Professor Arthur W. Frank, Calgary University
Professor Arthur W. Frank, Department of Sociology, Calgary University, Canada, will visit
Högskolan Dalarna on February 5th and 6th 2014. He will visit two of our research seminars,
Culture, Identity and Representations on February 5th, and Health and Welfare on February
6th. We would like to invite everyone to attend these two seminars. Professor Frank is well
known for his work with narratives, using literary concepts to ask social scientific questions.
He has especially worked with perspectives on the relationship between narrative and illness.
Articles suggested to read before the seminars will be sent out in due time.
KIG: Seminar February 5, time 13-16. Room:
“The Dialogical Turn: 15 Guidelines for Studying Stories”
After almost 15 years of workshops on narrative analysis, I have refined my own approach
into fifteen guidelines--not rules, and not a procedure for narrative analysis, but guidelines to
preserve what is always at least a three part dialogue between storyteller, story, and
listener/analyst. These guidelines point toward two core research questions: (1) What are
selves? Or in a dialogical sense, what are the multiple voices that make up a self? and (2) On
what basis do people affiliate into groups, and what holds groups together? Stories are
understood to be central to both selves and group affiliations.
After the seminar KIG invites the participants to a post seminar.
Recommended Reading:
Arthur W. Frank, Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-narratology. Chicago, 2010.
Arthur W. Frank, “Practicing Dialogical Narrative Analysis,” pp. 33-52 in James Holstein and
Jaber Gubrium, eds., Varieties of Narrative Analysis. Los Angeles: Sage, 2012.
Hälsa och välfärd: Seminar February 6, time 13-15. Room:
“Why Healthcare Needs Stories”
The seminar will begin with four basic propositions about why offering healthcare is a
narrative activity: why patients need to tell stories, why healthcare workers needs their own
stories, and why healthcare systems need to take stories seriously. We will then consider both
methodology and clinical issues: how to listen to stories, what could be useful to write about
stories, and how to lead people to question whether the stories that frame their experiences are
good stories with which to live.
Recommended Reading:
Arthur W. Frank, “Asking the Right Question About Pain: Narrative and Phronesis”,
Literature and Medicine 23, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 209-225.
Arthur W. Frank, “Selves, Holding Their Own With Illness.” Manuscript, in press.