Levinas, Storytelling and Anti-Storytelling explores the troubling nature of storytelling through a reading of the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas is a thinker who has a complex relationship with literature and with storytelling.

Natalie Davis is a quintessential storyteller in the way theorized by Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Michel de Certeau. Her work decenters history not simply because it grants agency and so historical visibility to those who have been hidden from history or left on its margins, but also because her stories reveal the complexities of human experience and so challenge the received categories with which we are accustomed to thinking about the world.

In this paper, we seek to explain the power of perspective taking in narrative discourse by turning to research on the oral foundations of storytelling in human communication and language. We argue that narratives function through a central process of alignment between the viewpoints of narrator, hearer/reader, and character and develop an analytical framework that is capable of generating general claims about the processes and outcomes of narrative discourse while flexibly accounting for the great linguistic variability both across and (...) within stories. The central propositions of this viewpoint alignment framework are that the distance between the viewpoints of participants in the narrative construal – narrator, character, reader – is dynamic and regulated by linguistic choices as well as contextual factors. Fundamentally, viewpoint alignment is grounded in oral narrative interaction and, from this conversation, transferred to the written narrative situation, varying between demonstration and invasion of the narrative subjects and guiding readers’ route of processing the narrative (experientialversusreflective). Our claim is that variations in viewpoint alignment are functional to the communicative context and intended outcomes of narratives. This is illustrated with the analysis of a corporate journalistic narrative that comprises both interactional and non-interactional aspects of storytelling. The concept of viewpoint alignment further explains the oral fundaments of narrative discourse in conversational storytelling and poses new questions on the relation between the dynamic processing of stories on the one hand and their static outcomes on the other. (shrink)

Cultural evolution researchers use transmission chain experiments to investigate which content is more likely to survive when transmitted from one individual to another. These experiments resemble oral storytelling, wherein individuals need to understand, memorize, and reproduce the content. However, prominent contemporary forms of cultural transmission—think an online sharing—only involve the willingness to transmit the content. Here I present two fully preregistered online experiments that explicitly investigated the differences between these two modalities of transmission. The first experiment (_N_ = 1,080 (...) participants) examined whether negative content, information eliciting disgust, and threat-related information were better transmitted than their neutral counterpart in a traditional transmission chain setup. The second experiment (_N_ = 1,200 participants) used the same material, but participants were asked whether or not they would share the content in two conditions: in a large anonymous social network or with their friends, in their favorite social network. Negative content was both better transmitted in transmission chain experiments and shared more than its neutral counterpart. Threat-related information was successful in transmission chain experiments but not when sharing, and finally, information eliciting disgust was not advantaged in either. Overall, the results present a composite picture, suggesting that the interactions between the specific content and the medium of transmission are important and, possibly, that content biases are stronger when memorization and reproduction are involved in the transmission—as in oral transmission—than when they are not—as in online sharing. Negative content seems to be reliably favored in both modalities of transmission. (shrink)

Bietti, Tilston and Bangerter take an evolutionary approach towards memory transmission and storytelling, arguing that storytelling plays a central role in the creation and transmission of cultural information. They suggest that storytelling is a vehicle to transmit survival‐related information that helps to avoid the costs involved in the first‐hand acquisition of that information and contributes to the maintenance of social bonds and group‐level cooperation. Furthermore, Bietti et al. argue that, going beyond storytelling’s individualist role of manipulating (...) the audience to enhance fitness of the narrator, that these adaptive functions of storytelling may well be assigned to other forms of language use besides narration (e.g., instructional discourse and argumentation). Based on this evidence, Bietti and colleagues claim that the specific adaptive function of storytelling lies in making sense of non‐routine, uncertain, or novel situations, thereby enabling collective sensemaking. (shrink)

