Stories Changing Lives: Narratives and Paths toward Social Change

Description

Personal narratives’ relation to social change is a frequent topic in the narrative-psychological and wider narrative social science literature. It is, indeed, a driving interest for many of those doing and reading narrative social research. This book aims to analyze not only the strong but also qualified significance of personal stories for progressive social change. It pursues this analysis by investigating particular aspects of narratives that narrative psychological research describes and explains and that seem to contribute importantly to narratives’ ability to make or catalyze social change. While narratives’ relation to social change is a common assumption and preoccupation of narrative researchers, fewer publications take this relationship as a central and explicit focus. This book aims to deepen narrative research’s engagement with progressive social change by addressing it consistently and from a number of different narrative-psychological research perspectives. The book acknowledges the strength and the importance of regressive and discriminatory narratives, narratives’ limitations, and research on these. However, it focuses on progressive social change possibilities, which seem especially important to consider at the current time. The book comprises three sections: Personal Stories and Social Change; The Language of Social Change Narratives; and Narrating Histories of the Past, Present, and Future. Throughout, the book foregrounds the multimodalities of narratives; the value of the multiplicity of stories, genres, positions, and intersectionalities; recent work on decolonialities; and the interdisciplinarity, historical reach, and transnationalism of narrative research. Cover Advance_Praise_for_Stories_Changing_Lives_Narratives_and_Paths_toward_Social_Change Title Pages Dedication Contents Contributors Introduction The_Personal_Is_PoliticalThe_Social_Justice_Functions_of_Stories The_Mystery_of_the_Dangerous_Book Using_Narrative_Analysis_to_Inform_About_Female_and_Male_Sexual_Victimization Changing_Lives_in_Unanticipated_WaysDisagreements_About_Racialized_Responsibilities_and_Ethical_Entanglements_in_Joint_Analysis_of_Narrative_Stories Hidden_From_ViewSome_Written_Accounts_of_Community_Activism The_Power_of_Bearing_WithnessIntergenerational_Storytelling_About_Racial_Violence_Healing_and_Resistance Living_Lives_of_Resistance_in_Multiple_RegistersDialogic_CoConstructions_Genocidal_Violence_and_Postgenocide_Transitional_Justice Narrative_SubjectsTense_Intension_and_Impossibilities_for_Change Cultural_Identities_and_Narratives_That_RaceRepresentations_and_Resistance_in_the_Context_of_a_South_African_University Index