Dominant Story Research Articles

Winging it: visions, automation, and narrating alternative mobility futures

This paper is concerned with the way that futures for autonomous mobility are envisioned, specifically in industry representations. We begin by analysing a pair of representative commercial narratives around future autonomous mobility, from Wing and Audi, finding them to be simplistic, exclusionary, and focused on individual freedoms. Building on this analysis, we draw on ideas around mobility justice and creative mobilities methods to craft an alternative science fiction vignette, one that augments a future from a gig worker’s perspective. In doing so, we foreground multiple injustices and insecurities, and aim to highlight the potential within creative and narrative methods to complicate dominant stories about technological futures, to articulate alternative futures, explore them, research with them, and make other futures more tangible. The paper concludes by discussing the need for such approaches given the dominant framings around autonomous mobility futures.

The state of British policymaking: How can UK government become more effective?

Abstract How can UK and devolved governments be more effective when addressing chronic problems like inequalities or crises like climate change? The dominant story is of pessimism: policymaking is bound to a Westminster tradition of short-termism, elitism, and centralization, and reform efforts are doomed to failure. We present a more cautiously optimistic account about the prospects for a more effective government, grounded in theory-informed lessons from two decades of UK and devolved government reform efforts. We describe a potentially more innovative and less blundering state and present a coherent Positive Public Policy agenda that can help to realize this potential.

On being an “oil and gas worker”: dominant discourse, self-representation, and Canada’s energy future

ABSTRACT Political wrangling over the future of oil and gas in the context of climate change dominates national debates about Canada’s energy future. These debates frequently rhetorically center around the needs and desires of oil and gas workers. Who, though, do politicians and pundits imagine these workers to be, and how do these imaginations measure up against how these workers imagine themselves and their futures? I answer these questions using the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse analysis to examine media and political debates as well as interviews with oil and gas workers. I find that oil and gas workers’ self-representation is considerably more versatile and adaptable to different energy pathways than media and politicians’ representations of them. I use this finding to argue for disaggregating workers’ agency from the dominant stories told about them. Doing so has the potential to open new pathways for energy transition.

New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims

Beydoun, K. A. (2023). The new crusades: Islamophobia and the global war on Muslims.University of California Press. "How could Europe lord it over a continent ten times its size?” wonders a voice in Wizard of the Crow, a novel by the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (2006, p. 681). One answer to this rhetorical question is addressed by the Palestinian-American intellectual and activist Edward Said’s (2003) statement: “Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate” (as cited in Beydoun, 2023, p. 68). Much of the colonial telling happens in the realm of education, whose institutionalized tools of textbooks and policies have been responsible for reproducing the fake history of the imperial narrative, one that silences the oppressed and lets the oppressors shine with nobility. Said’s statement not only answers the above question but also points to the empire’s hegemonic aspirations of constituting the identity of the Other since the Other in colonial discourse is framed as the uneducated who needs to be educated, necessarily, in the logics of the empire. Instilling racism as a major colonial project against the Muslim Other has been the case with the United States of America’s foreign policy in the aftermath of 9/11, a renewed imperialism in the name of fighting “terror.” Therefore, educating the U.S. Muslim youths about themselves as being anti-Western barbaric terrorists is as colonially imperative as educating white American generations about the latter being defenders of White “democratic” civilization against the “barbarity” of the former. Challenging the dominant stories of the empire demands devising tools that shake the grand narrative from within by making the missing narratives visible and heard

Not Supposed to be Born?

Drawing from two published literary narratives, the German wartime diary by Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, and the novel based on women’s testimonies of war rape and unwanted pregnancies in Bosnia by Slavenka Drakulić, S.: A Novel About the Balkans, in addition to published testimonies and unpublished interview data by now young adult (in the case of Bosnia) and elderly (in the case of Germany) children born of war rape (CBOWR), this article examines the intergenerational impact of wartime sexual violence. Applying feminist narrative analysis, the authors demonstrate the situation of “impossible motherhood” and experiences of children who were not supposed to be born. The article focuses on the narrative process marked by trauma but also by agency and resilience so as to challenge dominant stories of war and unwanted pregnancy following rape in armed conflict. The authors propose a resolution of tensions around the ethnic identity of CBOWR along their maternal lineage rather than the imposition of the paternal heritage of the enemy.