Storytelling is getting increasing attention as one of the effective strategies for revitalizing the local festivals and even regional economies. Yet, the mechanisms through how storytelling helps the success of local festivals are still relatively less known. Using the data from 322 individuals who participated in local festivals using storytelling, our results showed that local festival storytelling is positively related to tourists’ revisit intention. Furthermore, the positive relationship between local festival storytelling and tourists’ revisit intention (...) was serially mediated by authenticity and positive emotion. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

Drug misuse is a complex social and health problem. People who use drugs have very specific profiles according to their life cycle and sociocultural circumstances. For this reason, contextualized approaches are needed in addiction interventions that take on board the particularities of consumption patterns and their circumstances. The storytelling technique as a narrative communication strategy can serve as the main methodological intervention component that enhances this contextualized approach.

The well-established techniques of the professional storyteller not only have the potential to model complex “truth” but also to dig deeply into that complexity, thereby perhaps getting closer to that truth. This applies not only to fiction, but also to medicine and even science. Compelling storytelling ability may have conferred an evolutionary survival advantage and, if so, is likely represented in the neural circuitry of the human brain. Functional imaging will likely point to a neuroanatomical basis for compelling (...) class='Hi'>storytelling ability; this will presumably reflect underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms. (shrink)

Qualitative research should strive for knowledge translation toward the goal of closing the gap between knowledge and practice. However, it is often a challenge in nursing to identify knowledge translation strategies able to illustrate the usefulness of qualitative results in any given context. This article defines storytelling and uses pragmatism to examine storytelling as a strategy to promote the knowledge translation of qualitative results. Pragmatism posits that usefulness is defined by the people affected by the problem and that (...) usefulness is promoted by modalities, like storytelling, that increase sensitivity to an experience. Indeed, stories have the power to give meaning to human behaviors and to trigger emotions, and in doing so bring many advantages. For example, by contextualizing research results and appealing to both the reason and the emotions of audiences, storytelling can help us grasp the usefulness of these research results. Various strategies exist to create stories that will produce an emotional experience capable of influencing readers’ or listeners’ actions. To illustrate the potential of storytelling as a knowledge translation strategy in health care, we will use our story of discovering this strategy during a qualitative study in a nursing home as an example. (shrink)

This study tests an instructional model designed to empower students in an early childhood classroom as emerging digital storytellers. Educators can use digital storytelling to support students’ learning by encouraging them to organize and express their ideas and knowledge in an individual and meaningful way while developing voice and facility in child-computer interactions. This work also helps develop traditional communication skills, fosters collaboration, and strengthens emergent literacy practices. Students may develop enhanced communications skills by learning to organize their ideas, (...) ask questions, express opinions, and construct narratives as they interact with others and computers in the creation of digital stories. The “Emerging Digital Storytellers” instructional model focuses on social-emotional development and finding student voice through writing and digital content construction in the early childhood educational context. (shrink)

The November–December issue of the Hastings Center Report features a set of essays on the ethics of writing stories of patient care. The Report regularly features such stories, but some ways of telling them would be plainly unacceptable, and some in bioethics have suggested that the bar for acceptability is very high. Tod Chambers takes that position in this essay set. Drawing on the work of the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, he proposes that case studies should be “polyphonic”—meaning that they (...) contain “a diversity of voices that are unmediated and distinct.” In effect, he calls for a kind of coauthoring of stories about patients. In a second essay, Arthur Frank also calls for including the patient’s voice, but he builds on Bakhtin’s call for “dialogic” storytelling, in which the author seeks to represent the characters in the story as having their own voices and their own lives: “they can talk back.” A third essay, by Philip Rosoff, is concerned about the problem of harm and patient anonymity, which in the contemporary media environment has become harder to address. (shrink)

