Link—counternarrative/counter-story
Svane 20, associate professor in organizations, leadership and HRM at Aalborg University Business School, Ph. D. in intercultural organizational relations. (Marita, 2020, “Counter-narratives and counter-stories” in Routledge Handbook of Counter-Narratives, Klarissa Lueg and Marianne Wolff Lundholt (eds.). Accessed via University of Michigan Library.)
The conceptual complexity of the storytelling framework increases with the intersection of counter-narratives; a concept that has gained an increasingly firm foothold within the storytelling field (Bamberg & Andrews, 2004; Frandsen, Kuhn, & Lundholt, 2016). According to Andrews and Bamberg (2004), counter-narratives can be identified as positional categories in tension with other categories playing out at multiple layers of positioning. Counter-narratives are thus defined as relational categories that only make sense in relation to that which they are countering.
The intersection of the prefix ‘counter’ gives rise to new questions such as: What is meant by ‘counter’? What is the nature of a counter position? Does the meaning of ‘counter’ change when the prefix is related to narratives, to living stories, or to antenarratives? Furthermore, the prefix ‘counter’ is unavoidably associated with the idea of tensions and contradictions appearing in the middle between something. Hence, the prefix seems to foster a natural call for dialectics as a relevant perspective that, in addition to Bakhtin’s dialogue, may contribute to shedding more light on the dynamical forces involved in the three middles of the storytelling framework. The use of the prefix ‘counter’ and its associated middle thus need further scholarly attention.