Intergenerational Storytelling Research Articles

“Baba, you’re not gonna live forever … . we need these stories”: Intergenerational storytelling in Palestinian families connecting history, identity, and (the loss of) place

ABSTRACT The current study integrates communicated narrative sense-making (CNSM) theory with the ecological systems model to investigate intergenerational family storytelling (IGFS) in Palestinian families. Amidst historical and ongoing persecution, members of the Palestinian diaspora are tasked with making sense of their cultural and familial experiences. This study aims to understand how IGFS affects members’ meanings, values, and beliefs related to their Palestinian identity. Interviews with 25 Palestinians in the U.S. revealed that their IGFS was unified under “sumud” – a Palestinian concept highlighting steadfastness across generations. Sumud was illuminated through themes of shaping identity and connecting through generations. Findings contribute to CNSM theory by illuminating the unique functions of IGFS and can inform culturally sensitive interventions for communities facing intergenerational trauma and adversity.

Intergenerational Storytelling in China: Teachings About Family, Life, and Society Amidst Cultural-Historical Change

SYNOPSIS Objective. Over the past century, nationwide political, social, and economic reforms in the People’s Republic of China have drastically changed the structure of Chinese society and family life. This study describes the content of intergenerational storytelling in mainland Chinese families. Design. 193 emerging adult grandchildren recalled in writing a memorable story shared with them by their closest grandparent. Qualitative content analysis addressed what types of memorable stories are told by Chinese grandparents to their grandchildren and the central lessons embedded within those stories. Results. Stories in four broad thematic areas were told: (1) sociohistorical context and events, (2) existential life matters, (3) family history and dynamics, and (4) career and education. Across these areas, several subthemes and lessons learned by grandchildren emerged. Conclusions. Storytelling has the potential to build a bridge between generations whose realities are seemingly ages apart.

Storytelling and good relations: Indigenous youth capabilities in climate futures

AbstractHow can we support young citizens facing chaotic climate futures? This question is urgent, particularly for Indigenous communities who face disproportionate risks and impacts of climate change. For the past three decades, climate‐related education has focused largely on the acquisition of scientific knowledge in instrumental ways, while encouraging individual behaviour change. This approach centres the problem rather than human capabilities to generate solutions, which is especially misaligned with the increasing practice and significance of Indigenous communities’ regenerating self‐determining capabilities. This article reports on a pilot study that uses intergenerational storytelling methods or pūrākau to support leadership capabilities among Indigenous Māori and Pacific young people aged 10 to 14 years in communities at high risk of flooding in Ōtautahi/Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand. The study showed how storytelling locates and scaffolds Indigenous young people into positions of individual and collective responsibility for grappling with “wicked problems” such as climate and injustice and climate‐related challenges as part of the future they will inherit and shape within a broader intergenerational journey of resilience and reclamation.

World Futures Day 2023 Global futures agenda by The Millennium Project

World Futures Day (WFD), the 24 h round-the-world participatory method hosted every year by The Millennium Project and others on March 1, stimulates conversations and collective intelligence on possible futures. The 2023 edition marked its tenth anniversary. The 2023 Global futures agenda coming out from the data analysis is composed of four main clusters, each listing future oriented topics and related contents. Cluster 1, Complex solutions for complex problems, includes topics such as Environmental regeneration, Predictable food systems, Energy transition, Homo Galaxia, and Synergetic relations for peace. Cluster 2, A hyper-technological humanity, includes topics such as A biological revolution, New definitions of truth, An emotional AGI, A conscious AGI, and AGI governance. Cluster 3, Education and learning for a better future, includes topics such as Intelligent agent teachers, Intergenerational storytelling, and A cultural shift to self-actualization. Cluster 4, Improving global foresight, includes topics such as Futurists as a contradiction, A new leadership agenda, Futures shapers, The power of stories, Judging trillions of scenarios, Committees and summits for the future. After discussing some changes in the contents addressed over the years and some potential next steps for the research on WFD, the conclusions report that one key takeaway from WFD 2023 is that we have a vital need for pragmatic hope.