Adolescents are often an overlooked clinical population. Among school-based practitioners, there is a natural inclination to focus the delivery of mental health services, assessment measures, and intervention plans on younger children, and there is a strong research base to support these programs. On the other hand, the waiting rooms of most practitioners in private practice are filled with young and middle-age adults, couples, or families with young children. Because most therapists do not specialize in working with teens, who might make (...) up only a small portion of their overall caseload, there is a need for high quality, easily implemented activities to help engage with adolescent clients.This book provides an overview of the principles of therapeutic storytelling, developmental issues of adolescents and young adulthood, and their strengths-based model, before moving into a series of chapters devoted to specific issues. Commonly encountered topics such as sexuality, parent & peer relationships, substance abuse, violence & gangs, bereavement, and cultural and religious issues are covered within the chapters. (shrink)

This article examines the emphasis on facts and data in public discourse, and the belief that they provide a certainty necessary for public judgment and collective action. The heart of this belief is what I call the “myth of the Absolute,” which is the belief that by basing our judgment and actions on an Absolute we can avoid errors and mistakes. Myths of the Absolute can help us deal with wicked problems such as climate change, but they also have a (...) downside. This article explores the experience behind these myths, to better understand how they describe and mediate our experiences of uncertainty, then relates these myths to debates about climate change. I conclude by describing how to engage these myths in a way that promotes better public discourse—and thus better public judgment and collective action—by telling these stories in such a way that we poke and prod wherever the story is not. (shrink)

Storytelling is one of the favorite means the Apostle Paul frequently employs in his letters to enrich the spiritual formation of his converts. Philippians demonstrates this well. In this letter Paul presents not just stories of his own personal experiences–-whether in the past or present. He also talks about Christ Jesus, about his coworkers, about the Philippian brothers and sisters, and about the false teachers. The story of Christ in particular provides a theological foundation for all kinds of formation (...) experiences taking place in the individual, ecclesial, and societal contexts. In this paper, I attempt to demonstrate how Paul interweaves this metastory with other stories for the multilayered spiritual formation of Christ-believers in Philippi and suggest implications for pastoral ministry today. (shrink)

Rereading a canonic book in medical humanities can generate an immediate sense of how much has changed in the larger conversations still circulating around the issues that book broached in significant ways. The appearance in 2013 of the second edition of Arthur Frank's The Wounded Storyteller, first published in 1995, prompted me to review what has happened in the field of body studies in the intervening decades. Some developments point to the continuing importance of Frank's book, and others raise productive (...) questions about its limitations. (shrink)

Storytelling is a mode of communication in human interaction and is pervasive in everyday life. Storytelling in marketing is also a managerial application as a marketing strategy. Researchers of consumer psychology and marketing have devoted great efforts to developing theories and conducting empirical studies on this approach. However, in addition to narrative theories, many researchers are mainly concerned about the effect of telling a good brand story and its applications, such as advertising design and presentation. However, for those (...) products that usually lack branding, such as agricultural products, knowledge remains scarce about the relative impact of storytelling in marketing. Few researchers have explicitly developed a valid tool for measuring the effect of storytelling in marketing. To aid storytelling research in consumer psychology, this article conceptualized a construct of the effectiveness of storytelling in agricultural marketing and developed a measure with further validation. This scale consisted of 13 items with four subscales: narrative processing, affect, brand attitude, and purchase intention. The findings of this study strongly supported a structural model with strong order among the four dimensions and good model fit. A discussion of the results and the theoretical and practical implications for consumer psychology and marketing practice are also addressed. (shrink)

Collective memories are multiple discursive practices, in which social representations about a common past are used to build and maintain cohesion and identity of groups socio-historically located at a socio-culturally determined moment and to project future in frameworks of rights and dignity. It is understood that the memories articulated to the Colombian armed conflict are diverse: different stories of violence, oppression and resistance of peoples, communities and groups are identified and made explicit. Thirty media narratives distributed in the ElTiempo.com Special (...) “Thirty encounters with peace” (2017) comprise the universe of research. The sample is made up of seven narratives that propose the sense of testimony. The selected format is storytelling, which is built in the special edition of the newspaper as a communication proposal for the reconstruction of the social fabric, within the year after the signing of the Peace Agreement between the National Government and the FARC-EP (post-agreement). The research is nucleated on situations of rights violations linked to the conflict, and the proposals derived from these narratives, as regards the overcoming of the exercises of violence to which they refer. The analysis is assumed from the principles of Multimodal and Multimedia Critical Discourse Studies (MMCDS). The forms of representation in the discourses, their multimodal articulations and the multimedia implications in the production of meanings are articulated; the final aim is to derive sociopolitical consequences of the discursive proposal, constructed and socialized in the narratives of the special edition of the newspaper. (shrink)

