Multiple Narratives as Empowerment

In much of what we read there is one dominant narrative, whether it is the writer, the film director, the song writer or the journalist. Even the researcher will often create one dominant voice without realising that they are doing it.

When I was studying for my PhD thesis back in the late 1990s, I came across the work of an academic who was based at Nene University College in Northampton. It’s called the University of Northampton. I was really interested in the idea that multiple voices are important and that we shouldn’t marginalise particular voices. My own work involved interviewing a wide cross-section of people and analysing their stories so that prevailing themes or archetypes could be identified.

The academic I found in Northampton whose work informed my own was Professor Susan Weil. She ran a small research unit there called SOLAR (Social and Organisational Learning as Action Research). I found a few really interesting articles by her online, including her Inaugural Lecture as a Professor called “An inaugural in 7 waves…strangers on the shore?” I was struck by the way in which she weaved together the different voices and ensured that they were given equal weight. Integrity of voice was a key political issue for her. I was lucky enough to attend a one-day workshop at SOLAR run by a creative writer from the USA. We spent the day looking at creative approaches to writing, to see how they could be adapted to research writing. It was a fascinating day, deeply influential to some of the recent work I have been doing in the NHS.

Later, Susan Weil moved the unit to the University of the West of England in Bristol. That was in 2002. Since then SOLAR has disappeared. I suspect Susan has retired. I can’t find any of her work online, no matter how deeply I search. What a shame that such important work on multiple voices becomes a voice that vanishes itself!

… and that brought into sharp relief for me the fact that the internet may be the biggest project on the planet ever to capture knowledge in so many voices. But that so many of those voices are ephemeral. Any sense that we are developing a permanent repository of all knowledge is an illusion. In spite of key underpinning projects like the Internet Archive, so much  of what appears online is still really temporary in its nature – it only continues to exist as long as someone pays the bill to the domain host.

We still need plurality, multiple voices through which we make more reliable sense of the world around us. Books published hundreds of years ago are still held in libraries – how do we ensure that digital data doesn’t vanish?

Also published on Medium.