People’s sense of political representation and national stories: The case of Israel

Previous research on political representation mainly focused on representatives but has overlooked individuals’ sense of inclusion within the greater group: the nation. Building on narrative theory, we propose a novel mechanism that fosters a feeling of political representation—a similarity between individuals’ personal-national stories and the collective-national metanarrative of the polity. Metanarratives are shared dominant stories that present a community with desirable social conventions. While they seek to represent the nation, metanarratives are not entirely inclusive and do not appeal to all citizens. We argue that individuals who do internalize the metanarrative feel more represented. To demonstrate our theoretical expectations, we use election surveys and constitutive texts to capture national stories and metanarratives. We find that indeed respondents whose national story is closer to a nation’s metanarrative feel more represented by the political system.

John Vought and the Preservation Paradox

The War for Independence was both an intercontinental war and a civil war between Patriot rebels and Loyalists. Some colonists, “disaffected” with the war, sought to remain neutral. Especially in the middle colonies of New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, the tripartite division of the population meant Patriot rebels were often an embattled minority. About two-thirds of New Jersey’s population did not support the rebellion. This raises a preservation paradox. Today, almost all preserved sites are Patriot rebel sites, which promotes a popular, simplistic narrative. The dominant story of the American Revolution overlooks both the fact that Patriot rebels were often in the minority and that most Loyalists were people of integrity, no less than their opponents. The complexity of the revolutionary experience is swept from memory. The story of America’s first civil war can best be told where Loyalists are interpreted as protagonists and as actual people not misguided cyphers. Yet today in all of New Jersey, only two homes, Marlpit Hall in Monmouth County and the Vought House in Hunterdon, are interpreted as Loyalist sites. Tracing the experiences of the Vought family broadens our perspective and complicates our understanding of this crucial time and place. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we are challenged to present a fuller, more nuanced account of those who were disaffected, remained loyal, or took up arms, often alongside British and Hessians troops as uniformed New Jersey Volunteers. A more balanced account may also increase appreciation of the hardships faced by Patriot rebels and New Jersey’s distinctive place at the crossroads of continental war and the epicenter of civil conflict.

The afterlife of punk: Evental sites of punk 771

Building on the argument of my previous article ‘Autonomy and agency: The event of punk 77’, this article defends the continuing political relevance of punk. Rejecting the dominant story that punk was a utopian, short-lived revolution, over before it had a chance to effect any social change, I argue that punk survives through people who, radicalized by its vision of cultural agency, motivate revolutionary ‘ways of being’ committed to realizing and transmitting that vision to others. The subjects of 77 are heir to a revolutionary tradition, choosing to ‘keep’ punk ‘alive’ through fidelity to its inaugural event; a fidelity that involves renewed acknowledgement of the ‘subversive’ dimension of the event’s original ‘epochal rupture’. Two case studies are offered in support of this argument. An account of the eruption of a punk scene in the provincial town of Drogheda in Ireland in the early 1980s is followed by discussion of the specific way punk engaged young women, a case study based on interviews with Gina Birch, founding member of first-generation all-female punk band the Raincoats. I conclude by recasting the legacy of punk as a tradition of revolutionary inheritance.

Storying against non-human/superhuman narratives: Black youth Afro-futurist counterstories in qualitative research

Antiblackness, and the dominant stories it produces about Black humanity, creates distorted images of Black humanness that are used to justify violence against Black youth in schools and society. However, Black youth have different stories to tell about their being in the world that stems directly from their lived experiences and are inherently counter to damaged center narratives intertwined with Black suffering. Using the theoretical framing of BlackCrit and theorizations of Afrofuturism, I share two composite Afro-futurist counterstories developed by Black high school students in a summer writing course, which confront antiblackness and disrupt the ways the regime makes educators complicit in seeing Black youth as non-human/superhuman. The research provides insights into Black youth futurity in relation to schooling in an anti-Black world.

