Talking Health Matters:
Personal Stories in
Professional Practice
Workshop and Conference: 16th and 17th June 2009
Venue: Northumbria University, City Campus East,
Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8ST.
Conference 17th June 9.00am – 4.30pm
Keynote Speakers
Professor Arthur W. Frank,
Calgary University.
“The Telling of Truth and the Truth of Telling:
Issues and Openings in Listening to Service
Users' Stories.”
Dr. Maggie O’Neill,
Loughborough University.
“Beyond Binaries: abjection, narrative and
sex work.”
Dr. Ann McNulty,
Health and Race Equality Forum, Newcastle
upon Tyne.
“They need to know where we come from
and not just point the finger.” Personal
stories and professional practice.
Conference Fee: £75.00
Workshop 16th June 1:00pm - 4:00pm
Professor Arthur W. Frank
“Narrative Analysis Beyond Grounded
Theory: Questions of Storytelling Practice.”
Workshop Fee: £35.00
For further details contact:
John Given (0191) 2156228
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john.given@northumbria.ac.uk
The School of Health Community and Education Studies at Northumbria
University has a strong track record in both service user involvement and
narrative approaches to teaching and research.
One illustration of this dual interest has been the school’s involvement in the
CETL4HealthNE ‘people with experience’ workstream (and in particular with
the development of an audio visual ‘narrative archive’. Based on earlier work
in the school thearchive aims to develop a teaching resource which will
contain an audio visual data base of narrative interviews recording peoples
experience’s of the health care system.
http://www.cetl4healthne.ac.uk/view)
The project’s aim is to work collaboratively with community based groups in
order to mutually develop skills in creating and developing narrative resources
based directly on the lived experience of the participants. One session in the
conference will demonstrate this developing resource and invite participants to
consider this usefulness of this approach to their own areas of practice
Conference Abstracts
Professor Arthur W. Frank.
Professor of Sociology, University of Calgary, Visiting Professor, Dalla Lana
School of Public Health (2008-09), University of Toronto
The Telling of Truth and the Truth of Telling. Issues and openings in
listening to service users stories.
Service-users stories about their lives not only provide information in excess
of usual template documentation, these stories are also the medium of
relationships that are crucial to the efficacy of service delivery. In most
service-professional training, listening is taught as a pillar of practice. A
different question is whether institutions that provide services encourage
taking the time to listen to stories. To convince institutions of the value of
service-users’ stories, greater clarity is needed about what kind of truth
service users can express: What do their stories tell professionals, and how
can those stories lead to improved service? The lecture helps to sort out the
values of storytelling for service users and of listening for professionals.
Storytelling can be a good use of clinical time, depending on what one listens
for--the sense of what is most valuable in the telling.
Dr. Maggie O’Neill
Senior Lecturer Department of Social Sciences,
Loughborough University.
Beyond Binaries: abjection, narrative and sex work.
The recent turn to art in the Social Sciences (that follows the linguistic and
cultural turns) provides fertile ground to explore the intersections between
narrative research and arts based practice. This paper explores the space or
hyphen between arts based work and ethnographic research and reflects
upon the importance of using performative methodologies (visual, poetic,
dramatic) to interpret the issue of sex work through narrative biographical
research and participatory arts. The paper will explore: key themes,
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discourses and interventions in the policy and practice of sex work; move us
beyond binaries that lead to divisions and paralysis and ultimately help to
reinforce the Othering of women and men who sell sex; and argue for a
politics of inclusion – that makes use of participatory, biographical and visual
methods and also - whilst creating spaces for the voices of sex workers and
dialogue on the one hand can also lead to knowledge transfer and
interventions in the governance of sex work on the other.
Dr. Ann McNulty.
Health and Racial Equality Forum
Newcastle upon Tyne
“They need to know where we come from and not just point the finger”:
Personal stories and professional practice.
This comment comes from a woman with experience of having a baby under
the age of twenty, who grew up, went to school, and still lives in one of the
least affluent parts of Newcastle upon Tyne. It’s an expression of her
frustration at being talked about and labelled in relation to her background and
the place she identifies with.
