Alteration and Non-Belonging As Forms of Agency in Societies of Conflict

The biographical narrative approach allows listening to the individual’s story in social contexts. Especially in conflicted societies where conflict groups are strongly referring to antagonistic versions of history, biographical narratives might challenge the exclusive national collective storytelling.

Israel is an example for a conflicted society and my paper focuses specifically on Arab and Jewish Israelis working in the field of Coexistence Education. Coexistence Education is neither part of an official political agenda of the state nor part of a public discourse on education in Israel. Choosing to work in this field indicates a certain position as ‘not established’. In fact, in this field of work we can observe negotiations of conflicting positions such as history and cooperative actions of ‘not established’ members of society. Forms of agency in this conflicted field are closely connected to the individual’s life story and they represent a tension between individual positioning and social expectations.

The analysis of life stories of Arab and Jewish Israelis results in positionings of alteration and of non-belonging. Alteration is presented as an individual position towards processes of collective storytelling as well as towards social norms and familial settings.

Non-belonging implies an individual arrangement in a social context to establish new forms of political empowerment.

Theses positionings create an alternative community where cooperation and friendship are coping strategies of outsider positions. Therefore, outsider groups construct new strategies of action as a form of group agency.

I would like to discuss these two forms of positionings of outsiders by raising the question in how far they can be reconstructed as learning processes in the course of a life story and also, in how far these outsider positions interrelate with established positions in society or alike with other outsider groups.