Causal Narratives Research Articles

Causal Stories and the Role of Worldviews in Analysing Responses to Sorcery Accusations and Related Violence

This paper uses the concept of causal stories to explore how death, sickness and misfortune lead to accusations of sorcery or witchcraft. Based on empirical research in Papua New Guinea, we propose a new analytical framework that shows how negative events may trigger particular narratives about the use of the supernatural by individuals and groups. These narratives then direct considerations about the cause of the misfortune, the agent who can heal it, and the appropriate response from those affected by the misfortune. We also categorise the factors that attract people towards magical causal narratives or towards competing non-magical causal narratives. We situate our analysis within a context of worldview pluralism, where individuals possess multiple worldviews, such as a magical worldview or a scientific worldview. We argue that causal stories operate to activate the dominance of one worldview or a combination of worldviews in given circumstances. Our theoretical contribution may be extended to discrimination and violence against those suffering from health-related stigma, as this too gives rise to competing causal stories that either take hold or are ignored depending upon diverse factors.

Historical Narratives and Understanding

This paper defends the view that narratives that bring understanding of the past need not be exhaustively analyzable as explanatory inferences, nor as causal narratives. Instead of treating historical narrative as explanations, I argue that understanding of history can be analyzed by the general epistemic criteria of understanding. I explore one such criterion, which is of chief importance for good historical narratives: potential inferential power. As a corollary, I dispute one of the distinctive features of narratives described by some philosophers: the non-aggregativity of narrative histories. Instead, I propose that historical narratives modestly aggregate and this aggregation depends on the success of the colligatory concepts they offer.

Angus Fletcher. <em>Wonderworks. The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature</em>

Angus Fletcher. <em>Wonderworks. The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature</em>

Systemic evaluation of community environmental management programmes

Community environmental management (CEM) involves the facilitation of community partnerships, local dialogue, consultation and participative decision-making. This is increasingly seen as a solution to some of the more complex environmental issues faced by regulatory authorities. Anecdotal evidence suggests that CEM programmes have much potential, but the evaluation of them is problematic, and there is a need for more robust evidence of their effectiveness. This paper reports on the development of a new CEM evaluation approach (inspired by soft systems methodology, developmental work research and systemic intervention), which was trialled with a New Zealand regional council. The approach shows promise in addressing common evaluation bottlenecks and helping stakeholders to develop causal narratives that more fully account for the complex relationship between community participation and environmental outcomes. However, while the local participants in the CEM initiative acted on the evaluation findings, they hoped that it would stimulate wider organisational change, and this did not happen. Project reflections, informed by institutional theory, reveal that the logics of ‘participation’ and ‘community’ implicit in the findings were appropriate for local participants, but non-participating regional council stakeholders read the findings with different logics, and therefore the evaluation failed to communicate the necessity for wider change. The reflections highlight a previously unrecognised evaluation bottleneck. While the CEM evaluation methodology has the potential to be adapted for other contexts, if wider organisational change is required, care must be taken to anticipate the different institutional logics of stakeholders who might be unfamiliar with, or even hostile to, CEM.

Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures

Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures

Beyond slash‐and‐burn: The roles of human activities, altered hydrology and fuels in peat fires in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia

Near‐annual landscape‐scale fires in Indonesia's peatlands have caused severe air pollution, economic losses, and health impacts for millions of Southeast Asia residents. While the extent of fires across the peatland surface has been widely attributed to widespread peatland drainage for plantation agriculture, fires that transition from surface into sub‐surface soil‐based fires are the source of the most dangerous air pollution. Yet the mechanisms by which this transition occurs have rarely been considered, particularly in diversely managed landscapes. Integrating physical geography methods, including active fire scene evaluations and hydrological monitoring, with qualitative methods such as retrospective fire scene evaluations and semi‐structured interviews, this article discusses how and why sub‐surface peat fire transition occurs in an intensively altered peatland ecosystem in Indonesia's Central Kalimantan province. We demonstrate that variable water table levels and flammable surface vegetation (fire fuels) are co‐produced socio‐political and biophysical phenomena that enable the conditions in which surface fire is likely to transition into peat fire and increase landscape vulnerability to ongoing, uncontrollable annual fires. This localized understanding of peat fire transition counters normative causal narratives of tropical fire such as ‘slash‐and‐burn’, with implications for the management of new fire regimes in inhabited landscapes.