Stories of a long life with HIV: A qualitative study of a narrative intervention.

The dominant story of HIV in Denmark portrays HIV as compatible with a nearly normal life. International research on the experiences of elderly people diagnosed with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the 1980s to mid-1990s challenges this narrative. To gain knowledge on the experiences of elderly long-term survivors of HIV in Denmark and to evaluate if a narrative intervention 'giving voice' to this specific group was experienced as improving their quality of life. In collaboration with relevant stakeholders, we developed a narrative intervention at REHPA, the Danish Knowledge Centre for Rehabilitation and Palliative Care focusing on the experiences and stories of people having lived a long life with HIV. Nineteen women and men living with HIV were included in the study. The intervention's evaluation design was based on ethnographic fieldwork that included participant observation and focus group interviews. The qualitative data were analysed using thematic content analysis. The findings show that the dominant story on HIV does not adequately cover the experiences of elderly Danes who have lived a long life with HIV. The participants continue to suffer from late complications and physical, existential, emotional and social challenges. The narrative intervention helped improve how participants experienced their quality of life. Long-term elderly Danish survivors diagnosed with HIV in the 1980s to mid-1990s suffer from complex symptoms and problems related to living their lives with HIV and treatment. They found that telling and sharing their life stories with other people with HIV gave them a sense of coherence, meaning and direction in life. The study documents the experiences of a group of long-term survivors of HIV in Denmark, making it relevant for organisations supporting people with HIV and for health care professionals working with this group. Furthermore, the study adds to the knowledge base on the use of narrative methods in rehabilitation.

Cancer made me a shallower person: A minoritarian story in comics

AbstractThe most widely circulated breast cancer narratives today have the structure of a Bildungsroman. They market personal growth, overcoming, and self-improvement, and reflect a strikingly neoliberal stance, even towards a potentially fatal illness as breast cancer. This is not the case with Miriam Engelberg’s graphic novelCancer Made Me a Shallower Person: A Memoir in Comics(2006), which resists this dominant tendency. Engelberg’s book, does manifest some of the typical Bildungsroman traits (e. g. introspective hero, need for belonging). Mostly, however, it is torn between opposing tendencies: Engelberg oscillates between vulnerability and detachment, irony and expectation, the urge to withdraw from a frightening situation and the desire to speak up against all the injustice and bad practices she witnesses. Engelberg never gives in to “the pressure to become someone different – someone nobler and more courageous than (she) was” (Engelberg 2006: xiii), but mocks and denounces all oppressive cultural attitudes. Instead of becoming “deeper” and more spiritual, in the socially prescribed ways, she chooses “the path of shallowness” (xiii), and remains a witty and critical outsider. These attributes, together with the episodic fragmentation of Engelberg’s book, bring it closer to a picaresque, the protagonist of which, like her, occupies a marginal position, moves from situation to situation, and makes the reader aware of the social norms while she simultaneously challenges and destabilizes them (Moenandar 2017: 5). The goal of my article is to examine Engelberg’s memoir as a minoritarian, hybrid form of writing between Bildungsroman and picaresque, pointing to alternatives to the dominant stories of overcoming and neoliberal survivorship.

From Silence to #Shout: French-Language Abortion Narratives in Transnational Dialogue

Abstract: Taking as premise that stories provide the frames through which we grasp and articulate lived experiences, this article brings abortion narratives into transnational and transgenerational dialogue in order to challenge the dominant story told about termination. Comprised of accounts of both clandestine and legal abortions occurring on three continents (Algeria, Hexagonal France, and Belgium, with critical parallels noted in US narratives), including four literary texts, several collections of testimonies, and one documentary film, the corpus highlights core commonalties that cut across experiences of termination, demonstrating the global impact that women's health stories harbor. Part One examines Bey's Au commencement était la mer , Malinconi's Hôpital silence , Ernaux's L'événement , and, to a lesser extent, Guathier's Paroles d'avortées , discussing the dehumanization of institutional violence and lack of information as key commonalities. Turning to contemporary abortion narratives in a variety of genres, Part Two shows how silence, stigma, and dehumanization continue to characterize abortion stories today, but also notes a shared volition to craft new narratives of intelligibility. Finally, Part Three discusses the power harbored in dialogue amongst abortion narratives of all types, notably in terms of the medical humanities and the expansion of language available to express lived experiences, but more importantly as foundation for a relational understanding of abortion as part of reproductive care—a notion nascent in contemporary narratives, but which comes to the fore when stories are circulated as feminist folklore.

