Uppeldi og menntun - 01.07.2014, Page 96

Uppeldi og menntUn/icelandic JoUrnal of edUcation 23(2) 201496
Behind the qUest for tales, stories and liVes
little information about this project, the people who I was supporting, and my role as
a camp leader. One of the women in the group was Sara, a participant in my research.
Being able to spend more time with her was the reason for me volunteering. She is a
gifted singer and actress and has appeared nationally in movies, on TV shows and in
concerts. Sara is great fun to be around but some people might get annoyed with her
habit of imitating and mimicking the people around her. One day I was sunbathing
on a beach in Denmark and Sara walked up to me and asked what I was doing. I told
her I was enjoying the good weather. Then Sara responded by telling me it was not
an option to sunbathe on the beach. I was surprised and Sara laughed and said: ‘It is
what you tell me all the time. It is not an option.’ She was spot on because I had been
bossing her around during our stay in Denmark. I had been telling her to put on a
sweater because the weather was cold, telling her to eat her dinner even though she
did not like the food, and telling her to go to bed early because I was tired and needed
sleep. Her imitation of me was not simply an annoying habit, but a powerful way of
narrating her experience of our interactions.
It is interesting to look at our interactions in the context of Bakhtin’s (1984) idea
of the carnival laughter. He draws on the medieval carnival where power structures
are inverted and the world is turned upside down: ‘A boundless world of humorous
forms and manifestations opposed the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesias-
tical and feudal culture’ (Bakhtin, 1994, p. 196). The humour and laughter is important
in the carnival also when the purpose is satire (Bakhtin, 2005). Sara used it to question
my authority as a camp leader and she made fun of my behaviour and position. She
was not simply mocking me personally, but also the power structures of the camp
where non-disabled leaders have the power and authority to tell Others, adult par-
ticipants with intellectual disabilities, what to do and how to behave. She used the
carnival laughter to challenge ‘traditional concepts of logic and identity’ (Glazener,
1989, p. 159).
My actions reflect our power relations where I hold power over Sara simply be-
cause I am non-disabled and I justify these relations, or in Bourdieu’s (Bourdieu &
Passeron, 1990) terms, legitimate them on the basis of caring. It is not for what our
power relations really are, but for what I have perceived them and legitimized them to
be (Bourdieu, 1991). I take part in reproducing the arbitrary non-disabled position as
dominant over disabled people. And that raises questions about power relations in re-
search and how researchers, often in good faith, assert power as experts on other peo-
ple, the disabled participants. Our interactions and Sara’s outbursts of carnivalesque
laughter show that even though all research is itself a constitution of power relations,
they may shift and change.
DisCUssiOn: rEflECtiOns On nArrAtiVE rEsEArCH
The research encounters described above demonstrate the powerful positions of re-
searchers and their assumptions while also indicating that narrators are not simply
passive respondents. To understand our practices and suppositions, it is useful to