My research centers around enabling higher education students to craft their personal/educational narratives into stories of perserverance, overcoming obstacles, and contributions to society. (This builds on research in both psychology that demonstrates the importance of a positive "narrative thread" to a person's mental well-being, and educational research showing that students from less privelaged backgrounds often have a deficit minded narrative to tell). 

The research will consist of students crafting their narratives in small groups and alone, polishing it through rounds of peer and instructor feedback, and then presenting their narrative to the class (in a format that they choose). For the purposes of this discussion, let's assume a student chooses to write her narrative and read it aloud to the class. We then can imagine a student standing at the front of the class with a handful of papers, reading. We all know what this looks like because it is a common classroom "trope."

As such, the narrator at the front of the class, giving us a "report" she has prepared for an assignment has meaning. 

However, the assumption most would make upon seeing this image (or imaging a similiar one from this trope) is that the assignment is external to the individual. In this case, however, the assignment will very much be internal to the individual (inolving they/him/her). Thus, this exercise already jumbles the normal expectations associated with the reference points of space, image, object, body, and text. (The space is used for the personal instead of the communal, for instance, etc.). 

The text itself must then be translated into speech and understood as a reference to the personal. The narrative must be understood to be associated with the speaker herself.

Without these trasnpositional understandings, the act of the narrative text, speech, image, body, space, and object would all be indecirpherable. Thus, reference is essential in this exercise, even more so as the exercise itself is transgressional to the normal operations of the traditional classroom.