Caring narrative research with local communities in the Arctic

Narrative research and care have long been mobilised to engage with communities facing profound social and environmental change. While these literatures offer rich conceptual and methodological resources, questions remain about how care is enacted in narrative research in practice, particularly under conditions of epistemic and power asymmetry. This paper reflects on how care came to matter in narrative research within the SeMPER-Arctic project, an interdisciplinary collaboration exploring how Greenlandic communities experience and make sense of upheaval and resilience. It presents our reflections on what it meant to engage in narrative research with care, and on the demands this placed on our ways of listening, interpreting and positioning ourselves in relation to communities, knowledge and power. Drawing on ongoing reflexive work embedded in the project, we articulate three interrelated dimensions of care: (i) care as embracing the fleeting nature of narratives; (ii) care as post-abyssal thinking; and (iii) care as letting go of control by re-anchoring research in the present , informed by ideas such as ‘staying with the trouble’ and ‘living futures’. These dimensions do not constitute a prescriptive model, but offer a situated account of how care was translated into practice, questioned and negotiated over time, in dialogue with existing literature on narrative research, care, reflexivity and decolonial approaches. Through these reflections, we show how reflexivity became central to our caring narrative approach. While grounded in the SeMPER-Arctic context, this paper may resonate with scholars engaged in projects with communities, particularly in settings marked by social or environmental transformation, contested values and complexity.