Scholarly convention holds that logos and muthos are in Plato’s mind fundamentally opposed, the former being the medium of philosophy and the latter of poetry. I argue that muthos in the broad sense of story or narrative in fact plays an indispensable philosophical role in the Republic. In particular, any account of the nature and power of justice and injustice must begin with powers of the soul that can come to light only through the telling and interpretation of stories. This (...) is implicit in Glaucon’s Gygean tale. Read in connection with the earlier tale of Gyges in Herodotus, Glaucon’s muthos shows itself to be a story about storytelling and interpretation, knowledge of self and others, and the discovery of the roots of justice and injustice. (shrink)

In At the Will of the Body , Arthur Frank told the story of his own illnesses, heart attack and cancer. That book ended by describing the existence of a "remission society," whose members all live with some form of illness or disability. The Wounded Storyteller is their collective portrait. Ill people are more than victims of disease or patients of medicine they are wounded storytellers. People tell stories to make sense of their suffering when they turn their diseases into (...) stories, they find healing. Drawing on the work of authors such as Oliver Sacks, Anatole Broyard, Norman Cousins, and Audre Lorde, as well as from people he met during the years he spent among different illness groups, Frank recounts a stirring collection of illness stories, ranging from the well-known--Gilda Radner's battle with ovarian cancer--to the private testimonials of people with cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, and disabilties. Their stories are more than accounts of personal suffering: they abound with moral choices and point to a social ethic. Frank identifies three basic narratives of illness in restitution, chaos, and quest. Restitution narratives anticipate getting well again and give prominence to the technology of cure. In chaos narratives, illness seems to stretch on forever, with no respite or redeeming insights. Quest narratives are about finding that insight as illness is transformed into a means for the ill person to become someone new. (shrink)

The capacity for telling stories is necessary for being moral agents. The minimal necessary features for moral agency involve the capacities necessary for articulation, and articulation is a key part of what we learn and practice through telling stories. Developing the interdependence between agency and articulation, this article offers an account of both categorical moral agency and a degree-of-sophistication account of agency. Central to these are three factors: a moral agent has (1) the capacity to represent, (2) a sense of (...) self (including a sense of self in relation to others), and (3) the normative capacity to make judgments marked by authority. Featuring an analysis of Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” the article argues that Morrison portrays a moral sensibility emerging in the telling of the story, even in the absence of moral judgments within the text. Understanding the value of stories, fictional or factual, requires less attention to the moral value of the actions depicted within the story and more attention to the perspective and point of view developed in the narrative voice. Of most significance is the articulative process of the artist, the storyteller, the novelist, modeled for the reader, who must engage with that developing perspective. (shrink)

Narrative medicine explores the stories that patients tell; this paper, conversely, looks at some of the stories that patients are told. The paper starts by examining the ‘story’ told by the Shambaa people of Tanzania to explain the bubonic plague and contrasts this with the stories told by Ghanaian communities to explain lymphatic filariasis. By harnessing insights from memory studies, these stories’ memorability is claimed to be due to their use mnemonic devices woven into stories. The paper suggests that stories (...) can be unpatronising, informative, and appropriate vehicles for communicating medical information to all age groups across all cultures. (shrink)

