How can organizations and communities listen to people’s experiences without reducing those experiences to a survey result or an expert’s conclusion?
In this new episode of Epistemic Alchemy, I speak with Cynthia Kurtz, an independent consultant, researcher, author, coach, and software developer with more than 25 years of experience in participatory narrative work.
Cynthia introduces Participatory Narrative Inquiry, or PNI, as a practice built around collection, sense-making, and return. People share stories; participants explore patterns and tensions together; and the resulting learning is returned to those who contributed their experiences.
We discuss why this process is not simply another form of narrative analysis. PNI seeks to create conditions for people to think together, including through catalysis: the use of patterns, questions, and competing interpretations that open inquiry rather than close it prematurely.
Our conversation also addresses the method’s relationship to action research, its implications for power-sharing in organizations, the limits of certainty, the challenge of academic gatekeeping, and the continuing importance of learning to see the world through experiences other than our own.
https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-5ban9-1b73bc2