Live Discourse Analysis

4.2. Antenarrative

Boje (2001a) defines antenarrative in two senses. The “ante-” prefix can either mean “before”—in other words, antenarratives form the fragments of stories in becoming, proto-stories. “Ante” can also mean a bet (i.e. the entry fee to participate in a hand of poker). Such fragments, therefore, can also serve as bets on the future — a leap of sensemaking that anticipates future stories based on the knowledge of present living stories. Put differently, “antenarratives trace the pre-stories and the possibilities to transform the relation of narrative to counterstory” (Boje, 2011). This quote therefore sets the stage for antenarrative, stories, and narrative to exist in tension across the same epistemological plane – an approach that forefronts space and time in the ongoing production of stories.

4.2.1. Sensemaking

But first, we must start with sensemaking – a core conceptual forerunner to antenarrative. By sensemaking, I refer to the work of Weick (1995). Weick constitutes sensemaking through seven different properties. Sensemaking is:

1. Grounded in identity construction. Sensemaking constitutes the practice of a subject – some refer to this as a perceiving subject. The sensemaker, therefore, is “an ongoing puzzle undergoing continual redefinition” (Weick, 1995, p. 20).
2. Retrospective. Sensemaking involves the integration of present information with past knowledge to produce sensemaking accounts. Weick (p. 30) explains how this criterion also points to the challenges of forecasting or strategic planning. Such prospective activities prove “wasteful and misleading if they are decoupled from reflective action and history.”
3. Enactive of sensible environments. Sensemaking both interprets and produces the environment of organizations. In other words, “people create their environments, and those environments create them” (p. 30).
4. Social. One’s sensemaking is always in conversation with the sensemaking practices of others – both inside and outside of an organization. Conduct is, in other words, “contingent on the conduct of others, whether those others are imagined or physically present” (p. 39). Such a notion maps onto conceptualizations of audience and social literacy, as the conduct of an imagined discourse community of readers influences the activities of the astute writer.
5. Ongoing. Sensemaking always undergoes a continuous circular process of integration, akin to Ricoeur’s (1984) hermeneutic circle. Sensemaking therefore also never starts, as “pure duration never stops. People are always in the middle of things” (p. 43).
6. Focused on and by extracted cues. This means that sensemaking practices are (1) disciplined by the spatial affordances of the institutions that enclose its production and therefore (2) reify architectures of intelligibility on which sensemaking practices are mapped. Weick analogizes these criteria to Goffman’s notion of frame – a concept uptaken by others to describe (1) how science communicators organize a series of information to captivate audiences without misleading them (National Academy of Sciences, 2017) or (2) how interlocutors negotiate the ground upon which meaning negotiations take place (Canagarajah, 2013).
7. Driven by plausibility rather than accuracy. This last property nods to the double sense of the word “sense” (pun intended): (1) “Sense” in its cognitive connotation implies the imposition of a logical or explanatory structure onto a series of events or phenomena, and (2) “sense” in its embodied connotation of lived sensations and precognitive affects. Most importantly for Boje, however, “what is necessary in sensemaking is a good story” rather than just accurate recountings of events (Weick, 1995, p. 61). A good story, in other words, “holds disparate elements together long enough to energize and guide action, plausibly enough to allow people to make retrospective sense of whatever happens” (ibid.).

Ontogenetic Reflection

One reason that I really like this antenarrative log is it allows me to be creative with different methods of writing. First, because unlike AI assistants in outlining, I can produce writing that is unpolished, messy, and, quite frankly, more me. It’s a way of writing that AI would never think of. Whether or not it’s worth reading is a different question, but this is only something that practice can make perfect.

Number two, it also allows me to try different formats. While I oftentimes use the improvisational style to take my previous comprehensive examination writings as a kind of jumping-off point, a suggestion from the audience, this time I want to try a diffractive reading of Karl Weick’s notion of sensemaking against a key term that I often see used within reflexivity discussions in applied linguistics, namely transparency. What is the relationship between sensemaking and transparency? For one, sensemaking is one of the core constituent practices of storytelling within narrative inquiry in applied linguistics. Many researchers use the phrase “sensemaking” or “make sense of” as an explanation for storytelling in qualitative research, but few, if any, ever really define it. And I think Weick’s definition is quite strong with its seven core components. With the concept of transparency, we often understand this as a form of not self-surveillance, but rather one of ongoing meaning-making and disclosure that keeps the researcher in the frame without dominating that frame. I got this from a LinkedIn post from Sal Consoli, who posted some slide photos from a workshop that he did on reflexivity. So I will now use this opportunity to read Weick’s seven features of sensemaking diffractively against what I think of as notions of transparency within qualitative research in applied linguistics.

Number one, grounded in identity construction. This often served as some of the earliest markers of transparency and reflexivity in the form of positionality statements. Positionality statements are also grounded in identity construction. They frame the researcher as not a neutral apparatus of knowledge production, but as a perceiving subject. Now, this has often been framed negatively, as if one’s biases need to be acknowledged, particularly one’s problematic biases, as they relate to the problematizing aspect of power relations. However, I think what Weick brings up that is really important is one’s identity is always in perpetual redefinition. I think this is where the work of Gary Barkhuizen becomes so helpful. Dr. Barkhuizen talks about work in the identity construction of language teachers and students as one that is constantly situated, relational, and under constant negotiation. This is why so many applied linguists are now pushing back against the inadequacy of positionality statements, as their relative stasis also prematurely forecloses and often occludes the complex relational assemblages that a researcher identity constitutes.