Forking-path routines for plot advancement and problem solving in narrative composition and dramatic writing

ABSTRACT This paper investigates how plot-advancement routines, i.e. ‘what-if’, ‘if-do’, and forking-path story alternatives, are generated in narrative composition and dramatic writing by exploring cognitive representations such as schemata and problem-solving mechanisms. The complexity of narrative synthesis and problem-solving involves the integration, organisation and recall of data relations in a systemic way through identification of logical inconsistencies. Cognitively, the advancement of plot is not based solely on the consolidation of narrative information. Authors have to base their strategic decisions also on architectural and structural, goal-oriented routines and sub-routines, all of which are investigated in this paper through a comparative analysis of topics from behavioural and cognitive psychology, cognitive narratology and narrative theory, artificial intelligence and narrative causality, aiming to elucidate a multifaceted process during dramatic writing and narrative composition.

The centre cannot (always) hold: Examining pathways towards energy system de-centralisation

‘Energy decentralisation’ means many things to many people. Among the confusion of definitions and practices that may be characterised as decentralisation, three broad causal narratives are commonly (implicitly or explicitly) invoked. These narratives imply that the process of decentralisation: i) will result in appropriate changes to rules and institutions, ii) will be more democratic and iii) is directly and causally linked to energy system decarbonisation. The principal aim of this paper is to critically examine these narratives. By conceptualising energy decentralisation as a distinct class of socio-technical transition pathway, we present a comparative analysis of energy decentralisation in Cornwall, South West UK, the French island of Ushant and the National Electricity Market in Australia. We show that, while energy decentralisation is often strongly correlated with institutional change, increasing citizen agency in the energy system, and enhanced environmental performance, these trends cannot be assumed as given. Indeed, some decentralisation pathways may entrench incumbent actors' interests or block rapid decarbonisation. In particular, we show how institutional context is a key determinant of the link between energy decentralisation and normative goals such as democratisation and decarbonisation. While institutional theory suggests that changes in rules and institutions are often incremental and path-dependent, the dense legal and regulatory arrangements that develop around the electricity sector seem particularly resistant to adaptive change. Consequently, policymakers seeking to pursue normative goals such as democratisation or decarbonisation through energy decentralisation need to look beyond technology towards the rules, norms and laws that constitute the energy governance system.

Regional lifelong learning policies and the social vulnerability of young adults in Girona and Vienna

ABSTRACT This article explores the interface between lifelong learning policies and the definition of social vulnerability of young adults in two regions located within the European Union. Girona comprises a constellation of small towns with important industry, service and hospitality sectors. Vienna is a global city where many key international operators are based and employ a large number of highly qualified professionals. The article explores to what extent the meta-governance and the ‘causal narratives’ of lifelong learning policies contribute towards shaping the prevailing images of youth vulnerability in these regions. In Girona, bureaucratic governance patterns lifelong learning policies, which strongly rely on the potential of career guidance to encourage the youth to undertake further education. Correspondingly, policy designs and professional discourses emphasise that the beneficiaries previously failed at school. In Vienna, authorities govern lifelong learning by means of both bureaucracy and complex networks of employers and non-profit organisations. The ‘causal narrative’ of the policies straightforwardly claims that all youth must have an experience with employment, whether in apprenticeships or in transitional workshops that emulate real jobs. There, policies portray beneficiaries according to their capacity to undertake and finish apprenticeships.

Narrative Explanations: The Case for Causality

Abstract In this paper I argue that historiography employs causal narrative explanations just as other historical sciences such as evolutionary biology or paleontology do. There is a logic of explanation common to all these sciences that centers on causal explanation of unique and unrepeatable events. The explanandum of historiography can further be understood as mechanism in the sense developed by Stuart Glennan and others in recent years. However, causal explanation is not the only way historiography relates to the past. Arthur Danto has given us the theoretical tools to differentiate between causal narratives and conceptual colligations, with both playing a pivotal role in historiography even though Danto himself has not expressed that thought clearly.

