Abstract:
This article explores a small story narrative, the community of practice and the orientations of
a group of ‘born-free’ participants as these interact with the material discourses of the Gautrain
station in the business district of Sandton in the Gauteng, South Africa. ‘Born frees’ are young
people born after the end of Apartheid. They are of interest in social studies because of the
enormous demographic, familial and educational changes they represent. The discussion of
the article concerns, firstly, the genre of account, and the relation between story and trajectory.
Trajectory and the spatial coordinates of the story are introduced to understand what Sandton
and its material discourses represent for these participants. The Gautrain station is then
approached through geosemiotics. Thirdly, the negotiation of social space implicit in the coconstruction
of the small story is analysed through axes of intersubjectivity applied to
participant orientation and narrativisation. Methodologically, this article follows a new
narrative turn that sees narrative as practice. It seeks to introduce materiality to analysis. As
storytelling, from this perspective, is embedded within physically co-present texts, signs and
representations, the methodology was to map samples of participant talk against a site. This
allowed participant stories, isolated using qualitative audio annotation, to be situated in the
exact place of their telling, and for analysis to include artefacts of the semiotic landscape,
which is to say textual or visual ensembles such as notices, posters and billboards that are
displayed in urban public space and that represent a circulation of wider discourses.
