Counternarratives

In this autoethnographic mapping of the educational experiences leading to my current role as a researcher and teacher educator in the United States, I argue that I enacted de/colonizing processes through my academic migrations. Using personal narratives rooted in de/colonial, Black feminist, and Mami-influenced onto-epistemological orientations, I outline key movements made during my undergraduate studies at (a) an Ivy League college and a teacher education program in South Florida, and my graduate studies at (b) a second Ivy League institution and a Hispanic Serving
Institution. I provide examples from a published book, web articles, and personal e-mail communications that reveal how peers, faculty, and administrators reacted to my departures and arrivals. I contend with the paradox of the US academy granting me access to theorists who name critical pedagogy and intersectionality, while simultaneously exacerbating constraints I mitigated as a Black woman with familial ties to the Global South. Centering the de/colonial sense-making women embodying multiple marginality offer, I identify the epistemic frictions that motivated my critical academic migrations. I conclude by offering points of considerations for institutions of higher education that are purportedly committed to equity, inclusion, and supporting diverse onto-epistemic orientations.

Narratives are a constitutive part of the talk of crime. Whenever an event is interpreted as “crime” and reactions to it are determined, stories are established. Events are described, responsibilities ascribed, justifications sought, alternative interpretations evaluated, etc. In other words, crime is contested by devising and rejecting narratives. Narratives are linguistic and cultural patterns of the construction of crime that organise the production of crime. By “patterns” we mean that narratives do not simply exist. They are established and negotiated in social and institutional processes. Some narratives can be established in these processes in the longer term, others will be forgotten or wither. This is a conflictual process. But what exactly it means to link narratives and conflicts in the context of criminality and punishment has hardly been examined in detail so far, and this is what this volume seeks to illuminate.

This study employs narrative in order to examine circumstances wherein identity constructs and self-image are reconstituted in the face of oppressive circumstances. The authors of this article, both art educa-tors/academics, explore the role of narrative processes at the intersection of an " art education of place " purposed to reinterpret extant lifeworlds and mediate premature identity foreclosures. Narrative methods open portals for the authors to express both the challenges and the merit of reconciling our identities as African American males and professional educators who navigate predominantly White institutions. In this article, we juxtapose two selected life episodes narrated in order to examine the spaces between iterations of our lifeworlds; our situational, relational, and oppositional responses to various oppressive conditions; and our navigation of the stigmas and stressors inherent therein. These stories and their analysis are presented as an exemplar of the mediation of contemporary identity and the potential of such mediations as a transgressive form of pedagogy and a significant redress to persistent popular culture mythologies about race and class.

Archives are an integral component in the formation of a nation’s historical narratives. They are both repositories and sources of a nation’s evidence of events. Institutional archives have been striving to incorporate equity and social justice for Indigenous peoples but their practice is still heavily skewed to colonists’ perspectives. In this article, the author uses critical race theory to examine the social media narratives of Australia’s institutional archives during National Reconciliation Week, coinciding with the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising. She uses the concept of counter-narrative to demonstrate the gaps between narratives about Indigenous peoples and those by Indigenous peoples in contemporary archival narratives as portrayed in social media. She argues that to truly achieve equity and social justice for Indigenous peoples, archives must engage with Indigenous counter-narratives in their collecting and exhibiting practices and bring the institutional and Indigenous narratives closer together.

Humanities scholar Aja Y. Martinez makes a compelling case for counterstory as methodology in rhetoric and writing studies through the well-established framework of critical race theory (CRT), reviewing first the counterstory work of Richard Delgado, Derrick Bell, and Patricia J. Williams, whom she terms counterstory exemplars. Delgado, Bell, and Williams, foundational critical race theorists working in the respective counterstory genres of narrated dialogue, fantasy/allegory, and autobiography, have set precedent for others who would research and compose with this method. Arguing that counterstory provides opportunities for marginalized voices to contribute to conversations about dominant ideology, Martinez applies racial and feminist rhetorical criticism to the rich histories and theories established through counterstory genres, all the while demonstrating how CRT theories and methods can inform  teaching, research, and writing/publishing of counterstory.