Young people at a crossroads: Climate solidarity through intergenerational storytelling

AbstractSchool‐based teaching on climate change rarely draws on diverse experiences and knowledge about climate change that circulate in migrant homes and communities. We set out to consider experiences of climate change education (CCE) in schools in Manchester, UK, and Melbourne, Australia, among migrant‐background students. We interviewed young people aged 14 to 18 and educators in multicultural secondary schools about climate change education. We then trained and supported young people to interview their parents. Here, we show how those interviews built young researchers’ appreciation of family stories. Those accounts revealed aspects of parents’ lives growing up that provided a platform from which families could discuss the changing relevance of climate change in their countries of origin and present locations. From those shared insights emerged critical, contextually informed understandings of climate change. Given those outcomes, we argue that intergenerational and cross‐cultural storytelling, when brought into dialogue with scientific knowledge, can support climate change educators. They can then draw upon a range of knowledges and responses to climate change wider than that, which currently exists in most classrooms. We conclude by suggesting that among diverse learner cohorts, what then becomes possible is work to build a greater sense of agency and capacity for empathy with respect to climate change.

Intergenerational Storytelling and Positive Psychosocial Development: Stories as Developmental Resources for Marginalized Groups

Academic We articulate an intergenerational model of positive psychosocial development that centers storytelling in an ecological framework and is motivated by an orientation toward social justice. We bring together diverse literature (e.g., racial-ethnic socialization, family storytelling, narrative psychology) to argue that the intergenerational transmission of stories about one’s group is equally important for elders and youth, and especially important for groups who are marginalized, because stories provide a developmental resource for resistance and resilience in the face of injustice. We describe how storytelling activities can support positive psychosocial development in culturally dynamic contexts and illustrate our model with a case study involving LGBTQ+ communities, arguing that intergenerational storytelling is uniquely important for this group given issues of access to stories. We argue that harnessing the power of intergenerational storytelling could provide a culturally safe and sustaining practice for fostering psychosocial development among LGBTQ+ people and other equity-seeking populations. Public Understanding one’s identity as part of a group with shared history and culture that has existed through time is important for positive psychological functioning. This is especially true for marginalized communities for whom identity-relevant knowledge is often erased, silenced, or distorted in mainstream public discourses (e.g., school curricula, news media, television, and film). To compensate for these limitations around access, one channel for the transmission of this knowledge is through oral storytelling between generations of elders and youth. Contemporary psychological science has often assumed that such storytelling occurs within families, but when families cannot or would not share such knowledge, youth suffer. We present a model of intergenerational storytelling that expands our ideas around who counts as “family” and how knowledge can be transmitted through alternative channels, using LGBTQ+ communities as a case example.

“Living the stories of your great-grandmother”: Making sense of Russia’s war in Ukraine through Polish intergenerational family storytelling

ABSTRACT After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Polish people were tasked with making sense of war in close proximity while supporting millions of Ukrainian refugees fleeing to Poland. In times of distress, such as war and refugee crises, intergenerational storytelling helps people make sense of their experience. Interviews with 28 Polish adults during the first five months of the war revealed that intergenerational family storytelling prompted them to: cope with war, connect with Ukraine, and help others. These narrative functions were informed by various levels of culture, as proposed by ecological systems theorizing. Findings expand communication narrative sense-making theory by accounting for sociohistorical influences in intergenerational family storytelling and highlighting how family storytelling can motivate action during crisis.

