Learning Legacies: Archive to Action through Women's Cross-Cultural Teaching

Front matter

Archive to Action through Women's Cross-Cultural Teaching

THE NEW PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP

SERIES EDITORS

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

ONE: Introduction: Counter-narratives and Cultural Stewardship 1

Two: “That my work may speak well for Spelman”: Messengers Recording History and Performing Uplift 37

Introduction

Counter-narratives and Cultural Stewardship

In the late fall of 2014, an Ebola outbreak crossed the Atlantic from Africa and came to America. In its early stages, the disease had seemed remote—a somewhat exotic subject of world news reports, a “problem,” certainly, but one having no direct impact within US borders. But suddenly, Ebola exploded among us. In Texas, no less. And, for the community of Texas Christian University (TCU), where I was teaching in Fort Worth, Ebola became personal, almost tangible, when Nina Pham, one of our own, a nursing program alumna working in a nearby hospital in Dallas, contracted the disease from a patient, Thomas Eric Duncan. Ebola was now Joca/ news, not something far-removed.

And yet, even as the disease cried out for our attention—generating real fear, even—our responses also provided a powerful learning opportunity. As an acting dean in the Honors College, I hosted a meeting of alumni on campus just as news of Pham’s illness hit the airways. TCU alumna Linda Newman, one attendee, shared a vivid anecdote with the group: she had just been to the same emergency room a few days before Duncan’s trip to that hospital. As she reenvisioned her near-encounter with contagion, the conversation also led her to a memory of reading: she said that, since the news of Ebola’s arrival in the Metroplex via her own neighborhood hospital, she had been mentally revisiting Albert Camus’s The Plague, which she had first studied as a TCU undergrad. She wondered aloud if rereading it now, and inviting others to join in, might be a way of encouraging all of us to examine some worthwhile questions: How can we cultivate a stronger sense of empathy, perhaps even responsibility, for the pain of others? How would we respond, as individuals and as a community, if the initial outbreak of Ebola in our own homeland couldn't be contained?

As organically as that, through an informal conversation, a modest humanities-oriented community-building project was born. “Contagion, Quarantine, and Social Conscience,” we called it.' I tapped into a small fund that TCU’s teaching and learning center provides to support “global learning” and purchased about twenty paperback copies of Camus’s novel to distribute, first-come, first-serve. Working with graduate student assistant Marie Martinez (who had been studying “contagion literature” for her dissertation on Victorian disease narratives) and with undergraduate student leaders, Linda and I planned a roundtable for an evening near the end of the semester. To promote involvement beyond whoever might be able to attend in person, another doctoral candidate, Tyler Branson, a frequent partner in civic engagement projects, set up an online discussion board.

This short-term project was only a small-scale endeavor. And it was far from fully successful. The residence hall’s main lobby that we chose for the roundtable was loud and distracting. The main doors slammed repeatedly; most of the heavy student traffic that evening exhibited little interest in our gathering, passing through without even pausing to join in, despite the many paper and digital posters we had distributed ahead of time. Most of the undergraduates in attendance were actually students from the Popular Literature class I was team-teaching with grad student Thomas Jesse, so the effort to attract attendees from the dorm didn’t really take off. And, with the weather far chillier than usual for a Texas late-fall evening, we didn’t draw a crowd of area alumni either.

Yet, I’d argue, worthwhile learning certainly happened. Both the panelists for the roundtable and the other participants that night were fully engaged, beyond the scheduled time, in topics that reminded all of us how powerful cross-cultural interdisciplinary learning in a public context can be. One speaker, biologist Giri Akkaraju, started out by apologizing for the (supposed) limits of his literary interpretation skills, then insightfully launched into a series of ethical questions that galvanized the room. Brite Divinity School professor Nancy Ramsey extended Giri’s themes, which were then further complicated by a postcolonial take on Camus offered up by English professor Rima Abunasser. Katherine Fogelberg, who had recently completed a dissertation on enhancing undergraduate science education, pushed us to contemplate how reading Camus’s text in light of current events might encourage a shift in teaching foci in the “hard” sciences to more direct examination of public health issues.

All the panelists, and the thoughtful audience members who responded to their lead, told stories. Many were informed by the gear-up conversations on our virtual discussion board. Ephemeral though this shared moment of learning seemed to be, it nonetheless affirmed the need, as Native/ First Nations writer Thomas King has so eloquently pointed out, to tell each other stories when confronting challenging social issues.’ And this project also, however modestly, reasserted ways in which shared reading and discussion can generate stirrings of empathy—empathy that might, upon reflection, lead to social action.’

