This reading (Boje, 2007) comes from an edited volume on communicative practices in workplaces (Zachry & Thralls, 2007) – one of many publications along my journey through antenarrative theory, method, and practice. I say “journey through” rather than “understanding” because Boje, taking inspiration from Deleuze, is not a scholar that I read to understand. There is no copy-pasting of antenarrative ideas or methods. This is because antenarrative, in its ontological bones, resists a total understanding or comprehension. This mirrors antenarrative’s resistance to closure – its penchant for burrowing into the cracks that lie beyond the Western academic spotlight on what constitutes clean, cohesive, or comprehensive narratives. In other words, just like reading Deleuze, I read Boje to move — to disrupt sedimented patterns of thinking and habit and action. Just like Jackson and Mazzei (2012) encourage scholars to think through theory when reading data, Boje helps me return to data analysis or readings with a refreshed, open-ended sense of discourse – a polyphonic voice without organs (Mazzei, 2016).
What randomly selected Kindle quotes will inhabit this polyphonous voice? Let’s find out.
The first dimension is the dialectic between antenarrating and narrating, between emergence and coherence. Secondly, a dialectic exists between divergence into epic antenarrating and the convergence into more tragic (or dramatic) narrative closure. Thirdly, there is a dialectic between antenarratives that are multistranded, multiauthor tellings and the pressure in organizations for collective consensus around official single-author narratives (Boje, 2007[1]).
As I read this quote again, I think of the Africana Studies Global Virtual Forum. In yesterday’s session, my Penn State colleague Rose Ansah shared a visual essay that accompanied Sinfree Makoni’s upcoming co-edited volume on ontologies of water. My biggest takeaway was that the story structures and conventions that shape paradigms of knowledge are not inherent; they are inherited. Just as water shapes the land around it over millions of years, conventions of academic research reporting like IMRAD[2] have evolved over hundreds of years to produce a scholarshipscape that feels timeless. Yet as much as we assume North to be North and South to be South via a land-centric approach to ontologizing the world, such static cardinal directions lose their sense of coherence when we center directionality and positionality through water – to view being as waves and flows over space and time. When I think about Boje’s dialectic between divergence into epic antenarrating and the convergence into more tragic or dramatic narrative closure, I therefore find my eyes burrowing into the word “closure.”
Within academic research, it is imperative for us to write down and share the results of our research in academic books and articles. It is, as of now, a researcher’s prime deliverable. Yet the act of writing something down – of fixing ideas into words — closes off alternative meanings expressible through diverse literacies, word choices, or other organizations of knowledge. The act of writing further forecloses upon other meaning-making media – media that lend fresh insights into phenomena we often take for granted. This was the second biggest takeaway that I got from Rose’s audio-visual essay: to write one’s research into a journal article or a book is to precommit to non-neutral structures and paradigms of knowledge-making and literacy — paradigms that favor the oral over the written, the individual over the collective, and independent thinkers over entangled sense-making assemblages.
However, Rose closes her video essay by arguing against the abandonment of structure, or the disregard of all patterns of coherence that humans impress on the world. This would render the world illegible. What is important, as Braun and Clarke (2022) often talk about, is to inhabit a continuous flow of reflectivity and reflexivity – to continually unpack the implicit epistemological assumptions that qualitative researchers bring into their work. It is to make known previously unknown or unstated commitments to the nature of knowledge-making. We often talk about this reflexive engagement in terms of researcher identity and the power dynamics that asymmetries and identity categories forge between researchers and participants. But what often gets less airtime is the implicit epistemological assumptions that arise when we decide to publish our findings within a journal article – a literacy that has atomized and binarized into a language friendly to computational indexing – grist for the large language model mill (Manabu, 2026). Or, as Manabu (2026) writes, the structure of academic articles did not develop for AI, but its compartmentalized, standardized conventions have created a dense thicket of dead brush for AI to colonize like a wild firestorm.
The decision to write something down creates what Gia-fu Feng and Jane English (1974) call “partial understandings” in their translation of Zhuangzi: The Inner Chapters. But the Chinese characters Feng translated to “partial understandings” — xiaocheng (小成) — also translate to small achievements, small completions, or small closures — putting a cap on an ever-flowing river of sensemaking possibilities. Therefore, when I move with antenarrative, I do not give up on coherence and meaning-making. Sensemaking is what we do. But antenarrative gaps can also reveal how a journal article is not a definitive source of knowledge; it is but one source of knowledge among many forms of knowledge-making.