A Community-Based Participatory Approach in Applying the Sociocultural Resilience Model in U.S–Mexico Border Communities

Abstract: Background: Behavioral models play a key role in identifying pathways to better health and provide a foundation for health promotion interventions. However, behavioral models based in epidemiological research may be limited in relevance and utility in practice. Objectives: We describe a participatory approach within a community-based participatory research partnership for integrating epidemiological and community perspectives into the application of the sociocultural resilience model (SRM). The SRM posits that cultural processes have a symbiotic relationship with health-promoting social processes, which contribute to the health advantages among Mexicanorigin and other Latinx populations. Methods: Community action board members engaged with academic partners to interpret and apply the SRM to a community-clinical linkages intervention implemented in the context of three U.S.–Mexico border communities. In a two-day workshop, partners engaged in a series of iterative discussions to reach common definitions and measures for SRM constructs. Results: Partners described daily cultural processes as the food they eat, how they communicate, and a collectivist approach to getting things done. For intervention activities, the partners opted for intergenerational storytelling, sharing of food, and artistic forms of expression. Partners included measures of cultural nuances such as border identity and the complexities that often arise from navigating bicultural norms. Conclusions: Collaborative approaches within community-based participatory research partnerships can facilitate the adaptation and measurement of conceptual health behavior models in community practice.

Education for disaster resilience: Lessons from El Niño

This paper calls for greater attention to the role of youth and children as development actors in the context of education for disaster management. Drawing on debates in disaster studies and children’s geographies, we explore the possibilities offered by everyday formal education spaces, often overlooked in disasters management practice, to engage children in disaster preparedness and resilience planning. Using the case study of Peru, we examine the extent to which national responses to the restrictions that the COVID-19 pandemic placed on in-person teaching, opened-up opportunities to engage with disaster management in new ways. We draw on the case of an innovative digital curricula that uses intergenerational storytelling about the El Niño phenomenon to investigate livelihood opportunities and climate change pressures in northern coastal Peru, exploring how the phenomenon benefits desert populations. We assess the role of participatory virtual learning in facilitating disaster knowledge and climate adaptation awareness among students and critically examine the youth subjectivities that are constructed through these processes. We conclude calling for greater engagement with children’s formal education spaces in climate adaptation strategies, while cautioning against conceptualising children and young people as only ‘adults in the making’, rather than as impacted individuals with current agency and everyday capacities.

Sages and Seekers: The development of diverse adolescents’ transcendent thinking and purpose through an intergenerational storytelling program

ABSTRACT Adolescents develop capacities for emotionally engaged social thinking that transcends concrete situations, enabling them to infer values, beliefs and broader perspectives with implications for themselves and the world. We examined how such transcendent thinking emerged and promoted purpose within a formative, intergenerational relationship. Adolescent-older adult pairs from low-SES urban communities completed an 8-week relationship-building program previously shown to increase purpose. Adolescents described their experiences in weekly video-diaries and composed a culminating tribute to their elder partner. Video-diaries revealed that both initial levels and increases in adolescents’ transcendent meaning-making across the program additively contributed to increases in purpose (controlling for pre-program levels); in tributes, transcendence correlated with purpose post-program. Transcendence emerged in discussions involving micro-developmental patterns of recollections and emotions, and especially when reflecting on partners’ struggles. Results highlight the instrumental role of transcendence in adolescents’ development, and how meaning-making within close relationships may support psychosocial growth.

Stories and Histories: Gendered Performances, Caste and Sociability in some Punjabi Domestic Tales

AbstractThe article traces the performative, familial, women‐centric, intergenerational storytelling tradition through studying Punjabi domestic tales collected in a private, intimate archive, in an ambience of mourning and celebration. Deploying the ‘archival turn’ in history‐writing, the author argues to include personal archive as a valid source in disciplinary history. Using the idea of ‘genders as genres’, the article argues that in female‐centred folktales, told to women and children, women assert their point of view, speak of their needs and desires, and hold their own. Though they may not dismantle caste‐specific patriarchies, patriarchies in folktales are also unable to subdue women.

