Making Trouble Tellable: Negotiating Accountability in Immigrants' Narratives to Majority‐Group Recipients

This article examines how immigrants' experiences of problematic interactions with majority‐group members are crafted into tellable narratives when shared with a majority‐group recipient. Drawing on twenty‐four interviews between immigrants and a Finnish majority‐group interviewer, we analyse immigrants' narratives of problematic interactions with Finns using Bamberg's (1997, 2004) narrative positioning framework. We argue that when recipients share a cultural group membership with story antagonists, making narratives tellable requires the collaborative negotiation of accountability between narrators and recipients. This involves establishing the narrative as legitimate, the narrator as reasonable, and, importantly, the recipient as unimplicated in wrongdoing. Our results show how these accountability demands are managed through responsibility attribution and narrative positioning. Responsibility for problematic interactions was attributed to situational influences, practices of particular social categories, or broader societal patterns. Through this process, narrators were positioned as reasonable and competent in the majority culture, while the recipient was positioned as empathetic and unimplicated in the problematic conduct. While this accountability work rendered problematic experiences tellable and preserved rapport, it also redirected attention away from their seriousness and social significance. The findings demonstrate how accountability work makes problematic experiences tellable across cultural groups while simultaneously limiting opportunities to recognize and challenge the broader inequalities implicated in them.