For my own ongoing scholarship on collaborative learning that blends textual studies with analysis of educational practices, this project resonated with longstanding questions. How can we capitalize on the potential of the humanities—especially when set in dialogue with other fields—to enhance cross-cultural understanding? How can teaching, when conceived as a public enterprise, move learners from engagement with cultural resources to actions supporting social justice aims? And, in terms of guiding and assessing such work, what does narrative inquiry look like and why is it a valuable enterprise? What are the most productive methods for documenting the impact of civic engagement projects—from modest ones like our Ebolainspired novel study to larger-scale, sustained, and complex ones? This book is part of my ongoing effort—supported by many colleagues—to address such questions.

For the majority of that particular fall 2014 evening’s participants, as well as most who had joined the dialogue online, this project ended with the roundtable. For some of us, however, an archive of activity remains as a source for ongoing analysis.* When I reread the postings, they prompt me to reimagine ways of teaching in the future. In that vein, Sam, one of the members of that Popular Literature class that so commendably swelled the roundtable audience, wrote later about the project in an end-of-course narrative reflection: a future secondary teacher, he contrasted that collaborative learning experience with the focus on standardized assessments that he had been observing in school visits and tried to envision approaches for promoting open-ended, interdisciplinary teaching in his own classroom.

By leaving at least a partial record of our shared learning experience behind—in this case, through our record of online conversations— participants in the “Contagion, Quarantine, and Social Conscience” project invited others to join in future narrative inquiry. To accept such an invitation, by writing into the archive or carrying out new social practices inspired by it, would affirm that these kinds of collaborations seek communal more than individual agency.

In a sense, within the framework I’ll be using for this book, we left a “learning legacy”—a story about an intercultural learning process that used collaborative epistemologies toward potential social agency. The knowledge being made was admittedly tenuous and exploratory, grounded in writing linked to questions we had encountered in our daily lives and examined through the lens of shared study. I like to picture others reading through our postings and imaginatively joining our community—maybe even adding to its textual record, so that our online archive grows a bit, expanding its potential reach to others beyond the original participant community. I realize people seeking out that narrative space (or even stumbling upon it) wouldn’t have a full understanding of the transdisciplinary and pragmatic applications that emerged for some of us later. They wouldn’t have access to the reflection Sam wrote at the end of the semester about his future teaching; they wouldn’t have gotten to read Ben’s letter of application to divinity school, where he described future ethical leadership goals by echoing, and also extending, some of his previous online postings. Anytime we study archival records, we catch knowledge in fragments, at a remove from the actual lived experiences that shaped their construction. But any community that self-consciously leaves behind a learning legacy— adaptable accounts of narrative inquiry in process—surely does so as an aspirational act of rhetorical intervention, hoping it will be useful to others in the future. And learning legacies that emerge from efforts at cross-cultural teaching have a particularly crucial role to play today, given the many contact zones of social difference we are all encountering in our classrooms and the larger society.

Fortunately, there are numerous past learning legacies far more extensive and fully realized conceptually than the tiny set of exchanges generated through the brief “Contagion, Quarantine, and Social Conscience” program. Therefore, although I am especially committed to scholar-teachers’ intercultural community-building within and beyond the classroom today, I am eager to tap into cultural resources from prior generations to guide such work.

The three particular instances of learning legacies I will explore in this book come from my longstanding study of gendered social interventions at the turn between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Specifically, I'll be drawing from archival sources to recover narrative texts responding to three pivotal educational issues in that era: what learning opportunities should be afforded to African-American women in the post-slavery decades; how to acculturate the exploding immigrant population of that time;

and what role white and/versus Native cultural resources and teaching approaches should play in educating Indigenous Americans. Focusing here on a specific body of narratives around each of these ongoing debates— from Spelman College’s founding period, from Jane Addams’s leadership at Hull-House, and from the negative model of assimilationist Carlisle Indian Industrial School set in dialogue with alternative Native teaching practices—I will mine generative learning legacies from these knowledge-making sites.