This article focuses on how biblical content and spiritualities can be communicated, probably more effectively, to (late) preschool children by using information technology, which has already been implemented successfully for years in secular and religious environments. Because children enjoy listening to stories, watching cartoons and playing every day, the approach in this research will be to propose a particular construct to communicate biblical content to preschool children. This construct comprises interactive storytelling, cartoon animation and educational gaming, which constitute a (...) trilogy for teaching biblical content and principles to preschool children. This should be done interactively. These three approaches have become fundamental designs and presentations in child education. Churches, Christian nurseries and other Christian educators, in general, are encouraged to develop computer programs according to the construct and strategy proposed in this article for the teaching of the Gospel to late preschool children. The approach in this article will be, firstly, to examine and explore the religious orientation of preschool children and, secondly, to validate and propose how computer technology can be implemented to communicate the biblical content to preschool children via the trilogy of interactive storytelling, cartoon animation and educational gaming in an uninterrupted experience. Contribution: This article argues that the use of interactive storytelling, cartoon animation and educational gaming should be used consecutively and uninterruptedly to communicate the biblical message to preschool children. This is probably the most effective way to keep the attention of these children and to affect their conduct. (shrink)

I propose that we can explain the contribution of mental time travel to agency through understanding it as a specific instance of our more general capacity for narrative understanding. Narrative understanding involves the experience of a pre-reflective and embodied sense of self, which co-emerges with our emotional involvement with a sequence of events. Narrative understanding of a sequence of events also requires a ‘recombinable system’, that is, the ability to combine parts to make myriad sequences. Mental time travel shares these (...) two characteristics: it involves an embodied sense of self and the ability to create novel scenarios. What is unique about mental time travel is that it is a story explicitly about our selves, and it involves metarepresentation. Agency is enabled by narrative understanding when we are able to put our current situation into a larger narrative context, whereby some possible actions, but not others, make sense. However, new features of agency are enabled when we understand stories that are explicitly about our selves: we gain the ability to plan and act on plans. (shrink)

Digital storytelling has become a popular method for curating community, organisational, and individual narratives. Since its beginnings over 20 years ago, projects have sprung up across the globe, where authentic voice is found in the narration of lived experiences. Contributing to a Collective Intelligence for the Common Good, the authors of this paper ask how shared stories can bring impetus to community groups to help identify what they seek to change, and how digital storytelling can be effectively implemented (...) in community partnership projects to enable authentic voices to be carried to other stakeholders in society. The Community Digital Storytelling method is introduced as a means for addressing community-of-place issues. There are five stages to this method: preparation, story telling, story digitisation, digital story sense-making, and digital story sharing. Additionally, a Storytelling Cycle of Trust framework is proposed. We identify four trust dimensions as being imperative foundations in implementing community digital media interventions for the common good: legitimacy, authenticity, synergy, and commons. This framework is concerned with increasing the impact that everyday stories can have on society; it is an engine driving prolonged storytelling. From this perspective, we consider the ability to scale up the scope and benefit of stories in civic contexts. To illustrate this framework, we use experiences from the CDST workshop in northern Britain and compare this with a social innovation project in the southern Netherlands. (shrink)

