Narrative analysis and practices of understanding social life

This article reviews current work on narrative analysis, considering possibilities for dialogue with different areas of social research. We situate narrative analysis in the field of contemporary Applied Linguistics, assuming its alignment with the constructionist perspective of qualitative research, and provide theoretical and methodological tools for a discursive-interactional approach. The article also presents two analyses resulting from field research in contexts marked by violence. The first one, realized with inmates in a prison complex, focuses on a narrative about participation in a drug trafficking ring, reflecting on how the stigma of criminality is reframed in interaction. The second one deals with the Child Protective Services of Rio de Janeiro, seeking to identify the understandings of the caseworkers about how they perform their tasks.