Exploring the Opportunities of AR for Enriching Storytelling with Family Photos between Grandparents and Grandchildren

Storytelling with family photos, as an important mode of reminiscence-based activities, can be instrumental in promoting intergenerational communication between grandparents and grandchildren by strengthening generation bonds and shared family values. Motivated by challenges that existing technology approaches encountered for improving intergenerational storytelling (e.g., the need to hold the tablet, the potential view detachment from the physical world in Virtual Reality (VR)), we sought to find new ways of using Augmented Reality (AR) to support intergenerational storytelling, which offers new capabilities (e.g., 3D models, new interactivity) to enhance the expression for the storyteller. We conducted a two-part exploratory study, where pairs of grandparents and grandchildren 1) participated in an in-person storytelling activity with a semi-structured interview 2) and then a participatory design session with AR technology probes that we designed to inspire their exploration. Our findings revealed insights into the possible ways of intergenerational storytelling, the feasibility and usages of AR in facilitating it, and the key design implications for leveraging AR in intergenerational storytelling.

Intergenerational Storytelling as a Developmental Resource in LGBTQ+ Communities

ABSTRACT LGBTQ+ people continue to be threatened by systemic censorship and erasure in public spaces and discourses, making community-based resources for positive development crucial. In this study, we examined one such developmental resource—LGBTQ+ intergenerational storytelling about cultural-historical events. LGBTQ+ adults (N = 495) ranging in age from 17 to 80 years (M = 39.22, SD = 19.89) responded to an online survey about LGBTQ+ intergenerational storytelling and relationships. Results showed that although LGBTQ+ intergenerational storytelling was reported to occur infrequently, sharing stories across generations was considered important, and LGBTQ+ people desired even greater intergenerational connection. Intergenerational narratives reported by participants were primarily about cultural-historical events involving adversity and oppression (e.g. AIDS crisis), policy and legislation (e.g. marriage equality), and protest, resistance, and activism (e.g. Stonewall uprising). Stories were mostly told by older friends in private or social settings for the purpose of passing on LGBTQ+ history. Lessons learned through storytelling were diverse but tended to focus on appreciation and affirmation. Valuing intergenerational storytelling was associated with positive psychosocial identity. This study suggests that intergenerational storytelling may be an important developmental resource for LGBTQ+ people and other marginalized communities.

Portfolio: Ode to Odenabe: Intergenerational Storytelling and the Art of Making.

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Sharing Intergenerational Food Stories on the Land and Online to Engage Mi’kmaw Children in Indigenous Food Sovereignty

Introduction: Within Indigenous cultures, stories about food and health have been shared on the land because the land, air, water, and ice are where food naturally grows and exists. Yet, Indigenous children are increasingly using online technologies to gather knowledge and share stories with their communities. Objectives: Through analyzing a storytelling session led by a Mi’kmaw Knowledge Keeper, this paper explores how land-based learning can come together with online technology to engage children in Indigenous food sovereignty. Methods: This study is situated within an intergenerational Mi’kmaw foods project called the Land2Lab Project and is guided by Two-Eyed Seeing and decolonial theory. We used narrative inquiry to explore a Knowledge Keeper’s storytelling session that was conducted with 14 Mi’kmaw children. Results: Through this study we learned that we can prioritize Mi’kmaw knowledge both on the land and online. Yet, spending time on the land intergenerationally learning about Mi’kmaw foodways is imperative to maintaining Mi’kmaw food knowledge and engaging children in Indigenous food sovereignty. Conclusion/Discussion: While online technology may seem paradoxical to land-based learning, some elements of intergenerational storytelling can happen online and on the land, and both can be used to support the protection of Mi’kmaw knowledge systems, foodways, and health for future generations.

Resisting the Settler Gaze: California Indigenous Feminisms

Abstract: The settler gaze has created the conditions in which Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people experience high levels of violence both historically and in current times. This essay analyzes California Indigenous feminist resistance to the violences in the mission impacted region of the Californias. Toypurina, Bárbara Gandiaga, and Yaquenonsat are discussed as examples of California Indigenous feminist resistance to settler colonial systems that contributed to the murdered and missing Indigenous women, girl, and Two-Spirit (MMIWG2S+) crisis during their time period. These historic California Indigenous women are then compared with current efforts to address the MMIWG2S+ crisis in California and beyond. Counter-colonial Indigenous intergenerational storytelling is used as a methodology to read these stories and the settler records in order to resist the settler gaze.

