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In this section, I investigate the scope for resisting culturally dominant narratives by unpacking a number of claims about how individuals manage to retain agency, the role that memory can play in contesting dominant stories, and the affirmation of

the transformative potential of stories. I end the section with a consideration of the challenges of exploring narratives and individual and social change.

First, there is an argument in the narrative research literature that dominant narratives do not entirely determine our individual stories, and that although they may constrain our individual stories, they can be resisted because individuals retain a certain amount of agency.⁶ I turn back to Smith and Sparkes’ spectrum of perspective on narrative identity (2008) to illustrate this claim theoretically. Writing about a specific position on their spectrum, the storied resource perspective, they state:

Within the limits of relationally framed contexts, joint actions, narrative resources, body materiality and micro and macro structures, people may edit their stories, and have some ‘say’ as to which type of story gets told, what story they wish to live, whom the stories are about and to whom the stories are told.

Further, there can be slippage and discontinuities between the received public or meta cultural narratives and the way those storylines are narratively applied by the individual, thus signalling the moments when narrative, social structure and active storytellers meet. (20)

To illustrate this point, I will use the case presented by Talbot et al. (1996)⁷ about the affirmation and resistance of the dominant discourse on pregnancy. Here, Talbot et al. draw up a picture of the master narrative on pregnancy in which parents, especially mothers, are held responsible as individuals for their well-being and that of their children. In turn, this has led to the emergence of a moral discourse “in which agents must justify their conduct because they can influence

6The argument is found throughout volumes such as Bamberg and Andrews’ collection (2004), Scott (1990), De Fina and Georgakopoulo (2012), Riessman (2008) and chapters and papers such as May’s (2004), Manojlovic (2010), Watson (2008), Chase (2011) and the special issue of Storytelling, Self, Society on Storytelling and Social Change (2009), to cite only a few.

7Further examples can be found in Bamberg and Andrews’ volume (2004), especially in the chapters by Andrews, Squire, Jones and Throsby.

and be held accountable for outcomes.” (227) In this context, the authors analyse their interviews with two women, Mary and Sue, who are pregnant and considered at risk due to their health condition. They show how the expectant mothers employ discursive strategies in order to resist the master narratives, justify their choice of going ahead with pregnancy and position themselves in such a way as to counter the dominant story. There is a space for master and counter narratives to meet, a contested site in which individuals, through narratives, gain “the power to subvert social norms.” (Watson, 2008: 334) Thus, culturally dominant narratives, far from being monolithic and static are unstable.

Secondly, we saw in the previous section how culturally dominant narratives play a part in what we remember. In memory studies however, the popular memory approach supports the claim detailed above and put forth in narrative research that individuals may resist, individually and collectively, the dominant story, here specifically the “dominant memory” with “counter memories, as discursive practices through which memories are continuously revised.” (Misztal, 2003: 65) Individuals, then, are not simply the recipients of memory; they can agentively interpret it and reformulate it. For example, an “official” memory of the events of Bloody Sunday emerged in the aftermath of the events from the British State. In its story, British soldiers had acted in self-defence only against armed protesters, a version sanctioned by a Public Inquiry. However, a “survivor memory of Bloody Sunday” (Dawson, 2007: 90) emerged from Irish nationalism to contest the official memory created from above. In this memory from below, or counter-memory of the events, the innocence of the victims was asserted and reasserted every year in the public space through Bloody Sunday commemorations, which challenged the official British memory. (Dawson, 2007)

Thirdly, some authors go further and affirm the transformative potential of stories, with an underlying assumption that they can bring about a positive change. One of the ideas behind this is that if narratives can serve a dominant group, they can also serve the groups that are oppressed (Bradbury and Sclater, 2004). For example,

James Scott (1990) explains how dominating groups dictate a public transcript by which they and the “subordinate groups” must live their lives, leaving apparently little opportunity for the subordinate groups to produce their own transcript.

However, he also sheds light on the many subtle ways that subordinate groups have to resist the public transcript and create their own hidden transcript. Squire puts it quite simply:

Stories operate within ‘interpretive communities’ of speakers and hearers that are political as well as cultural actors. They build collective identities that can lead, albeit slowly and discontinuously, to cultural shifts and political change. Personal stories thus often operate as bids for representation and power from the disenfranchised. (2013: 62)

Polletta (1998) gives an example of the potential of individual stories for collective social change. In a piece of research about black students’ sit-ins in 1960, she argues that personal stories prompted the mobilization effort of the students. She shows how sharing individual stories in more or less public settings before the movement was properly established, helped to create a collective identity for the students. It was instrumental in making them take action. Through stories and

“story-telling as activism,” (154; emphasis in original) the Black students started to take part in a movement which would result in equal rights and thus social change.

If this is an example at the collective level, the transformative potential of stories can also exist at the individual level, as believed by narrative therapists. Indeed,

“the process of narrative therapy is built on the existential view that people have a capacity to revise and re-author the narratives in which they have been acculturated.” (Polkinghorne, 2004: 65) Here, narrative therapists have an intrinsic belief that personal transformation is possible through our own individual reworking of our personal stories.

Finally, a challenge remains to the transformative potential of narratives, located in the material reality of life. Narrative resources in themselves may not be enough to

lead to change in individual and collective lives and the impact of material realities on life cannot be underestimated:

At its limit, however, this line of reasoning [simple equation between stories and social realm] can be taken to support the notion that social life counts for nothing outside of discourse. On this tack the improvement of life can be accomplished if one tells a better story about it. But life is not merely talk; inequalities of opportunity, for example, are not redressed if individuals, or even whole classes, tell more ‘agentic,’ optimistic autobiographies. (Rosenwald and Ochberg, 1992: 7, as cited in Finnegan, 1998: 167).

In other words, although narratives can contribute to social change on a subjective level, social change is also dependent on practical or “objective” factors, such as

“economic redistribution, legal reform, political activism or neighborhood reconstruction.” (Squire, 2012: 54)