Experiences of victimization highlight the importance of storytelling as much as they obstruct it. Although victimology tends to focus on clearly severe and/or conventional forms of harm, this article turns to experiences that are both common and contested. Specifically, we examine how people recount and evaluate experiences of microaggressions: subtle, everyday forms of exclusion, insult, or discrimination directed at marginalized groups. To examine how people make sense of such experiences, we recorded 17 peer conversations about microaggressions and conducted follow-up interviews with the 34 participants. Using narrative analysis, we examined how and with what effects storytellers communicated their experiences of microaggression to their co-participants. Our findings demonstrate that participants used various narrative strategies to convey the feeling of being targeted, frame microaggressions as morally transgressive, and exert mastery over past experiences. Conversational partners played a key role in co-constructing evaluation and affirming moral meaning. The findings highlight the value of storytelling for articulating experiences that are hurtful yet ambiguous, suggesting ways to foster recognition and mutual understanding across social differences.

Victimologists observe that telling one’s story can foster healing for survivors of violence. To understand these processes better, victims’ narratives must be understood as situated acts of telling. This paper takes one man’s narration of victimization long past — child abuse and rape — as a case. We examined his interview-derived storytelling with a focus on narrative positioning, narrative discourse modes, and negations. We found that Stefan (a pseudonym) used various discursive modes and narrative positionings to exercise control over the stories and what they mean. His agency was partly achieved by what he recounted not doing or saying, and what he refused to address in the interview situation. Thus, his narratives feature his own defiance and self-empowerment in both the scene and the aftermath of violence. These findings lead us to conclude that narrative strategies of storytelling should be taken into account in any practical interventions that involves testimony about harm.

Criminology is foundationally an applied discipline, or one whose knowledge seeks to shape some non-academic practice. Narratives - particularly the narratives of parties to 'crime' - are essential to criminology, but criminologists have hardly engaged with narratology. This paper tracks the progression from traditional narrative research involving harm agents and criminalized persons to a relatively new narrative criminology that is attentive to narrative forms and strategies inasmuch as it considers these as shaping harm. In addition, the paper forecasts narrative criminology's fruitful engagement in concepts from rhetorical narratology. Interviews with men who perpetrated violence and insights from restorative justice encounters are used to demonstrate the potential value of rhetorical narratological concepts to narrative criminology and to interventions informed by narrative criminology.

We theorize workplace sexual harassment in terms of narrative. Two case studies – one at Ford Motor Company plants, the other involving former New York State governor Andrew Cuomo – ground thematic analysis of victims’ accounts of experiences of harassment and commentary on their capacity to give accounts. We identify six challenges - features of workplace harassment and its social context - that victims face in narrating harassment, which facilitate abuse and undermine redress: (1) ambiguity of meaning; (2) stepwise harassment; (3) coerced co-participation; (4) admonitions/mechanisms against telling; (5) competing narrative constructions; and (6) storyteller marginalization. Anti-harassment efforts should target these challenges.

This chapter examines the challenges that imprisonment poses to health, mental well-being, and relationships with family and friends, according to prior research. It compares such challenges for men and women. The chapter begins by reporting on problems wrought by ageing, then describes how such problems vary by gender, before turning to research on ageing in prison specifically.

Transportation in the United States is a deeply and intricately racialized system. In this paper, we use Seiler's ideas regarding the racialization of mobility and Henricks and Seamster's theory of the racial tax state, in conjunction with Presser's analysis of the unsaid, to explain high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) to high-occupancy toll (HOT) lane conversions in U.S. metropolitan areas. We argue that silence on race in the major push for HOV to HOT lane conversions by libertarian "think tanks" and U.S. Department of Transportation guidance is fundamental to instrumentalizing transportation policy for racist tax regimes.

Narrative criminology is a theoretical paradigm rooted in a view of stories as influencing harmful actions and arrangements. Narrative criminologists explore the storied bases of a variety of harms and also consider the narratives with which actors resist patterns of harm. We submit that narrative criminology is an apt and powerful framework for research in critical criminology because narrative criminology is fundamentally concerned with harm or resistance to harm, underscores collective involvement in the genesis of harm, illuminates the dynamism of harm and therefore the possibilities of resistance, and compels a reflexive stance on one's research. Stories are recounted at multiple levels of social life. They are self-consciously and habitually generated, structured and creative, populated by things said and things not said. The complexities of stories are a good match for the complexities of crime, harm and justice in late modernitycore concerns of critical criminology.

The dominant cultural narrative of sex-selling involves female sellers and male buyers, consistent with governing notions of sexual desire and sexual performance more generally. Likewise, needing and receiving care is conventionally coded as feminine. Analysis of semi-structured qualitative interviews with 21 cisgender male sex sellers in Denmark leads us to consider how storylines and discursive boundaries having to do with sex work, sexuality, gender, and care shape narrative imagination in ways that inhibit the participation of male sex sellers in programs that provide the kind of care they may need. Respondents described different experiences of and pathways into sex work. However, both respondents who enjoyed selling sex as well as respondents who suffered found it difficult to imagine themselves as participants in service-providing programs. Rather, they deemed programs designed to provide care and support to sex sellers the exclusive province of women. The paper clarifies the importance of cultivating narrative imagination among male sex sellers, policymakers, and care providers in order to develop and deliver more adequate policies and effective programs for male sex sellers in need of care.