Douglas Schrock (Florida State University), Janice McCabe (Dartmouth College), and Christian Vaccaro (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) won the 2019 David R. Maines Narrative Research Award for their work, “Narrative Manhood Acts: Batterer Intervention Program Graduates' Tragic Relationships.” The award was presented by the Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research.
In this article, the authors analyze how 20 graduates of a Batterer Intervention Program constructed autobiographical stories about their relationships with women they assaulted. They focus on the presentation of gendered selves via narrative manhood acts, which they define as self-narratives that signify membership in the category “man” and the possession of a masculine self. Their study demonstrates the usefulness of narrative analysis for research on batterers' accounts and manhood acts, and also shows how oppositional genre-making can be a method to resist organizational narratives.
The Maines Award is an annual competition, open to both students and faculty who submit papers that (1) interpret or address Maines' pragmatist approaches, (2) apply Maines' narrative concepts to a social/communication event, (3) develop aspects of Maines' scholarship in new directions, or (4) integrate the humanistic development of narrative and Maines' pragmatist conceptual and theoretical direction.