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11 - A Narrative Practice Approach to Identities: Small Stories and Positioning Analysis in Digital Contexts

from Part III - Methodological Approaches

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 October 2021

By
Korina Giaxoglou  and
Alexandra Georgakopoulou
Edited by
Michael Bamberg ,
Carolin Demuth  and
Meike Watzlawik
Michael Bamberg
Affiliation:
Clark University, Massachusetts
Carolin Demuth
Affiliation:
Aalborg University, Denmark
Meike Watzlawik
Affiliation:
Sigmund Freud University, Berlin
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Summary

This chapter discusses small stories and positioning as epistemological and analytical tools for the study of identities and affect in digital contexts. We start by discussing the shift from views of narrative as a textual mode of communication to stories as embodied communicative practice associated with identity positioning at different levels. We then move on to illustrate positioning analysis as an empirical framework for investigating how narrative identities are emploted and updated, reiterated and sedimented as ways of telling and as types of participation. Drawing on our respective work on sharing emotion and the self in social media, we call for the extension of identity positioning analysis to the study of affective positioning practices in light of their heightened importance in the performance of “authentic” identities in digital contexts. We show how a YouTube vlogger enacts her affective positioning through specific sets of linguistic, paralinguistic, and embodied markers that cue her affective orientations at different levels of her vlogging narrative activity. We conclude by foregrounding the continued relevance of positioning analysis for the study of identities in digital contexts and the need to keep updating it in response to “new” tensions and dilemmas arising from emerging narrative and identity modes.

Keywords

Narrative practicesmall storiesidentity positioningaffective positioningpositioning cues
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Identity , pp. 241 - 261
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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