Storying Relationships

Storying Relationships explores the sexual lives of young British Muslims in their own words and through their own stories. It finds engaging and surprising stories in a variety of settings: when young people are chatting with their friends; conversing more formally within families and communities; scribbling in their diaries; and writing blogs, poems and books to share or publish. These stories challenge stereotypes about Muslims, who are frequently portrayed as unhappy in love and sexually different. The young people who emerge in this book, contradicting racist and Islamophobic stereotypes, are assertive and creative, finding and making their own ways in matters of the body and the heart. Their stories – about single life, meeting and dating, pressure and expectations, sex, love, marriage and dreams – are at once specific to the young British Muslims who tell them, and resonant reflections of human experience.

This book is situated in the simultaneous thinking (theory) and doing (action) of posthumanist performativity and new materialist methodologies to bring forth a multitude of stories that demonstrate co-constituted and co-implicated worldmaking practices. It is written in response to the fact that our Earth is at a critical juncture. As atmospheric temperatures rise and cast unprecedented and wide-spread social and ecological crises across the planet, social and ecological injustices and threats cannot be separated from globalising, neoliberal, capitalist, and colonial discourses that proliferate through anthropocentric and humancentric logics. Manifesting in binary classifications that position the human as separate from the Earth, and dominant categories of the human in hierarchies of power, such logics homogenise and institutionalise the field of environmental education and result in an over-emphasis on instrumentalist, technicist, and mechanistic teaching and learning practices. Exploring the affects emerging within, and between, an assemblage comprising Researcher/Teacher/Environmental Education Worldings, this book seeks to understand how the researcher makes sense of herself with/in the broader ecologies of the world; collaborative processes with an elementary-school teacher in Saskatchewan, Canada, as actualised through four co-created and co-implemented multisensory researcher/teacher enactments (Mindful Walking, Mapping Worlds, Eco-art Installation, and Photographic Encounters); and how the researcher/teacher organises themselves with Land-based pedagogies, environmental education curriculum policy, and wider discourses of Western education. This book does not propose a better way of teaching and learning in environmental education. Rather, showing how difference between categories is relationally bound, this book offers a conceptual (re)storying of human/Earth relationships in environmental education for social and ecological justice in these times of the Anthropocene.

Storying Relationships explores the sexual lives of young British Muslims in their own words and through their own stories. It finds engaging and surprising stories in a variety of settings: when young people are chatting with their friends; conversing more formally within families and communities; scribbling in their diaries; and writing blogs, poems and books to share or publish. These stories are interesting to read and to hear, but they also have wider significance because they challenge stereotypes about Muslims, who are portrayed as unhappy in love and sexually different, even dangerous. The young people who emerge in this book, contradicting racist and Islamophobic stereotypes, are assertive and creative, finding and making their own ways in matters of the body and the heart. Their stories – about single life, meeting and dating, pressure and expectations, sex, love, marriage and dreams – are at once specific to the young British Muslims who tell them, and resonant reflections of human experience.

In this groundbreaking work, Robert Sternberg opens the book of love and shows you how to discover your own story--and how to read your relationships in a whole new light. What draws us so strongly to some people and repels us from others? What makes some relationships work so smoothly and others burst into flames? Sternberg gives us new answers to these questions by showing that the kind of relationship we create depends on the kind of love stories we carry inside us. Drawing on extensive research and fascinating examples of real couples, Sternberg identifies 26 types of love story--including the fantasy story, the business story, the collector story, the horror story, and many others--each with its distinctive advantages and pitfalls, and many of which are clashingly incompatible. These are the largely unconscious preconceptions that guide our romantic choices, and it is only by becoming aware of the kind of story we have about love that we gain the freedom to create more fulfilling and lasting relationships. As long as we remain oblivious to the role our stories play, we are likely to repeat the same mistakes again and again. But the enlivening good news this book brings us is that though our stories drive us, we can revise them and learn to choose partners whose stories are more compatible with our own. Quizzes in each chapter help you to see which stories you identify with most strongly and which apply to your partner. Are you a traveler, a gardener, a teacher, or something else entirely? Love is a Story shows you how to find out.