This paper’s main contention is that some basically methodological developments in science which are apparently distant and unrelated can be seen as part of a sequential story. Focusing on general inferential and epistemological matters, the paper links occurrences separated by both in time and space, by formal and representational issues rather than social or disciplinary links. It focuses on a few limited aspects of several cognitive practices in medical and biological contexts separated by geography, disciplines and decades, but connected by (...) long term transdisciplinary representational and inferential structures and constraints. The paper intends to show a given set of knowledge claims based on organizing statistically empirical data can be seen to have been underpinned by a previous, more familiar, and probably more natural, narrative handling of similar evidence. To achieve that this paper moves from medicine in France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to the second half of the nineteenth century in England among gentleman naturalists, following its subject: the shift from narrative depiction of hereditary transmission of physical peculiarities to posterior statistical articulations of the same phenomena. Some early defenders of heredity as an important causal presence in the understanding of life adopted singular narratives, in the form of case stories from medical and natural history traditions, to flesh out a special kind of causality peculiar to heredity. This work tries to reconstruct historically the rationale that drove the use of such narratives. It then shows that when this rationale was methodologically challenged, its basic narrative and probabilistic underpinings were transferred to the statistical quantificational tools that took their place. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Storytelling and Narrative Knowing:An Examination of the Epistemic Benefits of Well-Told StoriesSarah E. Worth (bio)IntroductionPeople love to tell stories. When something scary, or funny, or out of the ordinary happens, we cannot wait to tell others about it. If it was really funny, etc., we tell the story repeatedly, embellishing as we see fit, shortening or lengthening it as the circumstances prescribe. When people are bad storytellers we (...) tend not to pay as close attention to their stories; our minds drift, and we hope for a swift conclusion. We tend not to remember those stories as well as the ones that were carefully constructed and skillfully delivered. Storytelling is one of our primary forms of communication with other people. Narrativity is the principle way that human beings order their experience in time. It is also one of the primary ways that humans make coherent sense out of seemingly unrelated sequences of events. Thus, an account of how this ordering works is essential to understanding one of the many ways of knowing used by humans, one that has been widely unaccounted for, I believe. What I will argue in this article is that reading, telling, and hearing well-constructed narratives are not just idle pastimes that we have created for entertainment purposes or even as a mere means of communication. Rather, there are epistemological benefits to reading, hearing, and telling well-constructed narratives. In particular, by practicing what I call narrative reasoning, we develop this skill, just as by practicing discursive reasoning we develop discursive reasoning skills. In turn, we develop an enhanced reasoning ability that arises from narrative reasoning and narrative meaning construction. Ultimately, I will argue that those who are able to develop the capacity to reason narratively will be able to have a more comprehensive understanding of the human experience. [End Page 42]Defining NarrativeTo begin, I will go into some detail about what I mean when I talk about narratives since the reasoning skills that will ultimately come from engaging with narratives will be related to the way that we come to understand and make sense of them. Since I do not intend to posit a theory of narrative, I will talk about what constitutes narrativity and what sort of features contribute to increasing the narrativity of a story. To begin, narrative is generally the representation of an event or sequence of events. It is closely tied to description, but it goes beyond description. "My cat has fleas" is a description of a state of affairs. "My cat was bitten by a flea" is a narrative about my cat, which includes a description. Some theorists (such as Barthes and Rimmon-Kenan) argue that a narrative must consist of more than one event or state of affairs in order to be minimally considered a narrative. For my purposes, the change in states of affairs from one to another will be essential for understanding the cognitive aspects that can be gained from engaging with narrative. Although I do not advocate a minimal requirement for something to be considered a narrative, at least two, if not multiple, states of affairs increase narrativity significantly. Narratives also have a unified subject and some relatively easily understood temporal structure. Although many narratives do not order all of their events sequentially, good narratives will have a temporal order that can be gleaned by its reader.1An annal might be something that is temporally ordered and likely have more than two events or states of affairs, and for this reason it might be put into a category of "story form." The primary principle of organization of an annal, however, is merely a temporal list of events. It cannot count as a full-fledged narrative since it may be a temporal list of events that has no unified subject. For example,A: "The Space shuttle Challenger explodes in 1988, the Berlin wall comes down in 1989, there is a massacre at Srebenica, Bosnia in 1995."B: "The Space Shuttle Columbia blows up upon reentry to Earth; the Space Shuttle Challenger explodes upon take off."A is a temporally ordered list of events and is an annal; B, however, is... (shrink)

