POLITICIZED NARRATIVE THERAPY
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using a poly-vocal approach, this piece calls for the interruption and interrogation of narrative therapy’s colonial associations (White & Epston, 1990), and the cooption of narrative therapy by psychiatry under the guise of progressiveness (J. Poole, Personal Communication, January 31, 2017). We locate narrative therapy in the neoliberal geography of recovery and marketization, where social problems are coded as individual struggles, personal stories are used as mental health marketing material, and the burden of wellness enables psychiatric governance (Costa et al., 2012; Morrow, 2013; Poole, 2011). Drawing on Sefa Dei and Asgharzadeh’s (2001) anti-colonial discursive framework, critical race theory and its technique of counter-storytelling, Patricia Hill Collins’ (1990) Black feminist thought, and anti-sanist theorizing, we explore the possibility of reimagining narrative therapy for political ends. Throughout this piece, we draw on narrative techniques to move beyond an individual understanding of distress, connecting personal struggles to the broader social and political context. We do this by extending a political lens to the four steps taken in a mainstream narrative approach. We have chosen to use case studies informed by our own lived experiences in order to highlight the potential that we see in narrative work. This approach does not leave narrative therapy unchallenged and we understand that by remaining in a narrative framework housed in social work practice we cannot truly separate our approach from colonial care (Baskin, 2016; Lee & Ferrer, 2014). Rather, we hope to start a critical and transparent conversation that begins to explore the reconceptualization of narrative therapy for the purpose of deconstructing dominant discourses and making any colonial connections visible.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it