Paper short abstract:

What does it mean to be unable to construct and develop a coherent story credible to oneself? Drawing on my experience of Traumatic Brain Injury I will reflect on how acts of questioning, intersubjectivity, empathy and multimodality may facilitate and shape ways of (self) knowing and storytelling.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will commence from my experience of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), caused by a road accident, to reflect on how acts of questioning, intersubjectivity, empathy and multi-modality are embedded in (self) knowing and storytelling. TBI is an injury to the brain caused by a substantial impact to the head or body. Its effects may include reversible or permanent brain damage, coma, hallucinatory noise, disordered thoughts, personality changes and long-term difficulties in speech, movement, coordination, or fatigue, and in some cases a persistent vegetative state or death.

Ten years after "my" accident, despite extended recovery and seeming resumption of “normal” life, I remained disorientated, confused and displaced. My personal notes of the time are full of scattered sentences, images, video-recordings. Was I unable to make a story? Did I consider myself an unreliable narrator? In response to my existential confusion, I began a preliminary research based on making an ethnographic documentary on people’s social lives and experiences after coma.

I will reflect on how the research was an embodied way of questioning ‘who am I’, how it tackled most of my disorientation and it led me to make “a story” out of my experience. I will point to the role of intersubjectivity and empathy as a way of knowing oneself through the other and also to non-propositional ways of creating stories. Since the story of my TBI informed my PhD and fieldwork proposal it is worth to tackle the situated character of reliable stories and narrators