The purpose of this chapter is to situate Deejay’s story and position his experience of being a voice from the margins in music education within past research. Using the theoretical lens of Du Bois’s (1903) theory of double-consciousness, we offer a perspective on how Deejay, as a significantly underrepresented Black male in a significantly overrepresented White-male field, came to understand his legitimacy in music education. Du Bois’s framework of double-consciousness has been used as a lens to understand how Black people in a White dominated society view themselves in relationship to the world they encounter. In conclusion, we will suggest how double-consciousness permeates within music education in order to offer implications for how the theory may be useful in understanding marginalized populations in music teaching and learning.

Difficult Women analyses select case studies from international TV dramas to examine the unresolved feminist issues they raise or address: equal labor force participation, the demand for sexual pleasure and freedom, opposition to sexual and domestic violence, the need for intersectional approaches.

Drawing on examples from The Killing, Orange is the New Black, Big Little Lies, Wentworth, Outlander, Westworld, Being Mary Jane, Queen Sugar, Vida, and other television dramas with a focus on complex female characters, this book illustrates how female creative control in key production roles (direct authorship) together with industrial imperatives and a conducive cultural context (indirect authorship) are necessary to produce feminist texts. Placed within the larger context of a rise in feminist activism and political participation by women; the growing embrace of a feminist identity; and the ascendance of post-feminism, this book reconsiders the unfinished nature of feminist struggle(s) and suggests the need for a broader sweep of economic change.

This thesis inquires into possibilities for young children‘s active citizenship as provoked through a practice of social justice storytelling with one Preparatory class of children aged five to six years. The inquiry was practitioner-research, through a living educational theory approach cultivating an interrelational view of existing with others in evolving processes of creation. Ideas of young children‘s active citizenship were provoked and explored through storytelling, by a storytelling teacher-researcher, a Prep class of children and their teacher. The three major foci of the study were practice, narrative and action. A series of storytelling workshops with a Prep class was the practice that was investigated. Each workshop began with a story that made issues of social justice visible, followed by critical discussion of the story, and small group activities to further explore the story. The focus on narrative was based on the idea of story as a way knowing. Stories were used to explore social justice issues with young children. Metanarratives of children and citizenship were seen to influence possibilities for young children‘s active citizenship. Stories were purposefully shared to provoke and promote young children‘s active citizenship through social actions. It was these actions that were the third focus of the study. Through action research, a social justice storytelling practice and the children‘s responses to the stories were reflected on both in action and after. These reflections informed and shaped storytelling practice. Learning in a practice of social justice storytelling is explained through living theories of social justice storytelling as pedagogy. Data of the children‘s participation in the study were analysed to identify influences and possibilities for young children‘s active citizenship creating a living theory of possibilities for young children‘s active citizenship.

This article examines the purposeful use of counternarrative to develop an antiracist school identity. Based on a seven-year ethnographic project at an elementary school in the southeast U.S., it illustrates how counternarrative can be employed as strategy to embed Critical Race Theory (CRT) into school equity discourse and, in doing so, help public schools disrupt majoritarian narratives that deny the salience of race. It argues that by developing counternarratives rooted in the perspectives and knowledge of teachers of color, and then using those counternarratives specifically for the purposes of strategizing, schools and researchers can help CRT achieve its activist function in K-12 school contexts.

Analysis of IS/Daesh propaganda on Twitter between the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2016. Its supporters are called "fanboys" and they are as important as its mujahideen: they are "network warriors" or "media warriors" and all of them constitute a "radicalisation echo chamber" that fosters a widespread dissemination of IS extremist message.
In this work, IS narrative of hatred is compared with a counternarrative that aims to weaken its message and show its flaws. The latter narrative is made up by many global initiatives against radicalisation and violent extremism, which are gathered and promoted every year by UE organisation Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN). 

