Kearney, Celine (2015) Southern Celts: an investigation of how people with a Celtic/Gaelic background live out their traditions in Aotearoa New Zealand. PhD thesis, Victoria University.

Abstract

Southern Celts, a practise-led narrative inquiry (Arnold, 2007; Gray, 1997; Stewart, 2001), explores how people with Scottish and Irish backgrounds live out their cultural connections to the northern hemisphere homelands, while living in Aotearoa New Zealand. Using narrative as method and text (Clandinin, 2007; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; De Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2012; Reissman, 2008), the inquiry combines journalistic (Jeppesen & Hansen, 2011), autoethnographic (Bochner & Riggs, 2014; Chang, 2008; Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Holman-Jones, Adams & Ellis, 2013), and arts-based methods (Butler-Kisber, 2010; Chilton & Leavy, 2014; Leavy, 2009), with ethnographic and phenomenological insights (Maddison, 2008; Tedlock, 2000; Van Manen, 1990) to represent 25 of 40 interviews in an artefact, a book of interview narratives, intended to engage and inform a wide audience of general readers. These “lived and told stories” (Pinnegar & Danes, 2007) are situated in a visual metaphor from traditional Celtic art, that of spirals which envisage life moving across time and place. This movement is paralleled in the exegesis by the use of Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) three frames of narrative inquiry: time (past, present and future), place, and the intersection of the personal and the social, to view the narratives which record the lives of individuals, multi-generational families, communities geographic and cultural, past and present, and illustrate the discursive construction of culture/s and identity/ies (Fong & Chang, 2004; Norton, 1995, 2000, 2010; Weedon 1997, 2004).

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