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Narrative inquirers come to understand experience through story. In this way, the narrative is the primary unit of analysis rather than breaking down stories into its constituent parts, parsing particular words, ideas, or codes in the process of analysing and interpreting experience. This chapter adds complexity to understandings of the ways that narrative inquirers make meaning of experience with participants. My work with Olivia, a research participant, serves as a guide for this chapter as I further explore my process of meaning-making as a narrative inquirer. Beginning with recorded research conversations and transcriptions, the process moves to the use of word images as interim research texts. Word images are collections of participant responses, words and phrases, brought together to form storylines. The composition of word images allows for complex understandings of experience, with multiple, sometimes conflicting perspectives emerging from the participants’ words. As Maxine Greene suggested, meaning-making includes a going beyond the text that allows readers to connect with the words in new and interesting ways. Similarly, meaning-making in narrative inquiry moves beyond traditional qualitative data analysis that allows researchers and readers to think with the stories of participants, engaging with the participants’ experience(s) in new ways as the researcher and reader brings their own stories of experience to bear in the text; making meaning and imagining experience from new perspectives.

In this chapter, we argue that through relational research experiences with colleagues and participants, researchers are in a shared process of curriculum making and identity-making. Through reflections on a key shared experience, we demonstrate that in the liminal space of our work together, we have begun to shape our community identity-making to tell a story of ourselves as researchers within that community. In our work together, we have come to understand the ways that research contexts shape the ways we engage in research and the identities we compose as researchers. We suggest that as researchers, we meet in borderlands to engage in relational inquiry with participants and our colleagues. Similarly to Anzaldua, we understand the borderlands as liminal spaces between our respective worlds of research where we come together to compose new stories about ourselves as researchers and the research in which we engage. We attend to the places of tension as they emerge as opportunities to understand more deeply ourselves as researchers and as co-participants in a relational research experience. In doing so, we attend also to our shared responsibilities to each other in an ongoing research relationship. In the borderlands, we meet to tell a new story about who we are and who we are becoming in all our complexity. In this examination of the research community, we have grown into together, we define parameters and processes that resonate with our individual identities as researchers as well as our communal identities within a supportive research community.

The objective is to extend the concept of purse parties introduced by Gosline (2009) and to explore the phenomenon of counterfeit consumption through the in-home “purse parties” channel. The authors seek to reveal themes from the depth interviews and build a consumer typology reflecting attitudes toward purse parties and counterfeit luxury products.

The method is a qualitative phenomenological approach. Authors assessed attitudes toward purse party attendance and counterfeit goods – along with any subsequent behavioral intentions or behaviors. Authors addressed the objective using depth interviews among 28 women.

Findings included five emerging themes: distinctness of in-home consumption settings, obligatory attendance, social engagement, curiosity, and disregard for legalities of counterfeit consumption/disdain for purse parties.

The sample primarily consists of female colleges students and is not representative of all consumers. Due to social desirability bias and the controversial nature of counterfeit consumption, informants may have struggled to provide honest responses.

Research implications suggest potential increases in purse party events and consumption due to informant’s blatant disregard for the legalities of the practice, and interests in social engagement, intimacy (exclusivity), and curiosity.

The main contribution is a typology representing four types of purse party consumers: loyal, curious/social, skeptic, and disengaged. This proposed typology stems from the aforementioned themes uncovered. Further, authors identify the social implications of in-home purse parties and underscore the significance of an under-investigated purchase channel.

The purpose of this case study is to investigate one conduit through which racial inequality is perpetuated in American schools. Using Bourdieu’s theory of capital, this chapter uses visual ethnography to examine the signage of one predominately African American high school in the Midwest. Some of the signs, which are featured photographically in the chapter, include bans on “sagging,” bans on certain slang words, an emphasis on individual accountability, and more. The chapter finds that this school works to normalize forms of cultural capital considered valuable in the White, middle to upper-middle class communities while simultaneously discrediting and preventing less dominant forms of capital. The implications of this analysis are that Black students must gain access to dominant forms of capital in order to experience success in school. Such an analysis asks leaders in higher education to: (1) recognize that high schools often negatively evaluate a student’s non-dominant cultural capital – as reflected in poor student discipline records, low achievement and attainment; (2) consider transforming the college admissions process to be more inclusive of measures of non-dominant capital; and (3) consider how to authentically value what matriculating students with non-dominant forms of capital bring to the campus.

The participation of trans people is increasingly being framed as a defining issue for women's sport. A dominant narrative, promoted by various newly formed feminist organizations located in the Global North, is that (cisgender) women's sport will be forever changed – and negatively so – by the increased recognition and sports participation of trans athletes. The message is the following: first, that biological sex is fundamentally binary; second, that the place of ‘females’ in sport depends on the recognition of this biological ‘truth’; and third, that sports policymakers must choose between advancing the rights of interests of (cisgender) women or those of trans athletes, but can't do both. I call this phenomenon biofeminism: the wielding of scientific knowledge and expertise to claim binary, biological sex difference as the ‘true’ basis of (cisgender) women's experience and her rights. In this chapter, I offer an exploratory, empirical account of this variety of feminist mobilization by analyzing an awareness-raising event held in the United Kingdom in 2019. I approach this event as an opportunity to better understand how biofeminist actors are organizing, their epistemic strategies and the political frames they rely upon to give meaning to ideologies of binary sex difference and impact policy and legislation. Given the unfinished business of realizing gender equity within the institution of sport, I reflect on how women's sports organizations might counter biofeminist mobilization and pursue allyship between cis and trans women.

This chapter disrupts the common notion that identity can be understood through the use of categories. Categorical terms like gay, straight, man, or woman often mask the complexity of curriculum making and identity-making. Curriculum making and identity-making are narrative terms used to understand the dynamic, relational, and on-going process of making meaning about people, things, contexts, and identity through experience. Identity making, understood narratively as the composition of stories to live by, allows us to image diverse communities, contexts, and experiences that uniquely shape the stories that people live and tell. Inquiring into the experiences of two research participants, I begin the chapter by thinking with Calle’s stories of experience to explore the limited and limiting categorical stories of identity. Then, I consider Jamie’s stories to live by, attending to the role of his contexts and communities in the composition of his stories to live by. In doing so, I seek to further map out the narrative geography of curriculum making and identity-making places and communities for individuals who compose diverse stories to live by. Building on previous research findings that contexts shape the composition of stories to live by as identity is negotiated through these dominant stories as an individual’s ontology, his/her story of the world and self in it, is constituted in part, by these dominant stories; here, I argue that contexts that allow for diverse stories to be told are those that attend to experience rather than clinging to familiar dominant stories.