Narrative and Remaking Social Futures in Times of Pandemic Crisis: The Story-Making and Story-Telling of the Heroic Nurse

Abstract

Heroes come in many forms. We propose that through times of Covid-19 pandemic crisis, practices of story-making and story-telling have radically reconceived contemporary archetypes of heroism. Many health and social care professionals have been challenged in frontline practice within the pandemic. Our focus is on the casting of nurses into the limelight as everyday heroes and arbiters of hope within pandemic crisis. Of interest to question is how (auto)-biographical and narrative methodologies may revisit and reframe otherwise silent intricacies of these stories. Specifically, we make the case for the Biographical Narrative Interpretive Method (BNIM) as a productive methodological possibility for sociological questions such as this. As such, two exemplary conventions of the method are taken up within critical discussion, which are respectively: Generalising whilst particularising and conceptual attention to biography, narrative and interpretation.