******

Il lavoro di ricerca tratta il tema della propaganda jihadista dello Stato Islamico (o Daesh) svolta attraverso il social network Twitter. Per tre mesi, a cavallo tra il 2015 e il 2016, sono stati raccolti in forma automatizzata i tweet in lingua inglese e francese pubblicati da 156 account, selezionati in base alla presenza di segnali di evidente sostegno verso l’organizzazione (immagini, video, commenti che esprimono posizioni estremiste). Oggi, imbattersi nei profili dei combattenti non è più così facile come un tempo, perché i quadri dell’organizzazione hanno proibito loro di comunicare sui social, per evitare di diffondere informazioni sensibili, ad esempio la loro posizione geografica, come è capitato più volte. L’analisi si è quindi concentrata sui sostenitori, o fanboy, di Daesh, i quali non sono meno importanti dei membri effettivi, come si deduce anche dal titolo del mio lavoro, che li identifica come «combattenti della rete». Questi individui sono la chiave del successo della sua propaganda, perché permettono all’organizzazione di dare risonanza ai propri atti e di illustrarli nella forma più vantaggiosa. Insieme costituiscono una struttura complessa, una comunità virtuale e internazionale, che è stata definita «camera di risonanza della radicalizzazione». Infatti, senza di loro, questa organizzazione probabilmente non avrebbe acquisito una tale rilevanza e un tale seguito. Alla narrativa di IS si oppone la contronarrativa che deriva da diverse iniziative contro la radicalizzazione e il terrorismo, raccolte e promosse ogni anno dall'organo UE Radicalisation Awareness Network.

Loadenthal, Michael. “‘Eco-Terrorism’: An Incident-Driven History of Attack (1973-2010).” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 11, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 1–106.

Abstract:
The animal and earth liberation movements (i.e. “eco-terrorists”), are characterized by autonomous cells of activists utilizing a diverse tactical array to cause financial disruption and damage to businesses, governments and individuals seen to be contributing to animal exploitation and ecological degradation. Though the movement has produced an extremely limited amount of “violence,” and despite its strong tendency to target property, authoritative labeling has termed such actions terrorism. This study adds to the discourse concerning the political violence of “eco-terrorism” by examining the movement’s historical timeline through a statistical analysis of more than 27,000 events drawn from nearly three hundred sources including movement ephemera, government reports, academic articles and books, media accounts, and security briefings produced by besieged industries. This historical analysis demonstrates the atypicality of violent attacks qualifying as terrorism, and establishes that “eco-terrorism” is far more frequently a defamatory political label applied to small-scale criminal acts targeting property that present no risk to human life. This incident-based historical analysis, attempts to correct methodological flaws grounded in incomplete datasets which serve to skew findings through an over representation of attacks involving arson and explosives.

This article examines the ways African American children and their parents "story" themselves in relation to digital literacies, race, and the digital divide. Drawing from two interconnected qualitative, ethnographic research case studies about African American children's and parents' digital literacy practices, and using counter-storytelling as a theoretical framework and meth-odological tool, the authors share narratives that resist common deficit perceptions about these populations. Exploring counter-storytelling as a method, the authors asked: In what ways did two African American children and one parent "story" themselves or use counter-stories to talk about digital literacies, race, and the digital divide? This article refutes claims that the digital divide is a normalcy for African American families, and delivers new insights relevant to the fields of English education and literacy research. It directs researchers' and teacher educators' attention to how participants and students from minoritized communities "story" their experiences, and is designed to spark courageous and rigorous conversations that support African American children's and parents' digital literacy narratives.

The article draws on Victor Turner’s (1980) heuristic concept of social drama to construct an academic drama between diverging intellectual genealogies. It reviews narrative inquiry’s intellectual history and uses a dramaturgical perspective throughout to emphasize the varying diverging narrative paths this form of inquiry has taken. The intellectual history reviewed is not exhaustive but rather limited to a few scholars involved in developing narrative inquiry into a methodology and as a counter-narrative practice.

This article centralizes the work of Central American US diasporic
writers and artists within memory studies while expanding on the emergent ways of seeing and being for US-born or raised Central Americans. I posit that the three cultural makers portrayed in this essay —William Archila (poet), Dalila Paola Mendez (artist), and Cristina Henrı´quez (novelist)—represent a tendency of writers and artists to embark on projects that signify directly onto Central America through a lens of the imagined from within the United States. Archila’s The Art of Exile (2009) explores the persistence of generational trauma and the deep ambivalence carried within migrant Salvadorans who arrived in the United States as youths during the Salvadoran Civil War. Mendez’s painting of Tayte Feliciano Ama, painted in the style of La Palma, reimagines Los Angeles to recuperate the indigenous leader of the 1930s and the Salvadoran folk art movement. Henrı´quez’ novel The World in Half (2009) focuses on Panama; the protagonist must work through erasures and denials to recuperate the memories of her North American mother and Panamanian father to reconcile with her own Panamanian American identity. The cultural memory work of these artists and writers contributes to diverse constructions of Latinidad in the United States through what I name and propose as counterpoetics, countervisuals, and counternarratives. Pages 476-497.

