Disability Life-History Narrative Method

The disability life-history narrative method collects and analyzes disabled people's life stories as a way of understanding disability from the inside, attending not only to what people say happened but to how they tell it. Articulated for the field by Brett Smith and Andrew Sparkes in their 2008 Disability & Society article on narrative's contribution to disability studies, the approach distinguishes the storyteller stance (working with stories, telling alongside) from the story-analyst stance (analyzing stories as objects), and offers structural, performative, and creative-analytic ways to interpret narratives. Its distinctive contribution is to treat stories as both data about lives and as the very means through which disabled identity and meaning are made.