Dependent development and authoritarian state capitalism: Democratic backsliding and the rise of the accumulative state in Hungary

Democracy is in crisis around the globe. Hungary was long heralded as a champion of political and economic liberalization in postsocialist Eastern Europe. However, the country recently emerged as a striking example of the current wave of autocratization. Starting from the premise that political regimes are the results of class compromises, in this paper, I argue that Hungary’s authoritarian turn is in part rooted in the reconfiguration of the dominant power bloc and the concomitant change in the state’s strategy. The aim of this article is twofold. Firstly, I analyze the socio-economic roots of Hungary’s authoritarian turn and propose a new, theoretically driven causal narrative challenging and extending existing accounts. Relying on macro-statistics and a new dataset on the economic elite, I describe how the collapse of the class compromise that sustained the post-socialist liberal competition state engendered the revolt of the national bourgeoisie and the rise of the new authoritarian regime of accumulation. Secondly, I offer a new conceptualization regarding the political-economic nature of the new regime: the accumulative state. I empirically identify the political instruments through which the accumulative state props up capital accumulation and the ensuing social conflicts. Instead of portraying Hungary as a divergence from liberal capitalist norms based on a textbook view of markets, I situate authoritarian politics in the logic of capital accumulation. However, I stress that the post-2010 accumulative state serves only short-term capital accumulation and fails to enact long-term structural transformation.

Revisiting Contribution Analysis

Abstract: The basic ideas behind contribution analysis were set out in 2001. Since then, interest in the approach has grown and contribution analysis has been operationalized in different ways. In addition, several reviews of the approach have been published and raise a few concerns. In this article, I clarify several of the key concepts behind contribution analysis, including contributory causes and contribution claims. I discuss the need for reasonably robust theories of change and the use of nested theories of change to unpack complex settings. On contribution claims, I argue the need for causal narratives to arrive at credible claims, the limited role that external causal factors play in arriving at contribution claims, the use of robust theories of change to avoid bias, and the fact that opinions of stakeholders on the contribution made are not central in arriving at contribution claims.

Communicating policy information in a partisan environment: the importance of causal policy narratives in political persuasion

ABSTRACT Public opinion is frequently formed in an environment of both partisan signals and other types of policy information. How do people form opinions in such an environment? Much of the literature suggests that most people simply align their opinions with those of their party. We examine a condition under which people may rely instead on a more normatively defensible criterion: policy information. We argue that what people want in terms of policy instruments are effective tools for achieving their desired end-state. When information clearly communicates that a policy will lead to a desirable outcome, we hypothesize that it will be persuasive even in a context where party leaders provide countervailing signals. In two experimental studies, we find support for this hypothesis, and we find some evidence that such information also reduces reliance on partisan cues. We show that causal narratives are central to the opinion formation process and that communicating this information can improve the quality of public opinion.

From “Incel” to “Saint”: Analyzing the violent worldview behind the 2018 Toronto attack

ABSTRACT This paper combines qualitative and quantitative content analysis to map and analyze the “Incel” worldview shared by members of a misogynistic online community ideologically linked to several recent acts of politically motivated violence, including Alek Minassian’s van attack in Toronto (2018) and Elliot Rodger’s school shooting in Isla Vista (2014). Specifically, the paper analyses how support and motivation for violence results from the particular structure this worldview presents in terms of social categories and causal narratives.

Stability in Cardiac Attributions Before and After Cardiac Rehabilitation.

This study examined temporal patterns in causal attributions generated by patients with cardiovascular disease before and after cardiac rehabilitation (CR). Qualitative, descriptive survey. Eighty-six participants were asked what they believed was the primary cause of their cardiac events. Cardiac attributions were collected at the beginning of CR, at the end of CR, and 15 months after baseline. Content analyses showed that heredity and behavior were the most commonly generated causes. Most participants showed stability in attributions over time, although we found a trend for more participants endorsing behavioral attributions at the end of the study. Cardiac attributions remain relatively stable across time. Cardiac rehabilitation staff should approach patients differently, depending on their causal narratives. Some patients enter CR understanding that behavior played a causal role, whereas some do not. Encouraging appreciation of the importance of behavior in cardiovascular disease onset and recurrence is vital.