Immigration, Motherhood and Parental Involvement is based on a qualitative case study and the vivid accounts of seven Latina immigrant women of how they learned to navigate the school system in the rural southwest of the United States. Their stories are presented within several contexts, the socio-political conditions of immigration overarching them all. The process of acquiring a new socio-cultural script offers a common frame to the narratives, which illustrate the central role of the community in finding spaces for agency in circumstances of vulnerability. As a contribution to educational theory, this book explores the official discourse of parental involvement within the broader context of social policy by pointing to a common underlying ideal parent norm across areas of policy related to family and women. It also revisits the concept of parental involvement through contrasting ideologies of motherhood, as it applies the concept of participation parity in everyday institutional interactions as a fundamental measure of social justice. Immigration, Motherhood and Parental Involvement offers deep insight into the institutionalized patterns of formal inclusion/informal exclusion in the relationship of schools with Latina immigrant mothers, even within the best intended programs. Its focus on the persistent need for the implementation of culturally and linguistically sensitive approaches to home-school relations makes this a must-read for undergraduate and graduate courses in teacher education, education leadership and sociology of education. Teachers, administrators and policymakers committed to moving away from the prevalent view of mothers as people who mainly need to be educated also need to read this book.

Mental disorders have become the topic of numerous contemporary American novels. Attesting to the ongoing fascination with the workings and the sciences of the human mind, many of these texts turn to neuroscientific questions. This paper offers a close reading of one of these ‘neuronarratives’ – Joshua Ferris’s acclaimed 2010 novel The Unnamed, a story in which the protagonist is afflicted with an utterly mysterious condition that disrupts his sense of self as his mind appears to be separated from his body. In this paper, I aim to show how such a dualist conception problematizes not only the concepts of self and agency as the unnamed disease is linked to contemporary lifestyles in corporate America, but also helps to craft a counternarrative that challenges recent materialist conceptions and neuroscientific theories.

Counter-narrative has recently emerged in education research as a promising tool to stimulate educational equity in our increasingly diverse schools and communities. Grounded in critical race theory and approaches to discourse study including narrative inquiry, life history, and autoethnography, counter-narratives have found a home in multicultural education, culturally sensitive pedagogy, and other approaches to teaching for diversity. This chapter provides a systematic literature review that explores the place of counter-narratives in educational pedagogy and research. Based on our thematic analysis, we argue that the potential of counter-narratives in both pedagogy and research has been limited due to the lack of a unified methodology that can result in transformative action for educational equity. The chapter concludes by proposing critical counter-narrative as a transformative methodology that includes three key components: (1) critical race theory as a model of inquiry, (2) cr...

This book illustrates the importance of conflicting narratives in understanding and dealing with crime, based on a variety of cutting-edge research. Offenders tell stories about crime and punishment, as do policemen, judges and defence lawyers, but so do politicians and the media. Each tells them very differently and only some stories are believed, while others are rejected as implausible leading to conflict. This book explores how these conflicts are carried out and what relationships exist between (often unquestioned) master narratives and (sometimes loud, sometimes silent) counter-narratives. These are issues of central importance for criminology which have thus far received little attention.

This edited collection is international and interdisciplinary in scope, providing empirical insights from such diverse contexts as (social) media, newspapers, comics, police interrogations, social and criminal justice settings, and museum exhibitions. By including contributions from a wide spectrum of academic disciplines and using different methodological approaches, it is of particular interest to students and researchers in criminology and sociology, as well as to scholars of socio-legal studies.

Narratives are used by the states to create an environment in which foreign policy takes place. The US, over the years, has framed the war on terror and its relations with Pakistan in a specific way to justify its foreign policy goals. It has used coercion as well as enticements in order to force Pakistan to fulfill its foreign policy wish-list. Pakistan which has over the years been on the receiving end of these narratives has displayed unprecedented counter-narrative strategy. Applying Neoclassical Realism as a theoretical paradigm, this paper maps the continuity and change in the narrative and counter-narrative strategies of the US and Pakistan.

