Abstract
Keywords: Narrative Inquiry, Storytelling, In-depth Interview, Oral History, Iran, Isfahan
Zayandehroud is a river located in Isfahan, Iran. The river has been the reason for the city to form and since more than a thousand years the river and the city have not been separable in the minds of people, they define themselves and their relation to the city through the river. There are significant bridges over the river, everyone has memories around the river and the bridges. In the past few years, reoccurring droughts and mismanagements have caused this river to dry out, leaving a dry river-bed looking like a scar in the middle of the city.
This paper is part of an ongoing collaborative project and is focused on telling the story of this dying river using narrative inquiry method, with an ethnographic point of view. In order to do so, memories of the citizenry have been collected through social media as well as some in-depth interviews with elderlies.
These narratives are used to form a coherent narrative about the dying river, showing how it used to be seen in the eyes of the people and how it is being seen now. The narrative itself is accompanied by an analysis, firstly, explaining the method used and how it helped this research and secondly, what the outcomes of such method in this case study are.