“I am Alone in the Dark, Turning the World Around in my Head” – Space-Time Creation in Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark

The primary aim of the article is to examine Paul Auster’s metafictional novel – Man in the Dark – in reference to the represented reality and imaginary spaces which play a crucial role in the development of the action. I will be focusing on the diverse levels of the spatio-temporal dimensions of the novel – the primary story and the embedded one – and their mutual relations and interactions. While discussing Man in the Dark , I shall explore the ways in which particular chronotopes affect individuals immersed in them. I will also prove that the text’s dominant story, recounted by the protagonist, August Brill, transgresses the spatial and temporal borders of the main character’s world, and, consequently, becomes completely separated from what is quotidian, known, and experienceable for him.The created worlds shall be analysed in reference to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope.

Storytelling Earth and Body

According to Sylvia Wynter, we are “a storytelling species”: The capacity to narrate the world might be what we hold most in common as “humans” across diverse geographies. In this article, we weave together Black, Indigenous, and third world and women of color feminist scholarship to ask this question: How can storytelling, as an alternate mode of theorization, help us resituate contemporary planetary crises within longer histories and plural understandings of our relations with earth? We closely read three anticolonial (feminist) scholars whose theories illuminate the relationship of race, gender, and nature: Wynter’s genealogy of humans as storytellers; Lorena Cabnal’s elaboration of cuerpo-territorio (body-territory) and ancestral patriarchy; and Mishuana Goeman’s conceptualization of the body as a meeting place. Anticolonial feminist storytelling alters the spatiotemporal scales through which planetary crises are understood by centering the relationship between body and land. We elaborate how the White, cis male, bourgeois and propertied figure of the human reproduces a story that normalizes the racialization of people and ecologies, gendered domination, and extractivism. Revealing this dominant story to be a fiction of modernity, these scholars open a space of possibility, to tell stories otherwise that reimagine what it means to be human on earth. Storytelling as anticolonial praxis troubles the fixity of racial-colonial violence and reconceives the human, not as a liberal subject or fixed object within colonial capitalism, but as a node within a relational network of human and nonhuman kin.

Rethinking Atlantic Empire: Christopher Schmidt-Nowara's Histories of Nineteenth-Century Spain and the Antilles