As those three points of research attest, this previous era provides an especially fruitful ground for study. For one thing, in a seeming forecast of our twenty-first-century moment, these earlier decades in US history represented a period of intense social transformation (including increasing urbanization, a rapid rise in immigration, and enhanced educational opportunities across previous class divides). Educational sites both in and out of school—anticipating parallel American settings in the early twenty-first century—brought together learners from widely diverse backgrounds, often crossing generations; regional and national identities; and race, gender, and social class affiliations. Also similar to our current national context, the transition between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries prompted sustained efforts by powerful groups to maintain social hierarchies (such as Jim Crow tactics directed against African Americans; a rise in anti-immigrant campaigns; oppressive containment strategies used to undermine Native peoples’ own national and individual rights; and continued reluctance to give US women full political and economic access). The echoes of that era’s struggles over educational values and practices resonate quite strikingly today, thereby underscoring how relevant stories of cross-cultural collaborations from the past can be for us now. In particular, I have found transportable models of rhetorical activism in cultural work by the institution-founding women who generated published accounts of Spelman College’s early days, by women settlement leaders recording stories of Hull-House’s Progressive-Era programs, and by students/teachers creating resistant responses to the boarding school movement aimed at Native American youth. I will link these historically situated examples of archive-making with current applications of those legacies by self-conscious heirs today and with my own analysis of stories from both time frames—the past and today. I will analyze these textual records both in their specific historical moments and across time, so as to demonstrate how humanities-oriented knowledge systems and practices from the past can enable meaningful intercultural work in our own day.

Narrative Pathways to Knowledge

‘To embody this project’s arguments rhetorically, Pve constructed three layers of narrative writing in the book’s structural content. For each core chapter, Pve composed a historical narrative about a specific learning legacy; I’ve also shared a story about how those cultural resources are being used in social action today; and I’ve woven in a personal narrative about my own learning process along with that analysis.

I realize that using narrative as my own primary writing mode brings risks. There is a long history of women’s knowledge-making being downplayed or even ignored when that work is situated in everyday experience and language—or, said another way, when women writers and others on the margins of power “story” rather than “theorize” knowledge. Accordingly, throughout this book, I will sometimes foreground analysis, even as I also seek to establish the efficacy of individual stories and, more specifically, counter-narratives developed by knowledge-makers whose marginalized positions initially constrained their access to agency.

Despite its challenges, first-person narrative does bring important benefits to this project. As feminist epistemology has emphasized, whenever we construct knowledge, however hard we try to be fair, our personal standpoints shape our processes and conclusions. Identity is a particularly crucial factor to consider in my authorship of this book, in terms of my writing about educational practices carried out “for,” along with or managed by, marginalized peoples. As a white woman positioned in a highly privileged role as a university professor, I have a clear responsibility to reflect on how my own standpoint restricts my work.’ I must try to nurture a sensitive and responsive capacity for interpreting the experiences of the educators I am studying from the past, as well as those whose current work I seek to understand, while recognizing that complete empathy and identification with others are never fully achievable.’ Said another way, I must acknowledge the epistemic challenges to deep empathy that are associated with who and where I am.

Given these inherent limits, I have sought a rhetorical strategy for textually marking the standpoint-based constraints on my own learning and my scholarship. I do so by calling on interpretive methods and stylistic features of autoethnography. That is, I align my writing with this self-reflective research approach to make visible to my readers, rather than to mask, my own struggles with claiming a voice for this project. In employing features of autoethnographic writing, I also hope to affirm that knowledge derived from storytelling carries value, that analysis and narrative can work together productively, and that scholarly commitments to reach broad audiences may require us to write in a more personal way than when discipline-centered researchers talk only to each other. Overall, Pm seeking to represent textually the process of reflection that, I believe, is a necessary step between archive-guided learning and social action.’

Therefore, while this book is not, strictly speaking, an autoethnography, it does weave into each chapter techniques from that research method and conventions from that narrative genre. Admittedly, this partial approach makes for some stylistic jumps in my writing—shifts between a voice that takes a distanced, analytical perspective when interpreting textual records from the archive and one that speaks more directly to readers in an “I” voice, narrating personal experiences of using cultural resources to guide teaching, learning, and civic activism. To craft this hybrid language, Pve drawn on Heewon Chang’s Autoethnography as Method. He advises that autoethnography “combines cultural analysis and interpretation with narrative details,” so that “the stories of autoethnographers” can be “reflected upon, analyzed, and interpreted within their broader context” (46).* Pve also tried to emulate the best storytelling by the women writer-educators from previous eras who originally inspired this project—authors like Carrie Walls and Sophia Packard in the Spelman Messenger, Jane Addams in Twenty Years at Hull-House, and Zitkala-Sa in her stories for Atlantic Monthly and other periodical venues. And I’ve drawn upon models of writing by colleagues currently doing similar work in a range of civic engagement and community-building projects.’

