Michael Bamberg

Michael Bamberg visited the Georgetown linguistics department last Friday. He lead a discussion on publishing papers on narrative, and later in the day gave a talk demonstrating his concept (used by Georgakopoulou) of "small stories" in group interview and public confessions data.

Michael Bamberg is a lovely person with a big smile and a ready laugh. He is currently a psychology professor at Clark University in Worcester, MA. He also has a mustache.

Michael Bamberg photo from Clark University's faculty webpage

There were several very useful things I learned from his visit that I will record here; among them is that Bamberg generously makes his numerous publications easily available here.

His afternoon discussion about publishing (Bamberg is editor of the journal Narrative Inquiry, once known as The Journal of Narrative and Life History) was full of hard truths that were good to hear and important to remember:

• Just because your data is narrative, doesn't mean what you're doing is "narrative." 

This, of course, is a very tempting misconception. "Narrative" is a very specific theoretical framework, and just because s story exists in our data, does not necessarily mean our paper is a Narrative study. In addition, we often think that if our data does something interesting, then so does our research. But the data isn't the work; it's how we work with it that creates something publishable (or not) in a certain journal.

• Dissertations are not publishable.

Not, at least, without being restructured for a different audience. Our dissertations are written and framed mostly for our chair, the committee and for ourselves. While it would be convenient, we can't simply submit a dissertation chapter to a journal and expect it to be appreciated.

• Submitting to a journal often requires research of its own.

Bamberg suggests choosing a journal that seems relevant and reading its mission statement and several issues. He says it's important to locate the debates that the journal has published and to frame your own paper within those debates.

For his talk, he began by problematizing identity, claiming that it is becoming less sufficient to simply make identity claims; instead, these stances have become increasingly performed. He demonstrated this with an excellent choice of movie clip:

The need to perform our identities drives the constant use of small stories in interaction; indeed, in some cases, this is the only linguistic tool we have for this task. (Small stories are the short, fragmented tellings of personal experiences, which Bamberg (2005, 2006, 2007) and Georgakopoulou (2007, 2008) - and the two together (2007, 2008) - have found to be ubiquitous in everyday speech.)

Bamberg currently examines these small stories and narrative in the public confessions of politicians and shared some of his data and analysis with us. I won't share it here, since I don't have permission, but I would definitely keep an eye out for his publications on this fascinating topic.