Stories Of Change

Despite the amount of storytelling in social movements, little attention has been paid to narrative as a form of movement discourse or as a mode of social interaction. Stories of Change is a systematic study of narrative as well as a demonstration of the power of narrative analysis to illuminate many features of contemporary social movements. Davis includes a wide array of stories of change—stories of having been harmed or wronged, stories of conflict with unjust authorities, stories of liberation and empowerment, and stories of strategic success and failure. By showing how these stories are a powerful vehicle for producing, regulating, and diffusing shared meaning, the contributors explore movement stories, their functions, and the conditions under which they are created and performed. They show how narrative study can illuminate social movement emergence, recruitment, internal dynamics, and identity building.

Telling Stories to Change the World is a powerful collection of essays about community-based and interest-based projects where storytelling is used as a strategy for speaking out for justice. Contributors from locations across the globe—including Uganda, Darfur, China, Afghanistan, South Africa, New Orleans, and Chicago—describe grassroots projects in which communities use narrative as a way of exploring what a more just society might look like and what civic engagement means. These compelling accounts of resistance, hope, and vision showcase the power of the storytelling form to generate critique and collective action. Together, these projects demonstrate the contemporary power of stories to stimulate engagement, active citizenship, the pride of identity, and the humility of human connectedness.

Texas prosecutors are powerful: in cases where they seek capital punishment, the defendant is sentenced to death over ninety percent of the time. When management professor Hans Hansen joined Texas’s newly formed death penalty defense team to rethink their approach, they faced almost insurmountable odds. Yet while Hansen was working with the office, they won seventy of seventy-one cases by changing the narrative for death penalty defense. To date, they have succeeded in preventing well over one hundred executions—demonstrating the importance of changing the narrative to change our world. In this book, Hansen offers readers a powerful model for creating significant organizational, social, and institutional change. He unpacks the lessons of the fight to change capital punishment in Texas—juxtaposing life-and-death decisions with the efforts to achieve a cultural shift at Uber. Hansen reveals how narratives shape our everyday lives and how we can construct new narratives to enact positive change. This narrative change model can be used to transform corporate cultures, improve public services, encourage innovation, craft a brand, or even develop your own leadership. Narrative Change provides an unparalleled window into an innovative model of change while telling powerful stories of a fight against injustice. It reminds us that what matters most for any organization, community, or person is the story we tell about ourselves—and the most effective way to shake things up is by changing the story.

Identity and Social Change examines the thorny problem of modern identity. Trenchant critiques have come from identity politics, focusing on the construction of difference and the solidarity of minorities, and from academic deconstructions of modern subjectivity. This volume places identity in a broader sociological context of destabilizing and reintegrating forces. The contributors first explore identity in light of economic changes, consumerism, and globalization, then focus on the question of identity dissolution. Zygmunt Bauman examines the effects of consumerism and considers the constraints these place on the disadvantaged. Drawing together discourses of the body and globalization, David Harvey considers the growth of the wage labor system worldwide and its consequences for worker consciousness. Mike Featherstone outlines a rethinking of citizenship and identity formation in light of the realities of globalization and new information technologies. Part two opens with Robert Dunn's examination of cultural commodification and the attenuation of social relations. He argues that the media and marketplace are part of a general destabilization of identity formation. Kenneth Gergen maintains that proliferating communications technologies undermine the traditional conceptions of self and community and suggest the need for a new base for building the moral society. In the final chapter, Harvie Ferguson argues that despite the contemporary infatuation with irony, the decline of the notion of the self as an inner depth effectively severs the long connection between irony and identity.

This book considers the process of impact assessment and shows how and why it needs to be integrated into all stages of development programmes. In-depth case studies are included and show a variety of approaches.

In recent years, the world has seen unprecedented attention and political commitment to addressing malnutrition. Milestones such as the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement, the Lancet Maternal and Child Nutrition Series, and the Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2) have marked the rapid rise of nutrition on the global policy and research agenda. These developments reverse years of relative neglect for nutrition. Undernutrition is a global challenge with huge social and economic costs. It kills millions of young children annually, stunts growth, erodes child development, reduces the amount of schooling children attain, and increases the likelihood of their being poor as adults, if they survive. Stunting persists through a lifetime and beyond—underweight mothers are more likely to give birth to underweight children, perpetuating undernutrition across generations. Undernutrition reduces global gross domestic product by US$1.4–$2.1 trillion a year—the size of the total economy of Africa south of the Sahara.

This book presents stories of sustainability from communities in circumpolar regions as they grapple with environmental, economic and societal changes and challenges. Polar regions are changing rapidly. These changes will dramatically effect ecosystems, economy, people, communities and their interdependencies. Given this, the stories being told about lives and livelihood development are changing also. This book is the first of its kind to curate stories about opportunity and responsibility, tensions and contradictions, un/ethical action, resilience, adaptability and sustainability, all within the shifting geopolitics of the north. The book looks at change and sustainability through multidisciplinary and empirically based work, drawing on case studies from Norway, Sweden, Alaska, Canada, Finland and Northwest Russia, with a notable focus on indigenous peoples. Chapters touch on topics as wide ranging as reindeer herding, mental health, climate change, land-use conflicts and sustainable business. The volume asks whose voices are being heard, who benefits, how particular changes affect people’s sense of community and longstanding and cherished values plus livelihood practices and what are the environmental, economic and social impacts of contemporary and future oriented changes with regard to issues of sustainability? This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainability studies, sustainable development, environmental sociology, indigenous studies and environmental anthropology.

Eleven-year-old Tilly saved lives in Thailand by warning people that a tsunami was coming. Fifteen-year-old Malika fought against segregation in her Alabama town. Ten-year-old Jean-Dominic won a battle against pesticides—and the cancer they caused in his body. Six-year-old Ryan raised $800,000 to drill water wells in Africa. And twelve-year-old Haruka invented a new environmentally friendly way to scoop dog poop. With the right role models, any child can be a hero. Thirty true stories profile kids who used their heads, their hearts, their courage, and sometimes their stubbornness to help others and do extraordinary things. As young readers meet these boys and girls from around the world, they may wonder, “What kind of hero lives inside of me?”