This book takes readers on a journey that is part storytelling, part academic analysis, and part spiritual exploration. The authors identify the climate emergency as a breakdown in spiritual consciousness which fails to recognize our deep interconnection with Nature. To meet this crisis of spirit, Storying Our Relationship with Nature serves as a guide for transforming ourselves and our lives through story and highlights the importance of social and emotional aspects of environmental education. The authors introduce the philosophical and historical foundations of our objectification of Nature as a commodity and describe the effect this view has on our lives. They detail a path forward through storytelling, contemplative practice, Eastern philosophy, and the transformative power of education. Throughout the book, reflective activities provide a space for the reader to personalize their learning, leading the reader towards the book's central message: once we learn to consciously re-story our relationship with Nature, we can transform our cultural narrative of fatalism and greed into one of love, determination, and possibility, helping us move towards a sustainable future.

Aspiring historian Maxine is researching Canadian social policy when she discovers the story of Everett Klippert - the last Canadian man jailed simply for being gay. Maxine becomes fascinated with Everett's case and with discovering the man beyond the headlines, a beloved Calgary bus driver on the downtown route who took care to brighten the day of his passengers, who played on the family baseball team and was everyone's favorite uncle, and who, when he was confronted by police about his sexuality, refused to lie. Inspired and captivated, Maxine interviews people who knew Everett Klippert. She connects with a senior at a local assisted living facility she knows only as Handsome, one of Klippert's lovers and perhaps the only person who can truly illuminate the past. At the same time, Maxine is navigating her own new relationship with Métis comedian Tonya. This absorbing, heartwarming play weaves together past and present in a multi-generational exploration of queer love. It tells the near-forgotten story of one of Canada's quiet heroes and reminds us all that the past must be remembered as we work together for a better future.

THE POWER OF STORIES So many misunderstandings, hurts, and little fault lines that may grow into bond-shattering earthquakes can be minimized or even fully eliminated if only we practice more mindful, compassionate, and open communication—first with ourselves and then with our partners. You can change your story. You can repair your relationship. You can change your brain at a neurological level by rerouting elemental neural pathways that are associated with those stories that you made up to explain and face reality when you were younger. --Dr. Linda Miles Dr. Miles’ new book "Change Your Story, Change Your Brain for Better Relationships" combines essays and mindfulness practices to strengthen your relationships and provide healing for yourself and those close to you. Reader reviews for Change Your Story Change Your Brain “Dr. Linda Miles provides great insights and strategies to deal with loss and pain through the practice of mindfulness. Anyone who is struggling in life or dealing with a major life transition will benefit from her book.” “This is no self-improvement book. Change Your Story, Change Your Brain is a book that will change your life” “If you are going through some pain and trials right now this book is for you.” “...I love the way she draws from literature, philosophy and other professional sources to drive home her points. “Change Your Story: Change Your Brain" is a fantastic read. You'll thoroughly enjoy it.” Dr. Linda Miles has a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology and has worked as a psychotherapist and author for 35 years. Dr. Miles is personable and accessible in her books and articles and is passionate about how mindfulness and loving kindness can positively change your brain, your chemistry and your life. Her first book, The New Marriage, written with her husband, Robert Miles, M.D., won a literary prize as a finalist for Forward Non-fiction book of the year. She has published several books on relationships and mindfulness as well as articles in the Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Reuters and Miami Herald. She has been a guest expert on numerous national TV shows including CNN, Fox News, ABC, and NBC. For more information about Dr. Miles and mindfulness: www.DrLindaMiles.com and Facebook Mindfulness Rewrites

This book is an exercise in a thoroughgoing narrative theology. The social and legal validation of same-sex relationships in the West over the last two decades has presented an immense challenge to the church insofar as it seeks to remain faithful to Scripture. But it is not an isolated ethical problem. It is just one element—albeit a very important one—in the much broader, long-term overhaul and reorientation of Western culture after the collapse of the Christian consensus. The forces of history that are driving this transformation, however, have also alerted us to the historical perspectives that constrained biblical thought. Andrew Perriman suggests that Paul’s argument about same-sex behavior, perhaps more clearly than any other issue, highlights the narrative shape of the mission of the early church in the Greek world. By the same token, we must ask how that storyline has been refracted across the boundary of modernity, and how it now shapes the mission of the church as it adapts to its marginalized position in an aggressively secular world.