Though his life was tragically cut short, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara (1966–2015) was a trailblazer in the fields of Spanish imperial and Atlantic histories. His numerous monographs, chapters, and articles combined to demonstrate that “Spain's nineteenth-century empire was intertwined with similar empires in the age of abolition, free trade, proconsular despotism, and second slavery” (pp. 4–5). This volume evolved out of two initially unrelated conference panels organized to celebrate Schmidt-Nowara's life and scholarship. Editors Scott Eastman and Stephen Jacobson have collated 11 chapters that each engage different aspects of Schmidt-Nowara's work and legacy.Eastman and Jacobson organize the collection into four sections. The first consists of a single chapter by Jacobson that charts Schmidt-Nowara's intellectual biography. Therein, Jacobson explains how, as a product of the reinvigorating studying of imperialism at the University of Michigan in the 1990s, Schmidt-Nowara was influenced by “smasher[s] of paradigms” including Rebecca Scott, Geoff Eley, Seymour Drescher, Josep Maria Fradera, and Dale Tomich (p. 22).The second section explores the scholarly effect of these influences. It is comprised of three chapters that examine Schmidt-Nowara's major publications. Chapter 2, by Adrian Shubert, concentrates on Schmidt-Nowara's first monograph, Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874 (1999). Shubert explains the pathbreaking nature of the book, as Schmidt-Nowara revealed “empire and metropolis as acting upon each other reciprocally,” a momentous thing in 1999 (p. 46). Joshua Goode's chapter explains how Schmidt-Nowara's reading of sources “against the grain” allowed him to develop his revolutionary and widely circulated theses (p. 53). In chapter 4, Dalia Antonia Caraballo Muller furthers the analysis of Shubert and Goode, explaining that Schmidt-Nowara's scholarship “proved that the colonies were not only economically, strategically, and administratively important to Spain, but were politically and intellectually significant as well” (p. 68). Ultimately, Schmidt-Nowara told “a richly complicated story of domination, resistance, and engagement that is anything but straightforward” (p. 78).The third section of Rethinking Atlantic Empire is made up of five chronological chapters inspired by Schmidt-Nowara's multifaceted contributions to Spanish imperial and Atlantic historiographies. Emily Berquist Soule's chapter concentrates on the intersection of slaveholding and Catholicism in New Spain, using Schmidt-Nowara's thoughts on transatlantic reciprocity to explain how “the Church failed to live up to its own official program for African slaves” (p. 98). In chapter 6, Elena Schneider examines how Schmidt-Nowara influenced approaches to the Hispanic Atlantic with regard to scale, while in chapter 7 Anne Eller looks to the ways that Schmidt-Nowara influenced study of independence by analyzing Spanish colonial ideologies through the lens of the Dominican Republic. Chapter 8 engages with Schmidt-Nowara's effect on the historiography of antislavery, with author Lisa Surwillo exploring the Spanish translation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853). Surwillo explains that “the discourse around the transatlantic slave trade shared important similarities” (p. 161). In the final chapter of the third section, Louie Dean Valencia-García examines “the impact of the Spanish colonial project” on the rise of Spanish fascism in the twentieth century (p. 167). Valencia-García argues that Schmidt-Nowara “provided a methodological model to consider power relations more generally amongst marginalized groups” that proves useful to scholars outside his own nineteenth-century focus (p. 179).The fourth section of the anthology consists of two chapters that explore Schmidt-Nowara's posthumous and unfinished works. In chapter 10, Joselyn Almeida looks to Schmidt-Nowara's translation of Fernando Blanco White's Flight to Freedom (1815). Schmidt-Nowara's sensitivity to transnational connections “illuminate[d] how the interimperial relations of European states that vied for power across the Atlantic exacted a violent cost from Indigenous and African peoples” (p. 183). Juan Luis Simal's chapter theorizes about how Schmidt-Nowara's previous works might have shaped his unfinished project on the nature of captivity and experiences of prisoners of war in Napoleonic Europe. The volume ends with an epilogue presenting the transcription of an interview that Schmidt-Nowara gave to the Spanish radio program Hablemos de historia (Let's talk about history). The interview hints at Schmidt-Nowara's outlook on historical study as he engages in “how identities were generated in the metropolis and in the colonies, and how they have conditioned the future of these societies in the contemporary world” (p. 220).Overall, Eastman and Jacobson have organized a powerful reminder of Schmidt-Nowara's titanic contribution to Spanish imperial and Atlantic histories. The contributors write with great emotion, leading to compelling narratives and insightful arguments. This is a volume that should be read widely both for its synthetic treatment of Schmidt-Nowara's work and as a blueprint for how historiographical ideas can shape disciplines and scholarship beyond their own fields.

‘The Shadows of Black People Who Have Disappeared’: Alekos Doukas's Interpretation of the Dying Native Fantasy

Between the late 1920s and early 1960s, Alekos Doukas (1900–62), a Greek migrant and writer, engaged with the widely held belief that Australia's Indigenous people were a doomed race. By focusing on letters, articles, and fictional writing by Doukas – all of which were written in Greek – this article brings together histories of migration and histories of settler colonial thinking about Aboriginal people. Although, as we show, the pessimistic racialist views he expressed in them were largely consistent with the view that Aboriginal people were in a state of racial decline, his views also shifted, we argue, under the influence of a Marxist analysis of colonialism and his fleeting encounters with Aboriginal people. Doukas' writings show how the dominant story of Aboriginal racial decline could be learnt, confirmed, revised, and at times idiosyncratically interpreted by non-Anglo migrants living in Australia.

