Amidst the Russian aggression against Ukraine, peace and stability within the geostrategic region of the Western Balkans have come under the spotlight. While some have called for the “denazification” of the Balkans, others have firmly supported Ukraine. Among the six non-European Union states in the Balkans, the Republic of Serbia is perceived as the most visible and longstanding supporter, akin to a brotherly state, of the Russian Federation. This article aims to investigate President Vučić’s narrative in his Addresses to the Nation concerning the war in Ukraine. The objective is to gain a better understanding of Serbia’s foreign policy positioning with regard to the conflict in Ukraine. Anchored in the Regional Security Complex theory, the article examines President Vučić’s Addresses to the Nation from February 2022 to February 2023, revealing Serbia’s consistent insistence on independent decision-making in foreign policy matters, including in the context of the war in Ukraine. These Addresses to the Nation further reinforce the notion of Serbia’s multi-vector foreign policy, while also utilizing the war in Ukraine to reignite public discussions on the importance of Kosovo to Serbia’s foreign policy.

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted concern about the wellbeing of older people, however, there have also been accounts of increased sense of community in response to the disruption of established routines. To explore how older people experienced lockdown in Aotearoa/New Zealand, we analysed 635 written comments on the 2020 wave of the Health, Work and Retirement longitudinal survey of people aged 55–85 years. Using narrative genre analysis, we discuss two narratives of lockdown: a narrative of lockdown as ‘idyllic’ and a ‘dystopian’ narrative of distrust. Using the idyllic narrative, people described pleasant activities and linked these stories to earlier times when community life was less time-pressured and people were more connected to one another. The dystopian narrative was used to describe politicians and the media as untrustworthy and to depict new vulnerabilities created by the rules of lockdown. These narrative genres provide different positions for older people. In the idyllic narrative, older people are treasured and supported by younger community members, whereas in the dystopian narrative older people feel abandoned and manipulated. These genres draw on possible late-life futures that are familiar to older people: either treasured or discarded. Identifying these narrative genres reveals the different vulnerabilities older people experience. This information can be used to support older people to experience security and to flourish in uncertain times.

This Article seeks to synthesize academic research on home healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic to understand how their workplace challenges were magnified. Crisis communication researchers note that a crisis provides both opportunities and threats for growth. This Article argues that many of the issues that have impacted home healthcare workers have always been present, but the pandemic allows policy makers the ability to see them clearly because the pandemic brought a spotlight to the issues that home healthcare workers face on a daily basis. Consequently, the author employed a narrative analysis of the literature concerning home healthcare workers during the pandemic to understand how the pandemic exacerbated structural issues that led to an increase in mental health difficulties for this population. By understanding how the pandemic exacerbated mental health issues, policy makers can craft solutions that can withstand the next public health crisis which will undoubtedly impact the most disenfranchised.

The number of older self-funders in England is growing in the context of tight eligibility criteria and fixed financial thresholds to access statutory adult social care. Older people who self-fund their social care fall largely under the radar of statutory services and of research. Our study aimed to listen closely to the stories that older people tell about finding, managing and paying for their care. We interviewed 65 older people living in the community who were funding all or some of their social care. This paper focuses on narrative analysis of selected transcripts from these interviews. It sheds light on how older people represent their experiences of self-funding and what underpins these constructions. A key finding is that the disjunctions within older people's accounts between the care they want and the care they receive reflect wider political and structural tensions in the funding and delivery of care. Older self-funders temper their expectations in light of their experience of shortfalls in the system. This enables them to adjust to the deficiencies but obscures and perpetuates poor care. The discussion considers the findings in relation to: the fundamental incompatability of body labour and commodified care; the shared precarity of older people and care workers; and the individualisation of risks that makes older people and their carers responsible for making a failing care system ‘work’. Our analysis adds to the case for major reform of adult social care, including a revaluing of the status and employment conditions of front-line care workers.

In the 2016 United States presidential election, candidates Trump and Clinton embraced the demands of certain social groups and in this way, politically and symbolically, chose to “own” the social identities of these groups. Trump decided to attack the Latino community, while Clinton positioned herself as an advocate for this community. This article presents the results of a social narrative analysis of the values that Clinton and her team used to reach out to Latino communities during the 2016 election. The Spanish-language messages produced by the Democratic campaign compose the sample, which includes blog posts, Facebook posts, tweets, and television ads. Clinton’s campaign produced narratives about who the “good Latinos” are and, consequently, the “good immigrants” while at the same time promoting values such as globalism, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism. Paradoxically, these narratives and values failed to portray Latinos’ diversity because they left out this community’s historical, social, and cultural complexity.