Narratives are a constitutive part of the talk of crime. Whenever an event is interpreted as “crime” and reactions to it are determined, stories are established. Events are described, responsibilities ascribed, justifications sought, alternative interpretations evaluated, etc. In other words, crime is contested by devising and rejecting narratives. Narratives are linguistic and cultural patterns of the construction of crime that organise the production of crime. By “patterns” we mean that narratives do not simply exist. They are established and negotiated in social and institutional processes. Some narratives can be established in these processes in the longer term, others will be forgotten or wither. This is a conflictual process. But what exactly it means to link narratives and conflicts in the context of criminality and punishment has hardly been examined in detail so far, and this is what this volume seeks to illuminate.

The Alt-Right, a loose coalition of far-right groups which are particularly active online, claims that European integration is a part of a master plan by cosmopolitan elites to encourage globalisation and ‘corporate capitalism’ in order to partly replace and ‘blend’ the predominantly white population with migrants from outside Europe. Many Alt-Right followers argue that this conspiracy for a ‘white genocide’ can be traced back to Coudenhove-Kalergi’s plan for a Paneuropean Union. Although this Alt-Right counternarrative to European integration is only believed in its entirety by a small group of people, who do not care that their historical claims are evidently false, bits and pieces of the narrative filter down to mainstream political actors. By employing narrative analysis and drawing on new research on online news websites and social media forums, this article will examine the Alt-Right’s narrative entrepreneurs and their narratives.

Situated in an out-of-school writing program, this inquiry centers Black girls’ lived experiences as digital users and content creators. This inquiry documents Black girls’ journey from individual journal writing entries (rites of passage) to script writing for the development of a collaborative Black Girls’ podcast, Hair Me!: Black Girls’ Chronicles (writes of passage). This study is designed to create spaces for two Black girls, Kenya and Jalisa to speak back to dominant narratives of Black girlhood. This inquiry provides pedagogical strategies for literacy teachers in the urban secondary contexts designed to merge Black girls’ print and digital literacies.

The stock story versus counterstory within this essay constitutes part II of a three-part papelitos guardados dialogue series. Part I is the stock story versus counterstory in my 2014 Composition Studies essay “A Plea for Critical Race Theory Counterstory: Dialogues Concerning Alejandra’s ‘Fit’ in the Academy.”

As Victor Villanueva has been saying for twenty years, “people of color writing frankly, sympathetically about matters concerning racism … will attract people of color in sufficient numbers to begin to affect racism” (1999, 652). This form of scholarship is not without risks/consequences, as Marcos J. Del Hierro (2019) has so aptly described in his op-ed “A Room of One’s Own White Colleagues.” However, in a gesture of coalition and solidarity with Del Hierro and others of my generation who have the audacity to speak (Drake 2019, n.p.), I offer this essay as my contribution toward our collective efforts of what Yanira Rodríguez terms rhetorical “decolonial refusal” (Rodríguez 2020, 2). We no longer accept and protect white fragility and toxic masculinity in the academy, in society, in our lives (Cabrera 2016). Ya. Basta. We’re done.

What follows in this essay is a specific method of counterstory that I have termed stock story versus counterstory (Martinez 2014, 39). As Delgado (1989) and I (2014) have asserted, placing two dialogues side-by-side enables counter-storytellers to develop ideas through exchanges between characters that both represent and voice contending viewpoints about contemporary social issues. The audience is invited to first experience a version of the events from a status quo point of view, and second from a minoritized viewpoint. In the case of this essay’s stock story, the status quo represents the figure of the “colorblind” white supremacist, as well as enactment of white mediocrity/fragility as institutional practice (Bonilla-Silva 2018; Mitchell 2018). Following the stock story, a counterstory develops a minoritized viewpoint to critique the viewpoint put forth by the stock story while offering alternative possibilities for the audience to consider.

