Abstract
Narratives represent storied ways of knowing and communicating. Therefore, storytelling, framing and narrative analyses have always been a key feature in media and communication research. In this paper, an innovative approach to narrative inquiries is introduced to capture reflections on individual experiences of sustainability over time. Storytelling is perceived as an act of problematization and, at the same time, as method of analysis. Using Rory’s Story Cubes® (dices with pictograms), we stimulated 35 interviewees from various cultural backgrounds (Asian, European, Anglo-American) to story life events that they relate to sustainability and put it into order and meaning. Our analysis and evaluation of the interviews focused on the story as a whole, which was then linked to the individual biographical background to understand motives and the moral frame(work) for problematizing (un)sustainable behavior. In particular, we focus on problematization as core process of storytelling and complement existing approaches coming from actor-network theory and Foucault’s discourse analysis with Entman’s concept of framing. In this paper, this innovative form of a narrative inquiry is put up for discussion for environmental communication research in order to create a better understanding of individual perceptions of sustainability and sustainability related issues.
Highlights
Over the last two decades, sustainability has become a mainstream phenomenon and a normative framework on an individual and organizational level as well as in public discourses
The fairly new debate on sustainability communication draws upon existing academic research as well as upon transdisciplinary scholarship on environmental, risk and science communication
The techniques of qualitative content analysis were used as a basis to analyze the 35 interviews, which were conducted by using Rory’s Story Cubes®, to find meaning and to make sense of the sustainability-related stories or life events
Summary
Over the last two decades, sustainability has become a mainstream phenomenon and a normative framework on an individual and organizational level as well as in public discourses. At least in western countries, there is a common sense that the idea of sustainability is related to the acceptance of the Sustainability Development Goals of the United Nations as part of the Agenda 2013 [1] and has to be negotiated in public deliberation. Sustainability includes normative ideas: Meeting global needs, responsibility for the future, protection of the environment, and the need for participation and engagement—as well as communication [4]. With a constitutive interpretation of human action and communication as core dynamic of social behavior, sustainability communication covers the relationship between humans and nature, meaning their environment as well as related social discourses [5,6]). Communication plays a crucial role for sustainable development, even if the unsettled nature of sustainability and the normativity of related decisions are seen by some as a limitation on efforts to achieve meaningful sustainability [7] (pp. 30–32) and sustainability is described as “wicked problem” [8] (p. 4434) [9] in a complex societal debate associated with sustainability
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