Number two, retrospective. This is where transparency becomes hard to enact on a page. I say enact because, in Weick’s framework, enactment is a very important verb. To enact, as we will say in number three, is to carry out within an assemblage that includes both the researcher and lots of social and material factors external to the researcher, namely perhaps the location of one’s institution, the resources in terms of money that a researcher has access to, the way that a researcher’s positionality can either afford or constrain the participants that one can speak to, and the topics of which participants are willing to speak on. However, all of this is retrospective. All of this, at least according to Weick — Boje will have a different view — is always retroactively constructed by the researcher. Yes, the researcher can keep a researcher diary that addresses these issues as they arise and can therefore tell a story in real time of how a researcher continuously thinks and rethinks their research project. Yet most scholars will never have access to these diaries and rather only have access to the truncated research reports, which are ultimately storied.

Which brings us to three, the enactment of sensible environments. In addition to the discussions of identity and sociomaterial assemblages discussed in number two, we can also think of the research paper itself as a sensible environment. Weick often argues that people create their environments, and those environments create them. So too does the IMRaD — the introduction, methods, results, analysis, discussion. The structure of a paper also constrains and shapes the way that a researcher discloses and transparently tries to explain and articulate their research journey and the fruits of that journey. This is where I find AI to be most perfidious within the realm of qualitative analysis. AI is trained on an IMRaD structure of scientific writing, and therefore, when designing outlines or providing advice or support in terms of editing or changing structure, will adopt this structure as the norm, as the default. But this is not a neutral form of presenting information. It is one of many ways that a researcher can tell the story of their research. And yet we are all, to one degree or another, conditioned and socialized into this approach, and therefore whatever creative writing decisions we wish to make are all going to be measured against that approach, both by ourselves and by the reviewers and editors with which we interact.

Speaking of which, the sensemaking that researchers enact when trying to enact transparency in their writing is ultimately not a personal diary. Those often don’t make it to the public, but rather they are relational. They are social. They are engagements between a multitude of actors, including the participants with which hopefully some form of member checking or co-storying occurred, with reviewers, with editors, and with readers. Transparency is not something that a researcher can objectively produce. It is only one that can be ratified by a reader, and different readers will ratify transparency differently. And it brings me to an interesting point that academic and social scientist Peter Jandrić talked about as the editor of Postdigital Science and Education, who wrote about how efforts to provide transparency in the peer review process creates new problems where those who are novices to the peer review process ask for transparent rubrics or criteria, which then transform into checklists, which then creates, again, rigid constraints and boundaries about what qualifies as high-quality research. This is where the sociality of transparency can hinge on the dangers of creating a rigid and therefore opaque checklist that has already befallen positionality statements. Positionality statements are critiqued today because they have assumed the form of a siloed-off checklist. The question is, will reflexivity walk this same path?

Number five, transparency is ongoing. And I think this is the important move that authors like Sal Consoli or Sarah Ganassin are pointing at, that one cannot isolate transparency and reflexivity to a single paragraph that can grant objectivity or legitimacy to the remainder of the analysis. Reflexivity is not a box to check, but rather it is an ongoing call for presence. Yet the paradox of effective reflexivity is one where the researcher is both present but not dominating the conversation. This is not a science that can be captured within a series of to-do lists or collocations or prescriptive advice, but rather an art form that resembles one of a fiction author. A fiction author is encouraged to show rather than tell. And I think the important question is, how can a researcher show their reflexivity without telling it? In other words, one can overexplain reflexivity and therefore take away from the more important aspects of the research report, which is the findings and the participants themselves.

Focused on and by extracted cues, number six. Similar to point number three, we are driven and cued into particular keywords or particular sets of criteria that we believe constitute transparency. The idea of discussing one’s intersectional identity, for instance, or the notion of transparency to begin with, is itself an extracted cue. Reflexivity is what we believe it to be. It is not a series of propositional statements that can be deduced into a conclusion, and so therefore it is ultimately flexible to one’s intuition. This applies to both readers and writers. As I discussed, these cues relate to Erving Goffman’s notion of a frame. The past frames of reflexivity often took the form of a positionality statement. Now, the frame of reflexivity is one that is currently under development. It’s a frame that has yet to fully solidify, and I think that’s for the best.

Finally, number seven, driven by plausibility rather than accuracy. This is where I believe reflexivity is something that cannot be reduced to a checklist. This is where reflexivity is an art form rather than a science, because ultimately science is very concerned with accuracy. This is why we often hear of quantitative researchers praising the use of AI to make writing more clear, transparent, and accurate — because ultimately in a lot of quantitative sciences what we’re really looking for is a center of calculation that can index or point to a true and accurate fact about the natural world. However, if we go back to these previous definitions, one’s identity cannot be fixed as true. The past is always being reconstructed and is never fixed as true. Our environments are always changing and are never fixed to be true or false. Reflexivity is conditioned by actors who both enter and exit the stage of our research, and is therefore never fixed in one point as accurate or complete. It is ongoing and therefore true in one moment and perhaps untrue in the next. And if it’s driven by extracted cues, then as a qualitative research project unfolds, the cues can change and therefore render the accuracy of previous claims as dubious.

I say this all not to disparage the notion of transparency, but to reiterate the fact that transparency and reflexivity is itself a sensemaking process. And a sensemaking process is not one that can be made whole or complete. It is one that is consistently open-ended on the back end, the back end being the retrospective, past-looking end. Yet, as we will look at next week with David Boje’s concept of antenarrative, sensemaking is also open to the front end. Sensemaking is also a bridge into the future.