At the societal and policy level, delaying retirement is generally agreed upon to solve the problem of the increasing proportion of older workers in Sweden, as in many other countries. At the same time, two co-existing narratives that create legitimacy for early versus delayed retirement were found in our study, among both societal- and organisational-level actors. Older workers are viewed as either representatives of productive ageing and a solution to labour shortage problems, or as a barrier to recruiting younger, more promising employees with new skills. Through inductive qualitative analysis, this study shows in what way human resources departments are taking part in the institutional work of maintaining retirement-timing narratives in Swedish workplaces. The existing general organisational narrative of ‘the business case’ is used to mute discussion about delaying the retirement age, except for a select few. Their maintenance of this narrative is supported by the way in which the societal-level narratives target the individual, often backgrounding the role of employers.

Animal therapy has been shown to have both physiological and psychological benefits for older people, including improvements in outlook and social interaction. Volunteer-led animal visitation programmes are common within residential aged care facilities in New Zealand. Visits by animals and handlers are intended to improve the quality of life of people in residential care. Very little research has been conducted on the informal animal visitation programmes typical in care facilities in New Zealand. This project examined the experience of animal therapy in two residential aged care homes that receive animal visits from an animal welfare organisation. In-depth interviews were conducted with seven older people about their experiences of the programme and analysed using narrative analysis. Three overarching narratives were identified: animal therapy as a fleeting pleasure, residential care as a sad environment, and identity outside residential care as highly valued. Older people in residential care do value animal therapy, but it is narrated as a fleeting pleasure, rather than having a long-lasting or far-reaching impact on the daily experience of residential care. In some ways, the structure of the animal therapy programme may underscore the challenges to everyday autonomy and identity experienced in residential aged care. These findings can be used to develop animal visiting programmes which recognise the importance of a valued social identity in later life.

Coming to terms with negative life experiences is a way of reaching ego-integrity in mature age, a development task belonging to the last phase of Erikson's theory of psycho-social development. This study explores fundamental tensions between negative life experiences and ego-integrity through the lens of narrative enactment, i.e. by looking at how nadir experiences are constructed in the narratives of study participants. From 166 potential participants, we selected life-story narratives of 42 highly ego-integrated older adults based on a self-rated ego-integrity scale. Data were analysed using the narrative approach, where ageing is perceived as autobiographical work and narrativity is viewed as enactment of the constitutive event of ‘trouble’. Our results suggest a subtle classification of five distinct types of narrative enactment: ‘it turned out well’, ‘I managed to cope with it’, ‘validation with respect to future development’, ‘acquisition of a new attitude’ and, finally, ‘justification of a hard decision’. Each of these enactment types is defined by a particular configuration of narrative categories: agency in a negative event, agency in a positive resolution, reflexivity and construction of moral identity. Our results highlight the meaning of processing and reconstruction of negative life experiences and the various narrative pathways this process can follow in highly ego-integrated older adults.

Background. Epigenetics, which is just beginning to attract public attention and policy discussion, challenges conventional understanding of gene-environment interaction and intergenerational inheritance and perhaps much more besides.

Question. Does epigenetics challenge modern political ideologies?

Methods. I analyzed the narratives of obesity and epigenetics recently published in the more liberal New York Times and the more conservative Wall Street Journal. For the years 2010 through 2014, 50 articles on obesity and 29 articles on epigenetics were identified, and elements in their causal narratives were quantitatively analyzed using a well described narrative policy framework.

Findings. The narratives on obesity aligned with the two newspapers’ reputed ideologies. However, the narratives on epigenetics aligned with neither ideology but freely mixed liberal and conservative elements.

Discussion. This small study may serve as a starting point for broader studies of epigenetics as it comes to affect political ideologies and, in turn, public policies. The narrative mix reported here could yet prove vulnerable to ideological capture, or, more optimistically, could portend the emergence of a “third-way” narrative using epigenetics to question atomistic individualism and allowing for less divisiveness in public-health domains such as obesity.

Falls among community-dwelling seniors constitute a major public health concern because of the potential morbidity and mortality associated with the fall. This study examined the informal care networks accessed by Canadian seniors who had visited the Emergency Department as a result of a fall, and considered the implications of the processes of asking for and receiving help on the senior's identity. Four themes were identified. The first was valuing independence. The remaining three themes concerned threats to the participants' identities linked to the need to ask for or receive help from family and friends. They were: becoming indebted, feeling devalued and becoming a burden to others. Seniors were noted to excuse family members from the expectation of helping because of work and family commitments, and illness. Participants described a mutually beneficial relationship with friends wherein both parties valued their independence and provided assistance to the other when needed. Their comments suggested that assistance was viewed as a good to be traded among peers. Our findings indicate that seniors value their independence and may not seek help even when it appears to be available, if asking threatens valued identities. Health and social care practitioners and policy makers responsible for planning and delivery of services should take this into account in order to ensure the best possible care for injured community-dwelling seniors.