Do we have something in common? Understanding national identities through a metanarrative analysis

AbstractMany scholars stress the role national identities play as an essential element that shapes interests and explains political behaviours. Others, however, contend that national identities are too amorphic and highlight the analytical challenge of employing them as a research variable. We propose the use of metanarratives as a theoretical framework that captures the essence of national identities and allows the comparative study of their similarities and differences. Metanarratives are shared dominant stories that guide values, beliefs and behaviours and help communities understand who they are. We develop a new systematic method for measuring their content and present a three‐step process for gauging metanarratives. We demonstrate this method on 159 countries, analysing constitution preambles to assess each nation's metanarrative and create a global identity orientation map. We show how this approach enables the classification and comparison of national identities and discuss its potential contribution to further empiric study of national identities.

In conversation with digitalization: Myths, fiction or professional imagining?

We are surrounded by narratives about digitalization – in media, in white papers, in policies and in academic discourse. This article aims to dissect policy narratives to unveil the dominant stories associated with digitalization and open a dialogue on their consequences. The empirical material includes policy documents on digitalization at the European Union, national and sub-national levels focusing on the Swedish context. The article argues that these documents not only produce narratives of digitalization that reveal a certain orientation towards reality but also become tangible constructs. Further, despite their neutral language, they should be considered part of the problem formulation. The analysis is carried out by identifying the dominant and taken-for-granted stories, and the results show that digitalization, often portrayed as a modern and innovative concept, is frequently narrated in line with rather traditional perceptions of industrialized modernity. The results indicate that digitalization is trapped in an unambiguous and cramped dramaturgy, and if policies are enacted in the same way in practice, we will face a rather un-resilient digital modernity.

Expert views about missing AI narratives: is there an AI story crisis?

Stories are an important indicator of our vision of the future. In the case of artificial intelligence (AI), dominant stories are polarized between notions of threat and myopic solutionism. The central storytellers—big tech, popular media, and authors of science fiction—represent particular demographics and motivations. Many stories, and storytellers, are missing. This paper details the accounts of missing AI narratives by leading scholars from a range of disciplines interested in AI Futures. Participants focused on the gaps between dominant narratives and the untold stories of the capabilities, issues, and everyday realities of the technology. One participant proposed a “story crisis” in which these narratives compete to shape the public discourse on AI. Our findings indicate that dominant narratives distract and mislead public understandings and conceptions of AI. This suggests a need to pay closer attention to missing AI narratives. It is not simply about telling new stories, it is about listening to existing stories and asking what is wanted from AI. We call for realistic, nuanced, and inclusive stories, working with and for diverse voices, which consider (1) story-teller; (2) genre, and (3) communicative purpose. Such stories can then inspire the next generation of thinkers, technologists, and storytellers.

Re-embedding the circular economy in Circles of Social Life: beyond the self-repairing (and still-rapacious) economy

ABSTRACT Over the last decade, the aspirational rhetoric of circular economics has intensified exponentially. At the same time, the boundaries of projected circular economy outcomes have been tightened around a reductive, often neoliberally framed, inter-relation between the domains of economics and ecology. In this process, questions of politics and culture, including issues of justice and social meaning, have largely been ignored. It is this Janus-faced outlook, with one face turned to aspirational intensification and the other face captured by mechanical techniques within the economics/ecology domains, that helps to explain how the circular economy can be the subject of so much hype and so much critique. This also means that, for all their urgency, the emerging lines of critique have not been able to more than hint at an adequate and holistic re-formulation of a circular economy for living sustainably. To give a sense of the nexus of aspirational intensification and economics-ecology domain tightening, this article begins with a dominant story that is told about development of the circular economy by the Ellen Macarthur Foundation. The article then responds to this ideological discourse by posing a series of considerations for developing an alternative approach. This alternative will need to bring back in politics and culture, but it will also need (á la Karl Polanyi) to re-embed economics and its technical tools in a broader conception of social life. Here we use the “Circles of Sustainability” approach.