In calling upon a narrative epistemology, I affiliate with a gendered tradition but also with values and practices central to Native American and First Nations teaching approaches. As Gail Guthrie Valaskakis has explained in Indian Country: Essays on Contemporary Native Culture: “stories are not just the cultural glue that holds communities together and transports them over time. Stories express the dynamic cultural ground in which individuals and communities are formed through a continual process of adopting and enacting allied or conflicting representations and the ideological messages they signify” (“Introduction,” Indian Country, 4). Drawing on the work of Stuart Hall, Valaskakis emphasizes that both individual and group conceptions of identity are “contested and reconstructed in the discursive negotiation of the complex alliances and social relations that constitute community” (4). Further, echoing Thomas King, Valaskakis notes that taking control of the stories told about yourself and your community represents a vital step toward claiming agency (6-7).

Significantly, this vision of agency doesn’t assume that all problems will be resolved, that irrefutable answers will emerge from story-made knowledge. Given the contingent versions of our individual selves and the communities where we work, knowledge itself is also contingent and fluid. So narrative, given its open-ended qualities, becomes not just an appealing way to convey our understandings; it’s also a mode that acknowledges its own limitations. Like the archive from which many humanities scholars seek to construct meaning,'° narrative is tentative and exploratory. Similarly, the actions we may be able to take from studying cultural resources need not be definitive to be worthwhile. Particularly when collaborating to create or refine communal stories, part of the value of the enterprise is its ongoing process.

I am well aware that my claims for interactive archival inquiry and associated collaborative enterprises growing out of such study fly in the face of ongoing anxiety about the relevance of the liberal arts. I recognize, of course, that we live in a period when the “practical” hard sciences and technical expertise often hold sway in educational value systems. Just ask our political leaders. The governor of North Carolina, Patrick McCrory, and former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett (in)famously advocated public education’s abandonment of fields like philosophy and women’s studies; and though he later apologized to offended art historians, even President Obama extoled the superior importance of “job training programs” meeting “employer needs” over such liberal arts fields in today’s educational hierarchy."

Meanwhile, quantitative assessment orientations place a premium on “objective” testing over measures such as students’ own reflective selfevaluations of learning or their stories of how they use, in daily life, what they have studied in the humanities’ cultural records. This emphasis on supposedly objective and finely measurable standards undermines the educational value systems and practices for knowledge-making of minority cultural groups, whose members often “score” in lower “levels” on such measures than the white majority. Thus, Marlene Brant Castellano, Lynne Davis, and Louise Lahache have noted, in the context of tensions between First Nations educational curricula and dominant North American practices: “This aggressive gate-keeping of ‘standards’ has repeatedly challenged the legitimacy of Aboriginal knowledge and values, imposing an assimilative cultural agenda that is both pervasive and coercive” (“Conclusion,” Aboriginal Education, 251).

On a more hopeful front, a growing chorus of voices has been calling into question such assumptions about the limits of learning avenues in the liberal arts and, conversely, the supposed universal superiority of “hard” knowledge fields. In the K-12 arena, thoughtful parent groups and activist scholars have begun to resist the loss of meaningful learning time arising from “test prep” (i.e., teaching to/for the test) and the seemingly never-ending increase in testing days themselves.’’ In university settings, enterprises such as Campus Compact, Imagining America, and local civic engagement endeavors (often combining curricular and cocurricular approaches) are reasserting the “soft” communal responsibilities of higher education.'? Such projects reenvision how scholars working in the arts, education, social sciences, and humanities can create, sustain, and assess public partnerships. Furthermore, since civic engagement work is inherently complex, too multifaceted to be fully encapsulated in charts, graphs, and numbers, some are saying, it’s time to reassert more qualitative ways to track what we learn through the liberal arts, fine arts, and everyday teaching and learning experiences linked to them.

Accordingly, a subtext of this project might read as follows: let’s quit being defensive about the humanities and affiliated fields of study. It’s time to stop limiting our measures of effectiveness to strategies more suited to disciplines where knowledge is more easily quantified. Instead, let’s foreground knowledge-making and assessment practices best suited to the epistemological systems, tools, and, yes, the aspirations at the core of the humanities and their sister fields of the arts and education. Stories emerging from community-building collaborations offer one such avenue. Therefore, one goal of this book is to interpret legacies from a number of such cross-cultural enterprises, from the past and today.

