Speaker
Description
The crisis of representation in cultural theory has given rise to alternative forms of qualitative writing and a diversity of art-based forms of inquiry that are embodied, multi-voiced, and co-constructed. In that context, the purpose of the current paper is to see theoretical and methodological possibilities in exploring I and Me positions in the performative elements of a number of autoethnographical digital narratives, created by postgraduate students in a course on “dramaturgy, performance, and education” at the University of Athens. The narratives have been based on autobiographical memory and the poetics of the self. Authors’ experience in theatrical production generated works that are authentic in terms of prose and sonic atmosphere. One of these works competed at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival. The absent-presence of the embodied voice is notable in western philosophy, as Adriana Cavarero and Konstantinos Thomaidis have suggested. In the realm of Dialogical Self Theory there are quite a few works on the aural characteristics of narrator’s voice (cf. Monti’s paper on “vocal psychotherapy”). Psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati, echoing Ronald Barthes and his essay on “the grain of voice”, writes that voice “does not come out of the body. It is a body”. In this paper, we will examine how the aural characteristics of digital narratives are mediating in the dialogic transitions of the self. We will argue that the lengthy and skilled aural palimpsest of mixing, editing, and recording, constitutes the “ambiguous signifier”, a term coined by the Australian psychologist Peter Raggatt, echoing familiar ideas of Charles Peirce and Mikhail Bakhtin. Raggatt has put forth the notion of “thirdness” in the transition of the self and has described narrators’ “personal chronotopes” as the “thematically and historically organized string[s] or sequence of dialogical triads”.
CV
Athanasios Verdis is
Associate Professor of Educational Research and Evaluation at the Educational Department of Secondary Education of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He holds a degree in Educational Studies from the Department of Primary Education of the University of Athens and has studied Research Methodology at the Universities of Oxford and London with a scholarship from the State Scholarship Foundation. His research interests focus on quantitative and qualitative research methodologies with special interest in narrative and art based inquiries. He is a founding member of the Hellenic Society for Educational Evaluation.