In this presentation she will describe how she and other women designed and
delivered, over the past 6 years, a Public Health workshop for medical
students, putting their own stories at the heart of the sessions. Evaluation data
show how much students valued the women’s stories.
Ann McNulty, who worked with the women in these Public Health workshops,
will discuss the potential of using a biographical-narrative interview approach:
 to research people’s experiences in relation to health and well-being
 to contribute to debates about the concepts of ‘social inclusion’, ‘social
exclusion’ and ‘social capital’
In her doctoral research into teenage pregnancy, funded jointly by
Northumberland Care Trust and the ESRC this approach produced data that
highlighted the complex circumstances and relationships behind ‘simple
statistics’.
WORKSHOP Tuesday June 16th 2009
Venue: City Campus East, Business School, Room CCE1-025
“Narrative Analysis Beyond Grounded Theory:
Questions of Storytelling Practice.”
Researchers acknowledge the value of people’s stories, yet research is often
stuck in grounded theory’s emphasis on coding in order to discover some
number of themes in a collection of stories told in interviews. Not the least
problem of this research is its separation of the stories’ content from the scene
and circumstances of the storytelling.
The workshop presents five analytic questions that can orient research that
takes seriously the performative nature of stories. Stories can report past
events, but more significantly stories enact what storytellers hope will become
the truth of those events. Research can study storytelling as enactment,
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beginning with these questions. The questions also bridge research interests
in stories with clinical interests.
The workshop will begin with the question of what distinguishes stories from
other kind of narratives and a discussion of narrative interviewing, although
interviews are only one source of people’s stories. Participants are
encouraged to bring stories for discussion, either research stories or clinical
stories (for which appropriate consent has been obtained).
The workshop will be of interest to post graduate students or service
professionals interested in the development of skills related to narrative
research and practice.
Professor Arthur Frank is a prominent writer on narrative theory and method.
He is the author of a number of well known books including:
The Wounded Storyteller: Body Illness and Ethics (1995)
At the Will of the Body (2002)
The Renewal of Generosity: Illness Medicine and How to Live (2004)
Dr. Maggie O’Neill was co-editor of Sociology the Journal of the British
Sociological Association from 19999 -2002 and has written a number of books
including;
Adorno, Culture and Feminism (1999),
Prostitution and Feminism: towards a politics of feeling.(2001)
Dilemmas in Managing Professionalism and Gender in the Public Sector.
Edited with Jim Barry and Mike Dent(2002)
Dr. Ann McNulty was awarded her doctorate from Newcastle University in
2008 for her thesis entitled :
‘Great Expectations: teenage pregnancy and intergenerational transmission’
She is currently seconded from HAREF for one year as a research associate on an
ESRC funded study into Organisational Change, Resistance and Democracy: LGBT
Equalities Initiatives in Local Government
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Talking Health Matters:
Personal Stories in
Professional Practice
Conference Programme Wednesday 17th June 2009
Venue Northumbria University City Campus East, Business School.
Time
Session Room CCE1-003.
09:00 – 09:30
Registration
09:30 – 09:45
Introduction to the day
09:45 – 10:30
The Telling of Truth and the Truth of
Telling: Issues and Openings in
Listening to Service Users' Stories
10:30 – 10:45
Questions
10:45 – 11:15
Coffee
11:15 – 11:45
12:15 – 12:45
Talkinglongterm. Demonstration of the
CETL4HealthNE Narrative Archive
project.
Small group discussion about
applications/developments of the tlt
approach in different professional areas
Feedback from groups
12:45 – 13:45
LUNCH
13:45 – 14:45
“They need to know where we come
from and not just point the finger”:
Personal stories and professional
practice.
Beyond Binaries: abjection, narrative
11:45 – 12:15
14:45– 15:45
and sex work.
15:45 – 16:00
Coffee
16:00 16:30
Plenary Discussion and Conclusion
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Speaker
Professor Arthur
Frank, Calgary
University
John Given
Dr. Ann McNulty
Professor Maggie
O’Neill
Talking Health Matters:
Personal Stories in Professional Practice
Conference and Workshop: 16th and 17th June 2009
Venue: Northumbria University,
City Campus East, Newcastle upon Tyne
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