Knowledge-Making as Public Work

One social efficacy-seeking approach that “soft”-knowledge, liberal-artsoriented fields have in common when they operate in the public sphere, and thus one framework for tracing their influence, is their rhetorical underpinning. In that context, whereas a hard-scientific drug trial would set up an intervention treatment and a control group, then measure the impact of the medication in question via comparative quantitative data between the two groups, a social intervention project framed through the humani-

IO * LEARNING LEGACIES ties would assert the impossibility of isolating all variables in daily life. Instead, a story-based avenue to knowledge would draw on admittedly messier but more rhetorical means of evaluating impact. How, for instance, did participants respond affectively to a particular project’s activities? What elements within the language and social practices of the program seemed to impact that audience’s belief systems for day-to-day life choices, and why? What did they do with their learning, in their lived experiences afterward? What aspects of the cultural context shaping the project’s conception in the first place, as well as pathways through which it was experienced, have implications for future work? These are the kinds of questions an educator like Jane Addams, affiliating with narrative ways of knowing, would address in her writings about the Hull-House settlement. Curators working more recently at the Chicago museum honoring Addams’s legacy have asked similar questions about exhibits they developed or public programs they sponsored, as have Native leaders envisioning programming (both on-site and virtual) for the National Museum of the American Indian, and as have planners and performers in the annual Founders’ Day pageant held at Spelman College every spring.

This kind of active questioning around text-making and related social interactions aligns with scholarship in cultural rhetoric.'> In their introduction to a special issue of Enculturation dedicated to articulating cultural rhetoric’s evolving work, Phil Bratta and Malea Powell noted, “In practice, cultural rhetorics scholars investigate and understand meaning-making as it is situated in specific cultural communities.” Hence, they say, cultural rhetoric is a “situated scholarly practice,” one that responds to calls from voices like Steven Mailloux’s to “‘use rhetoric to practice theory by doing history.” For my work on Learning Legacies, Bratta and Powell’s description of cultural rhetoric as “More than anything, . . . a practice, and more specifically an embodied practice” is especially helpful, since it reminds me to be vigilant about my own personal standpoint’s impact on my inquiry. Similarly useful, I find, is their assertion that cultural rhetoric examines “issues of power,” particularly when doing comparative work, as I aim for here by bringing together several different case studies of archive-building and archive use. For Bratta and Powell, positioning our scholarly work within cultural rhetoric entails addressing power differentials ethically, attending to interpersonal relations as influencing cultural action, noting the interactive connections (“constellations”) that shape all knowledge-making, and using story as a central form of communication.’ My project strives to follow this mandate.

In line with such antihierarchical knowledge-building commitments, Learning Legacies affiliates with cultural rhetoric as both a conceptual formulation for scholarly study and a pathway toward political agency. Similar to Steven Mailloux’s self-positioning in a dialogue with Keith Gilyard for Conversations in Cultural Rhetoric and Composition Studies, I see benefits to linking rhetoric with pragmatism. Mailloux, for example, acknowledges the downside of hanging on to “rhetoric” as a term that can elicit negative responses from members of the general public, who may associate it more with verbal performance for effect than with sustained social action (40). Yet he nonetheless argues that there are potentially productive “associative” links between what he terms “rhetorical pragmatism” and “a commitment to radical democracy.” Both, he suggests, “share tropes of conversation and dialogue,” as well as “arguments about the primacy of empowerment and the protection of minority rights” and “narratives about the way that you come up with knowledge of truth: through deliberation” (39).!’

If Mailloux admits to both drawing on and resisting some aspects of his training in American literature in order to affiliate with the field of rhetoric, so will I. If the legacy of New Criticism gave me an intellectually appealing tool kit, it has sometimes seemed divorced from one-half of the mandate promoted by the nineteenth-century American women writers whose work has driven much of my prior scholarship: writing both to delight and to improve—that is, to use language in inherently artistic ways, but also to have a meaningful impact on daily life. Fortunately for those of us trained first as literature scholars in the New Critical perspective, Ottmar Ette’s calls for reconceptualizing our work’s relationship to lived experience have provided a useful vision for maintaining such skills as close, careful reading of the “literary” (however one defines that category), but not solely for the purposes of aesthetic analysis. Urges Ette: “For literary criticism and critical theory, knowledge for living is intrinsic to the very process of knowing: it is part of the object of study and of the subject’s (the scholar’s) individual life contexts” (“Literature,” 987). Ette argues that such a vision for the literary scholar moves us from feeling we should “confront the natural sciences” to “initiat[ing] a serious dialogue,” one that, by including “literary and cultural knowledge,” will enable “a more complex understanding of life and of the humanities as part of the sciences for living” (983, emphasis in original). In setting up the cross-disciplinary conversations around media coverage of the Ebola outbreak as potentially illuminated through (re)engagement with Camus’s philosophical novel, the collaborative “Contagion”

programming I described above was seeking just such a “serious dialogue” toward a “sciences for living,” in Ette’s terms.