Este artigo científico tem como objetivo explicar como Hannah Arendt tentou compreender os eventos de sua época, a ruptura do fio da tradição entre o passado e o futuro. Assim, segundo Hannah Arendt, uma das abordagens que ela utilizou para compreender foi contar "histórias" e narrar fatos, se distanciando dos moldes clássicos e propondo uma metodologia de um modo não-convencional. A partir disso, Arendt empreende uma tentativa hermenêutica em refletir sobre a experiência dos homens, utilizando narrativas capazes de nos mostrar (...) como os homens foram afetados pelo mundo e como o mundo foi influenciado por essas pessoas. (shrink)

Storytelling is a central aspect of everyday interaction, frequently observed in the routines of conversational exchanges. It involves managing multiple turns where utterances are linked to form a coherent sequence. This connectedness allows recipients to interpret a series of turns as a unified whole. However, recipients may sometimes question this coherence. Such challenges can disrupt the progressivity of storytelling, obliging tellers to resume their narratives. Following the analytic traditions of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (CA), this study examines how (...) topical coherence is questioned and managed in storytelling sequences when factual details and narrative content are problematized. Although CA has explored interactive storytelling, less attention has been given to the work of topical maintenance. Analyzing 27 storytelling sessions with second-language tellers, this paper reveals how recipient challenges can interrupt the story’s anticipated trajectory, and how tellers restore coherence through interactive negotiation. The findings illustrate that coherence maintenance involves more than language adjustments; it reveals the methodical nature of commonsense reasoning during conversational storytelling. (shrink)

Science and technology have changed all aspects of our lives, including the mode of narration, from traditional stories to data stories. Storytellers have been integrating visualizations into their narratives. From the case studies of some artworks and our students' works to visualization research, we have found distinct genres of narrative visualization and the education method for university students. We describe the differences between these artworks, together with interactivity and information transmission. Some small experiments and some examples of students' works will (...) be shown to explore the visual narrative. We suggest new design strategies including how to make invisible things visible. (shrink)

The master narrative of Apartheid South Africa created a specific identity for white boys and men and, together with this identity, a very particular role and place within the South African context. This identity was exemplified in the men who were conscripted into the military from 1967 until 1994, and who participated in operations on the border regions of Namibia and Angola as well as within local townships in the war of liberation against apartheid and minority rule. Many veterans have (...) been left grappling not only with the traumas associated with combat but also with the loss of their identities as war heroes in a country under changed political control. As a result, many of their personal stories and experiences of combat have been silenced by society at large and also, to varying degrees, within their own families, the Church, and among the younger generation who have grown up under a different dispensation. The conflict between vacillating narratives of villains who fought on the wrong side of history and victims of a closed socialisation system has supported the identity struggle faced by many veterans today. Against this backstory, this article explores the effects of storytelling as a trauma release using a narrative approach.Contribution: This article offers a contribution to the use of storytelling in pastoral conversations as a trauma release for untold stories. This insight links to the focus and scope of the journal as a pastoral narrative approach has been used under the umbrella of Practical Theology. (shrink)

Building on the storytelling, political storytelling, and religious storytelling literatures, I examined the role religious stories play in the formation of revolutionary convictions. This study’s primary sources of data are volumes I, II, and III of The Gospel in Solentiname, a historical record of religious discussions that took place in an isolated campesino community at a seminary-like setting under a growing national revolutionary scenario in 1970s Nicaragua. My analysis of these discussions reveals that religious discourse based on (...) stories of prophecy, Christian virtue, miracles, and social challenges to revolutionary action allowed story-users to assert, explore, and promote models of action and moral orientation consistent with the making of revolution. (shrink)

Relating Narratives is a major new work by the philosopher and feminist thinker Adriana Cavarero. First published in Italian to widespread acclaim, Relating Narratives is a fascinating and challenging new account of the relationship between selfhood and narration. Drawing a diverse array of thinkers from both the philosophical and the literary tradition, from Sophocles and Homer to Hannah Arendt, Karen Blixen, Walter Benjamin and Borges, Adriana Cadarero's theory of the `narratable self' shows how narrative models in philosophy and literature can (...) open new ways of thinking about formation of human identities. By showing how each human being has a unique story that can be told about them, Adriana Cavarero inaugurates an important shift in thinking about subjectivity and identity which relies not upon categorical or discursive norms, but rather seeks to account for `who' each one of us uniquely is. (shrink)

