Storytelling Global Reflections On Narrative

This book focuses on storytelling and human life by exploring the possibilities of narrative approaches across numerous disciplines and in diverse contexts; stories are humanity’s oldest way of making meaning of our past, present and future.

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2013. The Many Facets of Storytelling: Global Reflections on Narrative Complexity explores a range of issues around narratives and their uses in various contexts and aspects of life. The premise for this volume is that human beings are storytelling creatures and stories or narratives are part of our daily lives and have been for centuries. From this starting point, the authors in this volume offer their explorations, reflections and findings from research and practice across disciplines and continents. Certain functions of stories are uncovered - education, social change and identity formation, for example. Some specific uses of narratives are investigated, such as in research methodology and representations in the media. Finally, other narratives are offered for themselves, as performances and (auto)biographical reflections. The chapters in this volume illustrate the many meanings of storytelling, and thus account for the layers of complexity that are inevitable when we discuss narratives.

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2016. Story can have a power and presence that stretches beyond the vast, unspeakable boundaries of time and space; and yet story can also have a delicate impermanence that lasts no longer than a moment before it flashes back into the void. Some stories can bring people together; other stories can tear entire civilisations apart. Stories express and enliven experience; stories project and describe the desires and anxieties of existence. Stories can be narrated through written word and physical gesture, through graphic illustration and musical orchestration, through the spatial dynamics of architecture and the abstract poetics of conjecture. For these and myriad other reasons, storytelling and narrative are central to humanity, and the study of these practices is central to an understanding of what it means to be human. In this volume, the many narrative dimensions, media, and critical approaches to storytelling are explored with the common intention of comprehending and appreciating the global role that story plays in the articulation of human experience.

This book pursues an interdisciplinary approach to open a discourse on innovative methodologies and practices associated with narrative and metaphor. Scholars from diverse fields in the humanities and social sciences report on how they use narrative and/or metaphor in their scholarship/research to arrive at new ways of seeing, thinking about and acting in the world. The book provides a range of methodological chapters for academics and practitioners alike. Each chapter discusses various aspects of the author’s transformative methodologies and practices and how they contribute to the lives of others in their field. In this regard, the authors address traditional disciplines such as history and geography, as well as professional practices such as counselling, teaching and community work.

Artful Collaborative Inquiry comprises essays created collectively by a group of scholars and artists, the majority of whom have several decades of experience of working together. The book challenges commonly-held, individualistic beliefs about ownership, authorship and scholarly and artistic ethics and practices. The essays exemplify the entangled kinds of scholarly and artistic works that emerge in a post-human world, where humans, other species, environments, things and other matters, all matter and are of equal concern in the conduct of ethical artful scholarship. Situated at the (messy) crossroads where contemporary scholarship and artistic practice converge, the seamless mo(ve)ment and interplay between text and image make up the main body of the work in this book. The chapters combine the playful use and merging of time, space and place, researcher and researched, to give a unique exemplar of research and creativity in the rapidly emerging field of collaborative scholarship. It will be of particular interest to creative and qualitative scholars wishing to conduct more artful research, and artists engaging with scholarship.

Since the beginning of human history, stories have helped people make sense of their lives and their world. Today, an understanding of storytelling is invaluable as we seek to orient ourselves within a flood of raw information and an unprecedented variety of supposedly true accounts. In Stories Make the World, award-winning screenwriter Stephen Most offers a captivating, refreshingly heartfelt exploration of how documentary filmmakers and other storytellers come to understand their subjects and cast light on the world through their art. Drawing on the author’s decades of experience behind the scenes of television and film documentaries, this is an indispensable account of the principles and paradoxes that attend the quest to represent reality truthfully.

Crafting Collaborative Research Methodologies demonstrates a number of collaborative, visual and narrative methods that explore the promises and the ethical, relational complexities inherent in collaborative research. It engages with both the potentials and complexities of doing collaborative analysis and offers a medley of methods for analysis. These methods revolve around co-produced texts from Peru, Denmark and Bolivia, and involve images, memory work and practical approaches to intersectionality thinking. Through detailed explorations of the complex interweaving of issues of meaning-making, difference and the co-production of knowledges, dynamics of social exclusion and segregation become visible in the nexus between evocation and interpretation. Christina Hee Pedersen takes up the poststructuralist challenge of including researcher subjectivity as part of the analysis and, through a lively writing style, the reader is invited to engage in this analysis of the performativity of selves. This book can inspire analytical thinking for researchers and advanced students interested in expanding the rich dialogues among feminists doing poststructuralist and interdisciplinary inquiry, and for all students of qualitative and collaborative methodologies.