In recent years, narrative analysis has experienced what can be identified as a small stories turn. Specifically, some researchers, especially Bamberg (2004, 2006), Georgakopoulou (2006, 2007), Bamberg and Georgakopoulou (2008), have argued that the analysis of small stories that have been previously overlooked in favor of large-scale autobiographical narratives presents a valuable contribution to our understanding of identity construction and display. This paper builds on and extends the discussion of small stories as sites for identity construction by demonstrating how various small stories — retellings, hypothetical narratives, near-narrative structures as well as short past-oriented narratives — all construct a coherent family identity that includes pets as members. While a number of previous studies considered narrative as a key site for exploring how family members construct social identities, they primarily focused on individual family members and centered their analyses on traditional past-oriented narratives often limiting their settings to dinner-table conversations or interviews. In contrast, this study, drawing on prior studies of discursive construction of a shared family identity (Gordon, 2007) and pets as family members (Tannen, 2004), demonstrates how a shared family identity that includes pets emerges in diverse small stories that are embedded in on-going conversations and occur in a variety of places: a car, a dining room, a living room. This paper also shows how small stories about pets simultaneously create a shared family identity that includes pets and situate this family within a larger social discourse, or Discourse (Gee, 1996, 1999), of treating pets as family members.
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Chang, Chen-Chi & Yu-Hsun Lin
2022. Constructing Hakka Ethnic Identity Through Narrative Genealogy Writing. SAGE Open 12:1 ► pp. 215824402210799 ff.
Edwards, Delyth
2017. A Methodology of Remembering: The Self Who Was, the Self Who Is and the Self Who Narrates. In Cultural, Autobiographical and Absent Memories of Orphanhood, ► pp. 43 ff.
Edwards, Delyth
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Georgakopoulou, Alexandra
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Gordon, Cynthia
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2018. Building Behaviorally Healthy Relationships Between Children and Dogs. In Children, Dogs and Education, ► pp. 43 ff.
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2024. “She is Like a Sister to Me”: Children’s Lived Experience with Their Dog. Anthrozoös► pp. 1 ff.
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Launspach, Sonja
2016. Exemplar narratives: Resources for maintaining solidarity and upholding group standards in an American quilting guild. Text & Talk 36:2
Marshall, Philip H., Molly E. Ireland & Audrey A. Dalton
2015. Earliest Memories of Pets Predict Adult Attitudes: Phenomenological, Structural, and Textual Analyses. Human-animal interaction bulletin
2014. “We’ll only see parts of each other’s lives:” The role of mundane talk in maintaining nonresidential parent–child relationships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 31:8 ► pp. 1134 ff.
Savela, Nina, Rita Latikka, Jussi Lahtinen & Atte Oksanen
2024. Robots are coming to town: A visual experiment on urban belonging and anxiety. Cities 144 ► pp. 104640 ff.
Schmitz, Rachel M., Sarvi Amjadi, Jennifer Tabler & Jonathan Ishoy
2023. Radical Healing in Precarity: LGBTQ+ Young People’s Approaches to Life Challenges and Aspirations through Pet Caregiving in the Context of Homelessness. Youth 3:1 ► pp. 50 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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