“Destabilized Perception”

The formerly dissident status of the essay film has, in recent years, been exchanged for a great deal of favorable attention both inside and outside academia. In the more overly moralistic commentary on the form, the contemporary essay film is submitted as a tactical response to a surfeit of audiovisual media, to an era in which most of us have become both consumers and producers of a digital deluge. The work of Adam Curtis is notably absent from these ongoing debates. Yet Curtis is far from an underground figure—he has been making essayistic films for the BBC for more than twenty years and was the first to produce work directly for the iPlayer platform. Using archival images to examine the present, his films produce counterintuitive connections and abrupt collisions that supplant the authority of narrative causality for a precarious network of associations and linkages. This article treats Curtis’s recent body of work diagnostically. It argues that, quite apart from any promise of escape or deliverance, the aesthetic form of his work actively inhabits the rhythms and vectors of contemporary media. For Curtis, the media-technological conditions of the twenty-first century provoke a crisis that is both political and epistemological, one in which sensemaking can no longer claim to take place at a distance from the infrastructure that mediates such processes but is instead thoroughly and inescapably immanent to it, a situation that prevents contact with the outside. His films are about what he calls “destabilized perception,” but importantly they are also a function of this condition, one that in turn demands a shift in how we conceive the essay film in the twenty-first century.

Does policy respond to environmental change events? An analysis of Mountain Pine Beetle outbreaks in the Western United States

Understanding how institutions respond in the face of environmental or social shocks is a central concern in the study of the adaptive governance of social-ecological systems. This study attempted to determine whether and how the US Congress responded to epidemics of the native mountain pine beetle (MPB, Dendroctonus ponderosae) in the federal land-dominated intermountain US West, including a ca. 2000–2010 epidemic that far outpaced any prior outbreak on record in terms of area affected. In addition, we categorized the causal narratives represented by MPB legislation and analyzed patterns over time and by political party. We found very limited evidence of specific legislative responses to MPB epidemics; of the 43 MPB-related bills introduced into Congress, only five were passed into law and of these, three had relatively limited scope or application. Our analysis of narratives shows a shift over time from bills that attempted to increase the capacity of government agencies to address MPB impacts toward bills focused on reducing or eliminating procedural and environmental analysis requirements on federal land management agencies and providing new contracting options. Our findings call into question the ability of high-level deliberative bodies to advance institutional reform to address emerging patterns of environmental change.

Causal Claims and the Study of Ethnic Conflict

What does causation mean in conflict studies? Using a sample of published qualitative, article-length studies on the Rwandan and Yugoslav wars, this article finds a lack of reflexivity over causal claims in scholarship on conflict. Causal language is not as pervasive as expected, asserted cause-effect relationships are rarely fully explicated, and scholars under-explore their causal assumptions. Considering that ideas on causation necessarily condition explanations of conflict, including “ethnic” conflict, this is a major research issue. While there exists a lively debate between different causal narratives regarding the onset of conflict—with studies alternatively stressing “attitudes,” “conditions,” or both—it stops short of addressing issues at the deeper level of causal understandings. For the most part, studies subscribe to the search for empirical generalization, thus limiting attendant debates to a single model of causation. These findings indicate that conflict studies literature would benefit from greater reflexivity and pluralism with regards to causation and paying more attention to philosophical debates on the subject. The article provides a basic outline of this reflexive agenda.

Causes of cultural disparity: Switches, tuners, and the cognitive science of religion

ABSTRACTCultural disparity – the variation across cultural traits such as knowledge, skill, and belief – is a complex phenomenon, studied by a number of researchers with an expanding empirical toolkit. While there is a growing consensus as to the processes that generate cultural variation and change, general explanatory frameworks require additional tools for identifying, organizing, and relating the complex causes that underpin the production of cultural disparity. Here I develop a case study in the cognitive science of religion and demonstrate how concepts and distinctions drawn from work on contrastive explanation and manipulationist accounts of causation provide such tools for distinguishing explanatory levels, organizing causal narratives, and accounting for cross-cultural patterns.

The challenge of conceptualizing affordable housing: definitions and their underlying agendas in Israel

While critical work has focused on revealing underpinning motives of affordable housing strategy, there has been lesser attention given to how factors beyond affordability undergird affordable housing definition. The cultural embeddedness of affordable housing in Israel enables the concept to exist without formal definition, thus, laying bare the agendas and causal narratives and providing an effective laboratory to explore affordable housing’s varied interpretations. This research is based on 60 interviews, analysis of legislation, policy documents and newspaper articles. We use the framework of problem definition and social construction to explain how affordable housing can be manipulated by various institutions and actors to promote interests or agendas that may have little to do with affordability. The findings reveal that Israel’s affordable housing definition, or lack thereof, reflect both various demographic, fiscal, social and political interests and a perpetuation of an ideological shift from the social welfare state to a neoliberal regime.