Stories of Zubaida and Lisa in dialogue: recognising narrative agency in the practice of storytelling about experiences of violence

Storytelling is an established method in feminist research on sharing lived experiences of how the political is configured in everyday spaces in complex ways. Our aim in this article is twofold; first, to present two stories of experiencing violence in dialogue and second, to open up discussion about the relational aspects of storytelling and reading in the process of interpretation. For this purpose, we build on feminist philosophy of storytelling as a relational process that enables validation and narrative hermeneutical understanding of narratives as interpretational practices. We introduce Hanna Meretoja’s concept of narrative agency to explore the dialogic dimensions of storytelling as a practice of making meaning. In the process of creating the stories of Zubaida and Lisa we identify three dimensions in dialogue: the relationality between us and the research materials, the relationality between the two stories as these are placed side by side, and the relationality between this article and the potential readers. Both stories are based on the authors’ respective projects researching non-physical violence as experienced in isolation. We argue that storytelling is a powerful method that enables validation and transformation.