Narrative inquiry : the songs and silences of adolescent alienation
Date
1993
Authors
Hughes, Denny
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Abstract
This thesis is a narrative study. It examines, through interpretive story, expressed existential alienation where it occurs specifically in late adolescence and early adulthood. An examination is also undertaken of societally-induced racial, gender and class discriminatory factors which promote sensed alienation or separation from self and others in adolescents and young adults. Young people studied range in age from 16 to 20 years, and all but one either currently attend or were recently enrolled in a senior high-school institution. An examination is also undertaken in this thesis of exclusionary, negative or inhumane pedagogical high-school climates and practices which either initiate or exacerbate student alienation.
This thesis is a narrative study. It is not grounded in objective, scientific or quantitative research. It is phenomenologically hermeneutic in its orientation, and it seeks illuminative understanding of the human condition of adolescent existential alienation, rather than extrinsic, objective understanding. This thesis is grounded in a collection of short stories. It record real-life human experiences of adolescent alienation, and it does so through unequivocally interpretive and creative narrative. Its songs are those of the young people it features, and its silences are those left by the narratives which gives those songs voice.