All forms of knowledge-making do not exist on equal political footing. Put otherwise, every time a researcher sits down to write an article where they present their findings, they are only telling but one story. They are telling the one story their researcher assemblage can tell at a particular point in time. In other words, an article is not only a story unique to that writer-researcher; it is a story that is unique to that researcher to one place in time. A different researcher will write a different article at a different time. A researcher with a different positioned intersectional identity will tell a different story. This is not surprising. What is meaningful, however, is that the same researcher with the same data, at a different point in time, will also tell a different story. We write our research to change the knowledgescape. Yet at the same time, writing up our research changes our researcher “selves.” The voice without organs does not emanate from a stable self; the self itself is an assemblage of components in a constant state of flux, turbulence, and reterritorialization. What appears to be a timeless qualitative analysis, in other words, is a fictive point across an endless unfolding – an endless becoming across a duration that brings past, present, and future into the now (Boje, 2011). As Boje writes:
Narrative analysts seem to replace folk stories with less messy narrative emplotment to create accounts of organizational events that are fictively rational, free of tangled contingency and emergence. Czarniawska (1997), for example, says narrative, or “a story consists of a plot comprising causally related episodes that culminate in a solution to a problem” (p.78) (Boje, 2007).
One challenge that I often see within narrative analysis and applied linguistics is reconciling narrative-based ways of thinking (Bruner, 1986), or what Angus Fletcher (2023) calls “storythinking”—with the predominant post-positivist paradigm of logico-deductive thinking (Bruner, 1986), or what Fletcher calls “philosophical thinking.”
When we open a novel or listen to our family members spin yarns, tellers do not often impose their logic, their themes, or their takeaways. They forefront characters and actions to tell a story within which readers can immerse themselves, resonate, and hopefully exit the taleworld with a fresh worldview. As we encounter diverse stories around us, our perspective is evershifting through minor degrees of refraction. It allows new information to pass through our perspective, leading us to realize new conclusions, new takeaways, new analysis, new stories. Stories, in other words, beget more stories in a storied ontology.
But many applied linguistics researchers, language teachers, and education practitioners appear dissatisfied with open-ended storythinking. Many prefer clear, distinctive upshots that allow all readers to converge upon similar interpretations, conclusions, and takeaways. Narrative inquiry, in other words, struggles against the postpositivist pull to sanitize and generalize stories into clean, logical, relatable analytical structures. Yet cleaning and straightening messy stories also divorces stories from (1) their situated site of encounter and (2) the dusty, unresolved, fragmented, contradiction-laden mess of daily lived existence (Rabbidge, 2017).
This is not to argue that we must eschew all structure. Instead, Fletcher (2023) argues that storythinking develops through processes distinct from the canonical academic pathway of logico-deductive thinking. Storythinking, put simply, develops through an exposure to diverse forms of story. This differs markedly from publishing conventions in applied linguistics that emphasize homogenizing structures, frameworks, and pathways of analysis that ultimately produce the same story with different flavors (Bal, 2026). I do not believe this is what applied linguistics intends when they talk about the need to diversify whose stories get told and whose ways of knowing count. Such hierarchization of academic knowledge defeats that purpose; such homogenous diversity defeats the purpose of plurality.
What can be more useful is a principle I often heard from Suresh Canagarajah’s classes – not all risky writing is great, but all great writing is risky. This entails writing in a way that remains legible to established structures and conventions of research reporting, while also diverging enough to render one’s voice unique — to produce a polyphony of researcher voices that eschews sanitized calls for full transparency in favor of flavors of opacity. This is what Boje gets into when integrating notions of intertextuality with antenarrative –producing stories that are both inherently unique to time, place, and speaker, yet also paradoxically entwined with stories generated by others within both local and global socio-historical contexts.
In this sense, antenarrative theory (Boje, 2001) is closely tied to the work of Kristeva (1980) and Bakhtin (1981) wherein each text has an intertextual trajectory that is historical and social…And antenarrative theory relates to Fairclough’s (1992) approach to critical discourse analysis, which advances the idea that the intertextual trajectory is embedded in a hegemonic struggle (Boje, 2007).
