Alexandra Georgakopoulou’s research while affiliated with King's College London and other places

This collection showcases the diversity and disciplinary breadth of small stories research, highlighting the growing critical mass of scholarship on small stories and its reach beyond discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives. The volume both takes stock of and seeks to advance the development of small stories research by Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Michael Bamberg, as a counterpoint to conventional models in narrative studies, one which has accounted for "atypical" yet salient activities in everyday life, such as fragmentation and open-endedness, anchoring onto the present, and co-constructive dimensions in stories and identities. With data from different languages and contexts, emphasis is placed on the analytical aspects of the paradigm toward producing models for the analysis of structures, textual and interactional choices, and genres of small stories. Chapters on the role and commodification of small stories in digital environments reflect on the paradigm’s recent extension to the analysis of social media communication. This book will appeal to scholars interested in narrative inquiry and narrative analysis, in such fields as sociolinguistics, literary studies, communication studies, and biographical studies.

Small stories research has recently been extended as a paradigm for interrogating the current storytelling boom on social media, which includes the design of stories as specific features on a range of platforms. This algorithmic engineering of stories has led to the hugely popular feature of Stories on Snapchat and Instagram (also Facebook and Weibo). This article offers a methodology for studying such designed stories, underpinned by a technographic, corpus-assisted narrative analysis that tracks media affordances, including platforms’ directives to users for how to tell stories and what stories to tell, discourses about stories as platformed features, and communicative practices. The article specifically focuses on the directive of authenticity in the storytellers’ self-presentation with data from influencers’ Instagram Stories. Authenticity is attestable in the values underlying the design of stories, the affordances offered, and the storytelling practices that these commonly lead to. The article singles out three constituents of authenticity vis-à-vis each of the above: the design of stories as vehicles for “imperfect sharing” and an amateur aesthetic; visual and textual affordances for sharing life-in-the moment; and the deployment of specific genres of small stories that anchor the tellings onto the here and now. These enregister a type of teller who offers a believable account of themselves and their life through affording an eyewitnessing quality to their audiences and access to their everyday.

While 'identity' is a key concept in psychology and the social sciences, researchers have used and understood this concept in diverse and often contradictory ways. The Cambridge Handbook of Identity presents the lively, multidisciplinary field of identity research as working around three central themes: (i) difference and sameness between people; (ii) people's agency in the world; and (iii) how identities can change or remain stable over time. The chapters in this collection explore approaches behind these themes, followed by a close look at their methodological implications, while examples from a number of applied domains demonstrate how identity research follows concrete analytical procedures. Featuring an international team of contributors who enrich psychological research with historical, cultural, and political perspectives, the handbook also explores contemporary issues of identity politics, diversity, intersectionality, and inclusion. It is an essential resource for all scholars and students working on identity theory and research.

(Im)politeness and Moral Order in Online Interactions presents a timely response to the ‘moral turn’ in (im)politeness studies. This volume, presented by a roster of prominent figures in the field, documents and showcases the complexity of (im)politeness as social practice by focusing on the morality of (im)politeness in internet-mediated interactions. It includes, among others, studies on how the moral order is made explicit and salient in the production and perception of online impoliteness as social practice and how situated impoliteness can perform positive social and communicative functions. This volume confirms once again that (im)politeness can serve as a lens through which a variety of topics, genres, and contexts are intertwined together pointing to the very presence and existence of human beings, and is bound to be of interest to not only students and scholars engaged in the area of (im)politeness and internet pragmatics, but also to all those with a more general interest in the study of human (inter)actions in various situations and contexts. Originally published as special issue of Internet Pragmatics 1:2 (2018).

Storytelling in the Digital World explores new, emerging narrative practices as they are enacted on digital platforms such as Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Contributors’ online ethnographies investigate a wide range of themes including the nature of processes of transformation and recontextualization of offline events into digital narratives; the effects of digital anonymity and pseudonymity on narrative practices; the strategies through which virtual communities discursively work together to solidify and negotiate their sociocultural identities; the tensions between the affordances that characterize different online media and the communicative needs of users; the structures and modes in which virtual users construct and enact participatory practices in these environments; and the significance of different spatiotemporal dimensions in the encoding, sharing and appreciation of stories. More generally, the volume engages with some of the theoretical and methodological challenges that the growing presence of digital technologies and media poses to narrative analysis. Originally published as special issue of Narrative Inquiry 27:2 (2017)

Drawing on our previous work on the role of small stories in social-mediatized engagements with the Greek socio-economic crisis ( Georgakopoulou 2014 , 2015 ), in this article, we set out to shed light on impoliteness on social media through the lens of small stories research. We explore how Facebook and YouTube commenters “bash” political leaders and perceived political opponents and attribute blame to them for the crisis, through comments that attest to specific links of doing impoliteness with storying the crisis. Bashing has been previously related to the affective reactions of participants in online comments on current affairs. In this case, we bring to the fore a salient combination in our data of (mainly on-record) impoliteness strategies for bashing politicians with specific narrating positions in stories about the crisis: the narrator as sufferer, as witness of suffering, and as spokesperson for collective suffering. We argue that in all these cases, on-record impoliteness is normally placed at the end of a small story and presented as legitimated and justified by the preceding account. We conclude with the implications of the association of impoliteness targeting public figures with social-mediatized processes of personalizing and constructing expertise on the basis of experience on the one hand and, on the other hand, of jointly (re)asserting moral order in political affairs.

Sharing the moment live, a built-in logic of many social networking sites, is, I claim, an invitation for creating plots, which has led to systematic practices. I single out taking a narrative stance on Facebook as such a practice and show the interplay between key-norms and evolving media affordances for pre-selection of story ingredients, localization, visualization of the experience, and audience selection. These contribute to showing the moment as opposed to telling it, with selected friends serving as knowing co-narrators and with story-linking allowing for allusive, transmedia links. I review these practices in the context of increased story facilities that notably bring together several social media apps. I argue that although this curation promises a move beyond the moment, it ultimately serves to consolidate sharing-lives-in-the-moment. I reflect on the implications of this for the direction of travel in relation to stories on many social media platforms.

With chapters on social media, videogames and human-machine communication, Dialogue across Media provides a comprehensive overview of the role of dialogue in contemporary media. Drawing on the expertise of scholars and practitioners from multiple fields and disciplines, including screenwriters, literary critics, linguists and new media theorists, each chapter provides an in-depth analysis of dialogue in action. Together, these chapters demonstrate the unique energy and versatility that dialogic forms can offer artists and readers alike, and the special role that dialogue plays in helping us to understand the complexities and contradictions of human interaction. Dialogue across Media provides an essential resource for students and specialists in many fields concerned with dialogue, including language and literature, media and cultural studies, narratology and rhetoric.