Dwelling with /in stories: Ongoing conversations about narrative inquiry, including visual narrative inquiry, imagination, and relational ethics

This dissertation consists of four individual papers, and an interlay of writing and art work reflecting my ongoing conversations about narrative inquiry as a research methodology and phenomena, including visual narrative inquiry, believed-in imaginings, as well as relational ethics. In the first paper I explore how place is inscribed onto and into our bodies and how home can be understood as embodied. In this way I explore place as geographic position of home and as ontological. The second paper focuses on how children see and visually interpret their lives and understandings of community. This visual narrative inquiry into childrens' lives and experiences highlights that understanding through sustained conversation and seeing is a way to create dialogical and creative possibilities to explore diverse experiences. The third paper links believed-in imaginings with the relational aspects of narrative inquiry. This paper illustrates the connections by using the image of a kite and kite flyer, as well as the kite string, illustrating the importance of tonos (tension) and teino (stretch) of relationships; both being and becoming in relationship requires narrative inquirers to be imaginative and playful in their in-between space. In the fourth paper I explore my ethical understandings and their relationship to the notion of resonance and remembering in narrative inquiry. As I attend to the life in front of me, I also attend to my own life and more so to the space that lays in-between my research participants and me. It is the in-between space, a space of encounter and resonance, a space in which our lives are unfolding in relation to each other that is significant in narrative inquiry. This dissertation draws on several research studies I undertook or was part of throughout my graduate studies. The methodology of narrative inquiry that was part of all these studies became my research puzzle and thus the focus of this dissertation.