As I edit this at my desk, I feel thirsty. I feel a pull toward water. How can we think about intertextuality from a point of view of water? When Boje talks about each text having an intertextual trajectory, it implies a kind of separation, that there is a distinct boundary that demarcates the boundaries of one text and its adjacent texts. When we think about water, we often identify separate, namable categories of water bodies: lakes, oceans, fjords, streams, creeks, and runs. Yet what sustains a body of water is its connection and interdependence with other bodies of water. The sea is sustained by the rivers that flow into it. Second-order streams are sustained by the convergence of first-order streams. Snow falls upon the mountain and melts to feed the first-order streams. Snowfall is an endless accumulation of snowflakes. The largest agglomerations of matter on the Earth’s crust (i.e. oceans) are sustained by the molecular movement of snowflakes and raindrops flowing across the skies.
Where does one find the intertextual linkages between individual snowflakes and the water that comes to constitute a stream? To think of watery intertextuality is to realize that the boundaries and the geographical names and categories that we bestow onto bodies of water are not natural. They are artificial if we define artificial as man-made. One person in Rose’s Global Virtual Forum talk asked such a question: Does the world have order? Or do we impose order? We can read this from the perspective of water to say that the organization of water is not inherent. It is an intertextual mosaic passed down and struggled over throughout history. Rose opened her video asking, “What was the original name of the Blue Nile River?” The answer is: We don’t know. Such names remain lost to the ravages of colonialism. In this way, the name of water, just like the names of languages (Makoni and Pennycook, 2020), is a political act.
Stories are highly political. That which we term “common sense” is nothing more than living stories condensed and crystallized into a seemingly immovable narrative. I say “seemingly” because narratives are both fixed and liquid at the same time. Intertextuality dissolves and reconstitutes narratives at its borders. Sometimes such contact zone interactions shake narrative bodies to their core. This is why antenarrative matters. It leans into the postqualitative rejection of postpositivism, arguing that matter has no structure until we as observers declare it so. Such declarations constitute molecular antenarrative bets on future sensemaking just as clouds of vapor drifting across the sky constitute bets on the future of water.
References:
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.; M. Holquist, Ed.). University of Texas Press.
Bal, P. M., Orhan, M. A., Van Rossenberg, Y., & Alhnaity, R. (2026). Reproduction of form in management and organization research: Why and how compulsively repetitive publishing kills academia. Organization. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505084261428230
Boje, D. M. (2001). Narrative methods for organizational and communication research. Sage.
Boje, D. M. (2007). The antenarrative turn in narrative studies. In M. Zachry & C. Thralls (Eds.), Communicative practices in workplaces and the professions: Cultural perspectives on the regulation of discourse and organizations (pp. 219–237). Routledge.
Boje, D. M. (2011). Storytelling and the future of organizations: An antenarrative handbook. Routledge.
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2022). Thematic analysis: A practical guide. Sage.
Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Harvard University Press.
Czarniawska, B. (1997). Narrating the organization: Dramas of institutional identity. University of Chicago Press. (As cited in Boje, 2007, p. 78.)
Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Polity Press.
Feng, G., & English, J. (Trans.). (1974). Chuang Tsu: Inner chapters. Knopf/Vintage.
Fletcher, A. (2023). Storythinking: The new science of narrative intelligence. Columbia University Press.
Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. A. (2012). Thinking with theory in qualitative research: Viewing data across multiple perspectives. Routledge.
Kristeva, J. (1980). Desire in language: A semiotic approach to literature and art (T. Gora, A. Jardine, & L. S. Roudiez, Trans.; L. S. Roudiez, Ed.). Columbia University Press.
Makoni, S., & Pennycook, A. (2020). Innovations and challenges in applied linguistics from the Global South. Routledge.
Manabu, T. (2026). The machine consumes itself: Artificial intelligence and the end of publish-or-perish. Postdigital Science and Education, 1–24.
Mazzei, L. A. (2016). Voice without a subject. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 151–161.
Rabbidge, M. (2017). Embracing reflexivity: The importance of not hiding the mess. TESOL Quarterly, 51(4), 961–971.
Zachry, M., & Thralls, C. (Eds.). (2007). Communicative practices in workplaces and the professions: Cultural perspectives on the regulation of discourse and organizations. Routledge.
[1] I sourced this book chapter from an online source that does not provide page numbers to individual chapter downloads. I therefore leave direct quotes unpaginated.
[2] Introduction-Methods-Results-Analysis-Discussion: The dominant convention of academic articles across STEM and social science disciplines.
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