This paper examines life-long singlehood and its ramifications in old age among women and men in Ireland. During the life-time of the 26 research participants, Ireland shifted from the Western European marriage pattern, characterised by high rates of singlehood, late marriage and high fertility, to declining prevalence of singlehood, higher marriage rates and lower fertility. In-depth interviews were analysed with the help of narrative analysis and grounded theory methods. We identified two main pathways into singlehood that had a long-term impact on the participants' lives. The women and men who had chosen singlehood associated this status with independence, self-fulfilment and autonomy throughout their lifecourse, including in old age. In contrast, older adults who had been constrained in their choice of marital status due to poverty, care work, family roles and cultural norms, expressed regret and dissatisfaction with their single status. In the latter group, the ramifications of the inability to actualise the roles of a spouse, parent and grandparent were particularly apposite in later life when many felt the absence of close ties and expressed loneliness. For some of the older adults who had been constrained in their choice of marital status in earlier life, the possibility of entering into a romantic relationship seemed more feasible in later life. How older adults interpret their pathway into the single status in earlier life impacts on relationship formation and life satisfaction in older age.

This paper reports a qualitative study that used narrative analysis to explore how social support helps many armed-services veterans cope with traumatic memories. The analysis was carried out on two levels, that of narrative form (level of narrative coherence), argued to be indicative of reconciliation, and narrative content (themes of social support), which allowed exploration of the types of social support experienced by veterans with coherent, reconciled and incoherent narratives. Ten British male Second World War veterans were interviewed regarding their war experiences, presence of traumatic memories, and experiences of social support from comrades, family and society. Different patterns of support were qualitatively related to coherent, reconciled and incoherent narratives. Veterans with coherent narratives were no less likely to have experienced traumatic events than those with reconciled or incoherent narratives, but they reported more positive perceptions of their war experience and of the war's outcomes, more positive experiences of communication with family in later life, and more positive perceptions of societal opinion. The results are discussed in relation to how veterans can be supported by family and friends to reconcile their traumatic memories, thus to lessen the burden in later life when vital support resources may be unavailable.

On the basis of data collected during a year-long study of a Congressional campaign in California in the mid-1990s, this article uses semantic, pragmatic, and narrative analysis to show how candidates for political office construct and defend the coherence of their actions, including their choice to run for office. First, semantic and pragmatic analysis is used to discuss two charges of lack of coherence against one candidate. Second, three discursive strategies used by candidates for building existential coherence are identified: (i) constructing a narrative of belonging; (ii) casting the present as a natural extension of the past; and (iii) exposing potential contradictions in order to show how to solve them. After examining the extent to which each strategy is common across candidates and situations, it is shown that candidates who frame themselves as “independent” tend to use these strategies more than those who choose to identify more closely with a party's platform and ideology.The research on which this article is based was in part supported by two small grants from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1996–1997 and 1997–1998, and by a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship supplemented by funds from UCLA during the 1999–2000 academic year. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Discourse Lab in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA on 2 June 2004. I thank my colleagues and students for their generous feedback and comments. Among my research assistants over the years, special thanks go to Jeff Storey, Sarah Meacham, and Jennifer Reynolds for their help in transcribing the talk in dozens of videotapes I recorded. I am also indebted to Anjali Browning for her careful reading of the first draft of this article. Some of the data and ideas presented in this article were first introduced in a number of seminars, workshops, and conferences at the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” the University of Florence, and the University of California at Santa Barbara. I would like to thank the participants in those events for their engagement with this material and their comments. I am also grateful to Jane Hill, former editor of Language in Society, and three anonymous reviewers for specific suggestions on how to improve the organization and content of the article. A number of people made the project on which this article is based possible and a rewarding experience. First and foremost, I am deeply indebted to the late Walter Capps and to his wife Lois Capps – now Rep. Lois Capps (D-California) – and to their extended family for letting me enter their home and giving me access to their lives as they experienced an extraordinary series of events. I am also very grateful to Walter's brother, Doug Capps, who was Walter's campaign manager in 1996 and has continued over the years to be my liaison with the rest of the Capps family. Others members of the Capps-for-Congress campaign staff I could rely on for information include Bryant Wieneke, always most generous with his time, Steve Boyd, Thu Fong, and Lindsey Capps. After Walter Capps's death, I benefited from conversations with Capps's colleague and friend Richard Hecht, professor and former chair of the Department of Religious Studies at UCSB. I am also grateful to the 1995–1996 Independent candidate Steven Wheeler, who, in June 1998, consented to meet with me and to being interviewed. This project was born out of conversations with Walter Capps's daughter Lisa while she was a graduate student at UCLA. She remained a strong supporter of my efforts to capture her father's adventure in politics after she accepted a position in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and even during the last year of her life, as she struggled with cancer. This article is dedicated to her memory.