Narrative Reconfiguration Across Contexts: A Comparative Analytic Autoethnographic Study of Self-Authored and Media-Mediated Disability Narratives

This study examines how the same disability-related experiences are narratively reconfigured across different communicative contexts. Narratives of illness and disability are often understood as expressions of personal experience, yet less attention has been paid to how such experiences are reorganized when they move across self-authored and media-mediated forms of narration. Using a comparative analytic autoethnographic narrative analysis, this article analyzes six self-authored blog posts and one television segment that refer to the same set of experiences. The findings show that the narratives are systematically reconfigured through clarification, simplification, linearization, structural silence, and the structuring of support relations. These transformations do not indicate discrepancies in the underlying experience; rather, they reveal how disability experience is made communicable under different social, institutional, and media conditions. The study argues that narratability is not simply inherent in experience itself but is shaped by the contexts in which experience is selected, organized, and presented. It also shows that certain aspects of disability experience may remain partially non-narratable when narratives are adapted to more publicly intelligible forms.