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Key Concepts and Terms in Narrative Mediation
Alternative story:
Building a story of cooperation that stands in stark contrast to the conflict-bound story
Coauthoring:
The ideal mediation relationship in which the mediator and the parties share the responsibility for the development of the story of cooperation.
Curiosity:
The naïve inquiring spirit that is essential in narrative mediation. It differs from the kind of curiosity that seeks to confirm existing assumptions ; it is marked by a genuine desire to learn of the emergence of actions that provide the basis for alternative story development.
Deconstruction:
The process of unpacking the taken-for-granted assumptions and ideas underlying social practices that masquerade as truth or reality. It is achieved by bringing to light the gaps and inconsistencies in a dominant story so that acceptance of the story's message or logic no longer appears inevitable. Deconstruction is less adversarial and more playful than critique or confrontation.
Discourse:
A set of ideas embodied as structuring statements that underlie and give meaning to social practices, personal experience, and organizations or institutions. Discourses often include the taken-for-granted assumptions that allow us to know how to 'go on" in social situations of all kinds. They are linguistic in nature (provided that language is taken to include non-verbal as well as verbal practices).
Dominant story:
The "normal" way of construing a situation, or the set of assumptions about an issue that has become so ingrained or widely accepted within the culture that it appears to represent "reality".
Externalizing Conversation:
A way of speaking in which space is introduced between the person and the problem issue. The problem may be spoken of as if it were a distinct entity or even a personality in its own right rather than part of the person. This creates an opportunity for the relationship between the person and the problem to be articulated.
Mapping-the-effects:
A question asked about an externalized problem to detail the relationship between the person and the problem. The map may be about the influence of the problem on the person or vice versa.
Modernist:
Pertaining to the ways of speaking promoted in the modernist era, which can loosely said to have begun in the eighteenth century with the age of reason, in which the search for universal scientific truth takes precedence over other forms of knowledge.
Position Call:
A use of language by one party in a relationship that invites the other party to take up a particular relational position. Position calls structure people's responses and the meanings that are made of them.
Positioning:
The process by which discourses place people in relation to each other - usually in power relations of some kind.
Postmodernism:
A philosophical movement across a variety of disciplines that has sought to dismantle many of the assumptions that underlie the established truths of the modern era. It is marked by acceptance of plurality and the challenging of norms. In particular, postmodernism tends to reject the view that science and technology necessarily provide hope for human progress.
Power/knowledge:
According to Michel Foucault, the form of power developed in the modern world that, rather than being repressive, is productive of relations and subjectivities. It tends to be decentralized and language-based. The idea stresses the role professional and academic disciplines play in the production of systems of thought by which society is governed. Power/knowledge operates everywhere to produce truth, reality, and normality. Power is not considered a commodity held by one group at the expense of another but a feature of all human interactions in everyday contexts.
Problem-saturated story:
The story that a party presents to a mediator in which the conflict is so dominant that there at first appears little sign of an alternative story.
Romantic:
Pertaining to a movement in Western art and culture, originating in the nineteenth century, that laid stress on individual subjective experience as a source of truth in the face of a hostile society.
Social Constructionism:
The movement in the social sciences that stresses the role played by language in the production of meaning. A central tenent is that people produce through discourse the social conditions by which their thoughts, feelings and actions are determined. In this way, meaning is made in social contexts rather than given.
Sparkling Moment:
A moment in any problem-saturated story when the parties in the conflict demonstrate a surprising achievement in defeating or limiting the influence of the shared conflict. Such moments, which are of the isolated and neglected, are the shining stars in a sky darkened by the dominance of the problem. Same as unique outcome.
Unique Account:
A story developed from the connection of a series of unique outcomes or sparkling moments. The coherence of a uniqwue account makes possible the performance of alternative meanings.
Unique Outcome:
An aspect of a lived experience that lies outside of or in contradiction to the problem story. Michael White's term, borrowed from Erving Goffman.
Unstoried Experience:
Aspects of lived experience that lie outside the realms in which dominant stories have sway or demand attention
Voice:
The capacity to speak on one's own behalf, in terms that are not given by others.
These concepts and terms were adapted from the text: Narrative Therapy in Practice: The Archaeology of Hope edited by Gerald Monk, John Winslade, Kathie Crocket and David Epston, published by Jossey-Bass, 1997.
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