Narrating participation and power relations in a social inclusion program

•In this practice-based research, participants positioned as subjects of policies uses narrative to evaluate those policies.•Research design elicited first person and third person narratives varying expressive positions in the professional context.•Narrative character analysis indicated how participants shared diverse knowledge and experience across narrative genres.•First person narratives tended to conform to professional norms; third person narratives expressed alternative insights.•Implications suggest how research and practice can apply narrative as flexible cultural tool to mediate diverse perspectives.

This article examines how professionals with much at stake in challenging circumstances use diverse narrative genres to evaluate policies designed for them. Character mapping analyses of 156 narratives by 78 adults participating in the Roma Pedagogical Assistants reform program in Serbia used diverse narrative genres to make sense of the reform and their participation in it. Character mapping analyses indicated that participants conformed to professional dimensions of the program with relatively constrained character expressions in autobiographical narratives in contrast to their expansive and psychologically rich expressions in third person narratives of a Roma child. Results indicate that narrating is a flexible cultural tool for mediating individual–societal relations, with implications for research and practice design.