In this book project and within the civic engagement programs I’ve joined across my academic career, two other scholarly frameworks play a key role: American Studies and studies of communities of practice in education. In the first case, I affiliate with the longstanding commitment of American Studies Association presidents such as Paul Lauter, Mary Helen Washington, and Karen Halttunen to partnering with K-12 educators and community activists. Further, I embrace mandates such as Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz’s to enact an “American Studies as Accompaniment,” so that, in collaborating with colleagues from different backgrounds than our own, we position ourselves for “traveling the road with them,” while learning “to listen” and craft “more cosmopolitan and critical conversations” (27). Accordingly, the historical case studies I present here all involve women rhetors who were also activist educators in their own day, capitalizing on connections to learning communities they helped construct and nurture. From those networks of narrative inquiry in action, shared stories emerged. On a parallel front, my analysis of contemporary applications of those women leaders’ past stories will show how the heirs of their work are constructing new communities of practice in day-to-day and project-based teaching.'* Networks of educators sharing praxis-based knowledge, with the National Writing Project’s interconnected local communities and nationwide programming being a prime example, offer compelling evidence of the efficacy in such collaborations. My own involvement, for over a decade, in helping build the Kennesaw Mountain Writing Project in metro Atlanta has certainly had an impact on my scholarship and on communities of teachers and learners there.

Studies of women’s educational rhetoric in action invite a mixed methodology, given the need to examine the original context of textual production as well as later transmissions and reconfigurations. Therefore, in this book, I begin each historical case study by recovering particular instances of archive-building through stories of teaching practice and then shift to tracing ways that twenty-first-century educators have used those textual legacies to guide their own work. My method is “textbased,” with my analysis grounded in cultural records—some inscribed, some performed, some enacted in conversations. This focus on textual records of learning as a social resource is one feature of my project that aligns it with traditional scholarship in the humanities, including cultural rhetoric’s studies of narrative writing as an activist genre. But I also hope to expand the way we conceptualize such archives to embrace texts that are often excluded, to encourage strategies of interpretation that are under-utilized, and to apply archival resources to our own social agency today. To clarify this goal, which links my methodological commitment to aspirations for how others may be able to use my work, I will now explicate several of this book’s key terms.

Counter-Narratives as Resistance

One concept essential to this project is counter-narrative, a politicized discursive strategy: when marginalized people are denied full access to social agency, they sometimes construct stories that push back against a constraining ideology’s textual power. As my English Department colleague Richard Enos suggested in an email after reading this introduction: “counternarratives figure prominently in social movements,” partly because “they are used to provide a (counter/alternative) view of reality.” They are also useful in cross-cultural storytelling “because they provide diachronic accounts of issues centering on value and preference.”!”

In particular, the counter-narratives at the heart of the upcoming chapters are inscribed and/or enacted stories strategically constructed to claim agency by mimicking some features of dominant narratives while simultaneously resisting other features of expected generic form and the belief system shaping it.” In that sense, Molly Andrews has defined counter-narratives as “stories which people tell and live” in order to “offer resistance, either implicitly or explicitly, to dominant cultural narratives” (“Opening,” 1). Andrews describes the interrelationship between dominant (or master) narratives and the resistant texts that sometimes emerge in response: “master narratives” express “what is assumed to be a normative experience,” so that “such storylines serve as a blueprint” for understanding ourselves and social practices in the world around us. Accordingly, she argues, “the power of master narratives derives from [our] internalisation,” as “we become the stories we know, and the master narrative is reproduced.” However, Andrews suggests, particularly anong members of marginalized groups, alternative visions may develop. In such cases, individuals who see themselves as outside the dominant pattern may choose to create “personal stories which go against the social grain,” and, through that process, generate “new possibilities” available to others as well. Andrews argues that such narrative-making has particular appeal for those outside the mainstream, whose perspective has been undervalued or even ignored. Self-consciously positioning their alternative stories on the margins, individuals who generate counter-narratives also do an important service for others, as the new storylines can eventually be adopted by larger communities (1-2). If dominant narratives offer maps reflecting “the social construction of normalcy,” with related patterns of “inclusion and exclusion” creating “pressures of social expectation” (3), counter-narratives open up alternative possibilities based on resistance to those constraining norms.”!