Counter-narrative has recently emerged in education research as a promising tool to
stimulate educational equity in our increasingly diverse schools and communities.
Grounded in critical race theory and approaches to discourse study including narrative
inquiry, life history, and autoethnography, counter-narratives have found a home in
multicultural education, culturally sensitive pedagogy, and other approaches to teaching for diversity. This chapter provides a systematic literature review that explores the place of counter-narratives in educational pedagogy and research. Based on our thematic analysis, we argue that the potential of counter-narratives in both pedagogy and research has been limited due to the lack of a unified methodology that can result in transformative action for educational equity. The chapter concludes by proposing critical counter-narrative as a transformative methodology that includes three key components: (1) critical race theory as a model of inquiry, (2) critical reflection and generativity as a model of praxis that unifies the use of counter-narratives for both research and pedagogy, and (3) transformative action for the fundamental goal of educational equity for people of color.

This paper discusses the ongoing media conflict between ISIS and the communities afflicted from violence inspired by ISIS via Internet radicalization. This work examines the need for counter-narratives and associated media products that are authentic, legitimate, and that resound with target audiences.

Narratives which reduce complex, real world phenomena to simplistic, violence promoting propaganda can activate the necessary mechanisms for violent radicalisation to occur. To stop this from happening, researchers and counterterrorism practitioners have turned to counter-narratives; targeted interventions that challenge the instrumentality of violence as put forth in dominant narratives.This review summarises the available evidence on this approach, looking at whether counter-narratives are effective at preventing violent radicalisation across a spectrum of contexts, including right-wing, ethnic and religious extremism

This article shares alternative conceptions of time in a qualitative study about the schooling experiences of teenage mothers. The counternarratives of three women of color are presented as alternatives for understanding temporally restricted discourses of achievement in high school. Using third space theory as a lens for understanding the participants’ experiences, this articles illustrates how each participant’s school story creates room for thinking about school success differently. This understanding of participants’ experiences provokes a deliberate reconsideration of time as it relates to student success and achievement in school. This article concludes with an analysis of the participants’ counternarratives and implications for future work. This work is useful for practitioners and researchers in reconceptualizing difference among students and in creating room for school structures that support diversity in classrooms and schools.

The nursery rhyme, 'Sticks and bones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me' is widely recognisable. But is it true? I contend that it is not. As Toni Morrison reminds us, words hurt. Words mean something. Consider how you might feel if you were called a liar when you told the truth. It does hurt to be called names. It hurts to be bullied and excluded because you have been labelled or set apart and called ugly, fat, stupid, lazy, old, homeless, illiterate, gay, disabled and so on. To be called names, or be labelled, is a form of 'othering' that is dis empowering and oppressive. To label another person adversely is careless and insensitive. Negative labels often stay with children and young people for the rest of their lives. Labelling often leads people into believing they are incapable and powerless. Conversely, labelling excuses - even encourages - some individuals to participate in destructive behaviour that upholds certain deficit, racist and homophobic views of the individual. Hurtful labels from
careless politicians, parents, relatives, practitioners or teachers are harmful to everyone, especially youth. Name calling and labelling others is a practice that must be rejected and redressed by practitioners working with children and young people. But it is so entrenched in the taken -for-granted and everyday practices of many powerful people, that a formidable strategy is needed to expose the violence
oppressive language represents and validates - with the aim of altering it.

In many cultural texts, disability and futurity take different paths. We will analyse several narratives which work as a background for this assumption, proposing in every section some counter–narrations. Firstly, disability is often understood as a tragedy. Secondly, it is often presumed that disabled people are nostalgic of their ‘former’ selves, which freeze them in a suspended time. Then, we will examine how our incapacity to imagine a flourishing future with disability affects our removal of disabled people from our collective future. Lastly, we will propose an imagined world which already, sometimes, presents this erasure: science fiction — and especially some utopian and feminist texts.

