#narrative ethics

[gregxb]

What do you think a villain redemption needs to have in order to be good?

A good villain redemption is not about becoming nice. It is about accountability, transformation, and cost. Regret alone is not redemption. Love alone is not redemption. A tragic backstory is not redemption. Redemption only works if the character understands the harm they caused, accepts responsibility for it, and actively chooses to change even when it costs them something. Not just reputation, but power, identity, safety, control, or desire.

A real redemption arc requires internal change, not just external behavior. The character’s worldview has to shift. Their values have to change. Their sense of self has to evolve. If they are still the same person inside but just fighting on the other side now, that is not redemption. That is a faction swap.

And not every villain deserves redemption. Some stories are stronger when redemption is impossible. Sometimes the most honest ending is consequence, not forgiveness. Redemption is not a moral requirement of storytelling. It is a narrative choice that only works when it is earned, painful, and irreversible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQsD-XgEixg

[one-page-a-day]

5th of June 2024

"I was a whole different person back then."

How do we justify actions of our past selves that feel wrong now? How can we be one and the same person, but different people at different stages of our life?

Maybe it's because we narrate our own life in chapters. On the one hand, our self outlasts our whole life, on the other hand I am not the same person that I was yesterday.

Narration is our way of navigating this paradox. Narration ties all loose strings together, all desicions and actions and feelings, of all those different "mes" of childhood, of monday mornings and hot summers. The conglomerate of all adds up to "my life", and "my life" becomes one coherent narrative. Only looking back at it as a story, we can judge our life to be good, fruitful or happy.

Eva Baillie said, autobiographic writing is identity research.

And maybe, our answer to the question of the meaning of life is a confession, which is just another form of narration.

[one-page-a-day]

27th of April 2024

I finally handed in my paper on Scheherazade in contemporary Arab women's writings. It was a dive into postcolonial studies, Arabic literature and history. It was challenging, sometimes I noticed that I was exploring outside of my comfort zone to connect the dots, but what I was writing felt relevant and close to the beat of the heart of our time.

Contemporary Arab women writers both celebrate and disregard the figure of Scheherazade in their writings. For some, she is the queen of narrative, a survivor and a fighter against despotism; for some she is a storyteller telling fairytales, metaphorically blind and deaf to the suffering of the Arab people, or the personification of 'the mysterious, seductive, obedient Arab woman' that is a present picture in the mind of the people in the West. Either way, Scheherazade is used as a means to liberation and political change.

I've discussed the works of Joumana Haddad, Liana Badr, Samar Yazbek and Mohja Kahf, building up on findings of researchers like Hanadi al-Samman and Hiyem Cheurfa.

Now, I have started with a smaller assignment. I have to compare an entry to a root in two arabic-arabic dictonaries regarding composition and contents. I will use Al-Qamus al-Muhit and Taj Al-Arus.

[one-page-a-day]

6th of March 2024

Getting closer to scope down on a topic for one of the two longer assignments (20 pages) I have to write.

I want to write about Shahrazad and how philosophers see her as an embodiment of the idea that "to live is to narrate"; and how postcolonial arab writers and artists reclaim Shahrazad from Western interpretation to regain agency and authorship over themselves ("narrate or be silenced").

[shrinkrants]

At the risk of offering a truncated and thereby trivialising summary, Michael White’s particularist ethics of practice is a receptivity to discovery in the words, phrases, story openings, stories and story fragments of the people he met with, which involved restricting his attention to the local and particular within conversational languages and the neologisms that enter into them. These discoveries are not discoveries about objectively verifiable truths or facts. Nor are these discoveries justified or made more ‘real’ by appeal to sources of truth or fact other than the words and phrases that are offered. I suggest that Michael White believed the discoveries that emerge in the words, phrases and openings to alternative and preferred stories and story fragments are discoveries that elude the grasp of ‘conceptual refinements’, elude the empirically-derived findings of psychological sciences, and elude the dominant stories that shape expectations about how people ought to live and how they ought to feel about their lives and ipso facto themselves. --Phillipa Byers. (2019). Michael White’s particularist ethics in a biological age. The International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work No. 3 106-116.

[shrinkrants]

Ethics Alive! Narrative Ethics and the Value of Storytelling

Narrative ethics is an approach to exploring ethical issues by engaging people in storytelling. It is based on social constructionism, and t

I remember, for example, helping a particular teenager, Ashton.[1] I met Ashton in a park where he sat next to a knapsack with all his possessions. As he shared his story, I learned that he had left home eight months earlier because his parents had problems with alcohol. They were often violent while intoxicated. He eventually decided that it was better to live on his own, even if that meant living on the street. He said he used drugs to cope with feelings of depression and loneliness. He also shared that he engaged in sex trade to earn money to pay for drugs, food, and other necessities.      As a street-outreach social worker, my job was to offer help, not to judge, blame, or dictate what Ashton should do or how to lead his life. We discussed various options, including the possibility of going to a residential addictions treatment program. A residential program would offer him a safe place to stay, food to eat, and a fresh start in life. Residential treatment programs are abstinence-based, meaning that he would need to be drug free. He told me very adamantly that he did not want to stop using drugs. He felt that drugs were his only way to cope. After further discussions, we agreed to use a harm reduction approach. Rather than focusing on abstinence, we talked about ways to use drugs in a safer manner (e.g., using clean needles, injecting safely, and avoiding overdoses).      Some people might hear this story and see me as an enabler. Rather than helping the client, was I enabling him to continue to use illicit drugs? And, if he continued to use drugs, would his health and well-being continue to spiral downward? As a social worker, however, I believe in the ethical principles of service, respect for the dignity and worth of all people, and human relationships. Initially, I offered services that I thought might be most helpful. When he rejected them, I knew that I needed to start with Ashton and his wishes. I needed to work with him as a partner. I needed to take his social situation into account and try to see things from his perspective. Essentially, I needed to honor his self-determination, dignity, and worth. These principles help to define who I am as a social worker.

[shrinkrants]

Narrative ethics, from a paper by Arthur Frank

… narrative ethics is more interested in preventing breakdowns in mutual understanding from happening in the first place than in adjudicating conflicts over preferred courses of action. The primary focus is to prevent situations from turning into cases. Thus narrative ethics necessarily morphs into narrative medicine, including in its purview how everyday clinical practice proceeds and how well such practice honors people’s stories of suffering. Narrative ethics focuses on pedagogy—teaching people how to recognize the best versions of themselves in whatever circumstances they find themselves. In adjudication, by contrast, an expert prescribes a preferred solution that participants were unable either to think of or to agree upon. Pedagogy is slower, helping people become capable of new imaginations of themselves and, crucially, of others and their imaginations about what they must do. But pedagogy has more lasting effects.

-Arthur W. Frank, “Narrative Ethics as Dialogical Storytelling,” Narrative Ethics: The Role of Stories in Bioethics, special report, Hastings Center Report 44, no. 1 (2014): S16-S20. DOI: 10.1002/hast.263 p S16

[thingsandschemes]

Fun fact: I'm approaching my writing this semester with the nonchalance of a far older scholar.