"Boring, Frustrating, Impossible": Tracing the Negative Affects of Reading from Interviews to Story Circles

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Fuller, Danielle; Rehberg Sedo, DeNel

• How can you trace the negative affects of reading experiences? Reading studies research
  often relies on heroic, transformational and celebratory narratives about reading elicited
  from research participants but also co-produced by the researchers because of the methods
  employed. In this essay we begin to build a counter-narrative about reading and reading
  studies research by investigating readers’ negative emotions through an experiment with a
  different method. After revisiting our earlier work with interviews and focus groups, we
  explore how and why we designed a participatory approach that employs aspects of the
  Story Circles method (Kurtz 2014). We contend that using a creative method that
  foregrounds the co-construction of narrative and interpretation and that explicitly
  encourages narrative as a type of performance enables both researchers and participants to
  explore a fuller range of emotions about reading experiences. This method also helps us to
  actively re-negotiate the positions of researcher and research subject.

• Date created

  2019-05-15

• Subjects / Keywords

  • reading
  • interviews
  • focus groups
  • Story Circles
  • Participatory Narrative Inquiry
  • Qualitative Methods

• Type of Item

  Article (Published)

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-9r2v-yr68

• License

  Public Domain Mark 1.0