The task of speaking the truth is an infinite labor: to respect it in its complexity is an obligation that no power can afford to shortchange, unless it would impose the silence of slavery (Foucault 1989, p. 308).... the attainment of truth is the outcome of the development of complex and elaborate methods of searching, methods that... in many respects go against the human grain, so they are adopted only after long discipline in a school of hard knocks (Dewey [1925] (...) 1988, pp. 234-35). (shrink)

A contribution to management philosophy is made here by the development of a postcolonial-storytelling theory, created by drawing together parallel developments in quantum physics and tribal peoples’ storytelling. We argue that these developments resituate the hegemonic relationship of discursive representationalism over material storytelling practices. Implications are two-fold. First, this dissolves inherent dualisms presumed in the concept of interactionamong entities like actor–structure, subject–object and discursive–nondiscursive in favour of a profound ontology of entanglement and intra-action of materiality and discourse, (...) where storytelling is a domain of this discourse. Second, postcolonial phenomena are understood as results of entangled genealogies in which plural voices are present. This implies an understanding and awareness of the intra-action of imperial narratives and material storytelling and antenarrative resistance, and thus the resistance and contestation to imperial and colonising monologic narratives of spatial and temporal alignment. (shrink)

Everyday teaching involves emotional and relational irrationalities, and these aspects of pedagogical sensitivity and sense are critical for beginning teachers as they develop their practice. The complex elements of what it means to teach are often impossible to grasp from an instrumental approach to teacher education, which emphasizes subject matter knowledge and practical behavioral know-how. Increased educational standardisation and a new teacher training paradigm in Sweden have resulted in positioning future teachers as responsible only for communicating official school knowledge and (...) assessing their learning process. This narrowed understanding of teachers’ practice requires another perspective of teaching to be articulated. This article explores the internships of beginning teachers from a phenomenological perspective, drawing on storytelling in teacher education as a way to reveal student teachers’ lived experiences. These beginning teachers are learning professional ways of being, which reveal the complexities of teaching, and their accounts have the potential to counter the dominance of neoliberalism in education. (shrink)

Beginning with the idea that digital storytelling can be a useful tool for moral sensemaking and development for undergraduates, the paper reviews the process of digital storytelling and details how the lead author incorporated a digital storytelling project into a course on leadership ethics. The paper provides a theoretical basis for the project in Gentile’s (2010, 2011) work on Giving Voice to Values, and in perspectives from aesthetics, phenomenology, and personal narrative. This is followed by two autoethnographic (...) narratives of the experience: one from the course designer and professor who discusses his motivation for the project and the moral dilemma he faced in assigning it, and another from one of the students in the class who investigates the challenges she faced in engaging a deeply-felt moral dilemma in a public way. Finally, the paper discusses the implications for this approach with respect to leadership development and research. (shrink)

In contemporary democracies, the image that political leaders project is of central importance to their electoral appeal, however, studies of image projection have mainly been based on textual messages, undermining often visual content such as photos, memes and postcards. This study explores populist leaders image projection through visuals on Facebook in a cross-national context, with the aim of verifying if politicians use images to promote their political action or if they instead implement more complex strategies of self-branding and personalisation. The (...) analysis focuses on the election campaign period for the 2019 European elections and proposes a comparison between four leaders that joined the European Parliament’s Group of Identity and Democracy, namely Matteo Salvini for Italy, Heinz-Christian Strache for Austria, Marine Le Pen for France and Alice Weidel for Germany. According to our analysis, important differences emerge in the use that leaders make of the images disseminated on Facebook. Some of them, in fact, disseminate almost exclusively images that are strictly related to their electoral campaign, while others seek a true identification with their voters, following the pattern of intimization. (shrink)