“I bring them here to tell their stories”: Transnational Latina mothers' critical literacy practices in an intergenerational storytelling workshop

AbstractFamily literacy programs are potential spaces of empowerment for transnational families, yet often draw from deficit logics that fail to acknowledge the rich language and literacy practices of Latinx communities. We brought together theories of critical literacy and theories of mothering as critical work to document how transnational Latina mothers in an intergenerational storytelling workshop reshaped the space toward their own goals. We explored how mothers in the workshop served as critical literacy pedagogues by writing, reading, and redesigning the workshop space in ways that asserted agency, fostered intergenerational learning, and pushed back against deficit narratives. We offer insights from the workshop experience to suggest ways in which educators, both in family literacy and K–12 settings, can learn from and partner with transnational parents.

Intergenerational narratives and identity development: A qualitative exploration of Chinese college students

ABSTRACT Previous research suggests that intergenerational narratives impact young people’s sense of self. Little knowledge, however, has been accumulated regarding what and how Chinese youth experience identity development in intergenerational storytelling. This qualitative study presented 149 Chinese college students’ experiences of identity development who collected their grandparents’ life stories. Findings suggest that the student participants reproduced their interviewees’ grand narratives about Chinese history and social changes, and embraced values such as endurance, diligence, and family cohesion which are transmitted across generations. Some students were burdened when hearing about their grandparents’ traumatic past and experienced negative feelings such as anger and guilt, while most of them elaborated gratitude toward people in the previous generations, and expressed a willingness to pay back and contribute to society. Drawing on existing theories, a preliminary model was constructed to capture the dynamic of intergenerational narrative identity among Chinese college students. We discussed how these findings contribute to research on intergenerational narratives and college students’ development. Recommendations for future research and practices for educators and policymakers to enhance family welfare were provided.

Constitutional Generation

The potential of emancipatory social movements to generate new legal norms is a source of hope for feminist activists. Yet there are also serious doubts as to the impact that marginalized women can have on legal institutions and constitution-making. This tribute to Drucilla Cornell foregrounds her contributions to theorizing women’s movements as a source of social-cultural values that could spark constitutional transformation. While Cornell’s concept of “global apartheid,” which exposes the linkages among legalized racism, sexism, capitalist exploitation, and anti-immigrant politics, might seem to reinforce doubts concerning women’s capabilities, the overall legacy of her legal philosophy is hopeful. Building on social movement practices of intergenerational storytelling, ethical witnessing, historical recollection, and respect for the dignity of women brutalized by apartheid systems, Cornell envisioned a revolutionary constitutionalism powerful enough to dismantle global apartheid. Out of women’s movement spaces, she showed us, dignitarian norms emerge with momentum to transform constitutional law.

The role of intergenerational family stories in mental health and wellbeing.

Patterns of memory sharing begin early in one’s life, informing relationships, one’s history, and one’s sense of cultural belonging. Memory sharing among families has been the focus of research investigating the relationship between mental health and intergenerational memory. A burgeoning body of research is showing that intergenerational knowledge of one’s family history is associated with positive mental health and wellbeing. However, research on the specific mechanisms and potential applications of such findings are just beginning to emerge. In particular, studies examining intergenerational storytelling point to the importance of culture and gender as critical factors underlying how stories are told and the extent to which these stories are associated with wellbeing. Such findings hold important promise for the pentation and treatment of mental health issues. As research in this area continues to evolve, the identification and characterization of factors and mechanisms underlying intergenerational family stories and wellbeing may help to guide the integration of family stories into mental health interventions.