research approaches that we can find today. Törrönen (2022) and Kahveci (2021) reminded us how life stories reconstruct through pieces or small pieces a complex puzzle. Through this research we have seen that these pieces acquire meaning in context beyond the individual one.…”

“…It is, therefore, an ethnographic research that seeks to interpret the history of different subjects belonging to the same group (Smyth et al, 2008). We can observe how through narrative research, “life stories make it possible to track down how the narrators reassemble the bits and pieces of their past life and weave them into meaningful trajectories” (Törrönen, 2022, p. 3). Narrative inquiry becomes a space of deepening the different experiences that shape these trajectories of the students (Karnieli-Miller et al, 2018; Pilbeam et al, 2022).…”