Rethinking the dialogical dimension of narrative productions beyond co-construction: unveiling the role of disagreement, contradictions, and dispute

Abstract

ABSTRACT Narrative productions methodology (NPM) constitutes a social research technique that, within feminist epistemologies and, in particular, Haraway’s situated knowledge, seeks to produce partial knowledge from co-writing practices of research texts between researcher and participant. The question that emerges is the extent to which NPM goes beyond co-construction to involve a deeper sense of dialogism, in which alterity is not dissolved but remains as a tensioned difference. The aim of this paper is to explore how dialogizing NPM can improve narratives as a feminist research tool. This has political and epistemological implications, as in the construction of knowledge some validation mechanisms dominated by specific groups have been privileged. As a consequence, not all knowledge has the same recognition, and feminist epistemologies argue against this over-representation. The political and epistemological implications of these suggestions are discussed.