Theory and language: locating agency between free will and discursive marionettes

This article outlines a research methodology that embraces individual narratives, yet recognizes that individual narratives are nested within a backdrop of broader social and cultural understandings of who we are and how we come to understand our world. This dialectical move requires an epistemological shift, focusing on the utility of reconceptualizing the 'environment', not only as the social, political, or economic conditions in society, but also as language. Reconceptualizing the environment as language makes it epistemologically possible to construct a bridge between varying levels of analysis, namely, between individual accounts and life stories and the cultural, social, and historical worlds from which those accounts emerge.