A Culturally Grounded Approach to Nepalese Grandmothers’ Caring Work: Developing Dohori as a Narrative Methodology

Abstract

The social sciences have a growing seismic shift from prioritising positivist, objective, and generalizable knowledge to accepting subjective qualitative knowledge. This has given rise to various art-based methods that leverage multi-sensory storytelling/narrative. To further advance innovation in qualitative narrative methods, I will present the Dohori narrative, an indigenous Nepali poetic storytelling method for narrative research with older grandmothers doing care work. I start by presenting a discourse on Dohori to understand better the history and traditional and cultural underpinning of the method. Provided a brief background to Nepali grandmother immigrants and then discussed the promise of Dohori as a form of culturally relevant narrative interviewing with this population. To demonstrate this, I provide an examplar case study adopting a conventional narrative interview and then Dohori to show the differences. The study showed that Dohori has the potential to elicit stories, emotions, and tacit knowledge and access other areas of consciousness that traditional narrative interviews are not privy to. I conclude by arguing for the adoption of Dohori and similar dialogical poetic methods for research with indigenous populations, especially minority groups with limited voice.