The concept of the desaparecido is based on a cynical lie articulated by the then president of the
Argentinean military junta, Rafael Videla in 1979. When asked about potential political
prisoners, he answered that „[they are] not here: they are neither dead nor alive, they
disappeared. […] They are a mystery and a non-entity“. The dictator’s intention clearly was to
prevent the murdered prisoners’ corpses from being found and used as potential juridicial
evidence of the exerced violence, in an act of what today would be considered state terrorism.
Nevertheless, the idea of the desaparecido made history, becoming an indispensable category in
current international Human Rights legislation.
Since the end of the dictatorship in 1983, literary transpositions of the practice of Forced
Disappearance have displayed a number of strategies that can be seen as a narrative
counter-practice to the act of disappearance itself. They thereby helped not only to reinforce the
existence of the disappeared individuals by constructing them linguistically, but also to address
the issues of cultural loss and the representational difficulties posed by the practice.
These narrations poeticize the transition between truth and untruth, knowledge and ignorance
itself. Even though they allude to nothing less than a dissolution of the basic opposition of life
and death, they rarely recur to gothic or fantastical elements. Instead, the authors attempt to
come to terms with the past in the form of adaptions of crime fiction as well as cathartic
anagnorisis‘ known from classical tragedy, where reversals from ambiguity to certainty are
orchestrated in a dramatic fashion.
The talk focuses on the intentional use of lying, truth distorsion, simulation and also shrewdness
in two novels about the disappeared: „My Name is Light“ (Osorio 1998) and „Buenos Aires
Quintet“ (Vázquez-Montalbán 1998). They also address another phenomenon, the appropiation
of the children of the disappeared by military families, which allows us to analyze the relation of
personal and logical identities in times of state terror. The talk will conclude with a brief
overview of the most recent auto-fictional, highly mediatized and self-reflexive forms of
narrations produced by the descendants of the disappeared (Bruzzone, Carri, Pérez).

Narratives are used by the states to create an environment in which foreign policy takes place. The US, over the years, has framed the war on terror and its relations with Pakistan in a specific way to justify its foreign policy goals. It has used coercion as well as enticements in order to force Pakistan to fulfill its foreign policy wish-list. Pakistan which has over the years been on the receiving end of these narratives has displayed unprecedented counter-narrative strategy. Applying Neoclassical Realism as a theoretical paradigm, this paper maps the continuity and change in the narrative and counter-narrative strategies of the US and Pakistan.

With many cities in the Global South experiencing immense growth in informal settlements, city authorities frequently try to assert control over these settlements and their inhabitants through coercive measures such as threats of eviction, exclusion, blocked access to services and other forms of structural violence. Such coercive control is legitimized through the discursive formation of informal settlements as criminal and unsanitary, and of the residents as migrants and as temporary and illegitimate settlers. Using findings from ethnographic research carried out in two informal settlements in Dhaka, Bangladesh, this article explores how informal settlement residents engage with and resist territorial stigma in a rapidly growing Southern megacity. Findings show residents resist stigmatising narratives of neighbourhood blame by constructing counternarratives that frame informal settlements as a “good place for the poor.” These place-based narratives emerge from shared experiences of...

Multiethnic practitioner researchers explore issues of power and schooling in relation to curriculum studies in troubling times. We discuss how the articulation and examination of issues of power and schooling are illuminated in 20 key texts of prominent educational thinkers (e.g., Bell, 1992; Coates, 2015; Dewey, 1931; Foucault, 1977; Freire, 1970/1992, 1998; Giroux, 1998; Grande, 2004; hooks, 1994; Illich, 1972; Kozol, 1992, 1981/1993; Lee, 2012; Nussbaum, 2010; Palmer,1998; Saïd, 1994; Schubert, 2009; Takaki, 1993; Watkins, 2011; Whitehead, 1929/1957; Zinn, 1980/2003). We particularly explore how 20 educational thinkers cultivate critical consciousness through counternarratives to explore issues of power and schooling such as race, gender, class, power, and place to contest the official or metanarrative that often portrays disenfranchised individuals and groups as deficient and inferior. The counternarratives in 20 key texts help tell silenced and neglected stories of repressions, suppressions, and subjugations that challenge stereotypes of Southern women, Blacks, and other disenfranchised individuals and groups and encourage examination of the forces of slavery, racism, sexism, classism, religious repression, and other forms of oppression on the life curriculum in schools, neighborhoods, and communities in troubling times. There are six specific purposes to the session. One purpose is to understand multiple theories of power. A second purpose is to engage in power analyses and critiques of pedagogical practices. The third purpose is to engage in power analyses and critiques of institutions in contemporary schooling. The fourth purpose is to engage in power analyses and critiques of policies and contexts in contemporary schooling. The fifth purpose is to explore the contradictions and complexities of competing theories of power