Professional Storytelling Research Articles

“Flat Surface” as Material Metaphor: “Bad” Cover Design, “Good” Storytelling, and Post-Fordist Sensibility in Chinese Web Novels

The article deploys the material metaphor of “flat surface” to read the unexpected cross-modal affinities between amateurish cover design and professional storytelling in Chinese web novels. Canvassing the ways visual and verbal artifacts put into play metaphoric associations with “flat surface,” this essay interprets the popular fascination with flatness as a symptom of China's alignment with ubiquitous computing in its transition to a post-Fordist cultural economy when the world is increasingly conceived as a flat horizon. The author first exhibits a selection of spoof covers and argues that their willful indulgence in two-dimensionality is an antidote to the uncanny similarity of illusionist covers born out of what Mario Carpo calls “mass customization” in the digital era. Then the author turns to examine the web novel Zhuixu 赘婿 (Matrilocal Son-in-Law) by Fennu de Xiangjiao 愤怒的香蕉 (Angry Banana), a highly acclaimed alternate history fiction with a curiously lousy cover, focusing on how Angry Banana's cover designs and narrative storytelling convey the flattening effect. The author attributes the fascination with flatness to the rise of post-Fordism in China's cultural economy by demonstrating how the protagonist in Zhuixu succeeds in flattening “all under heaven” (tianxia 天下) by way of nonhumanizing his existence and weaponizing an internet of things (IoT) while embracing a post-Fordist network of work, life, and governance. Finally, the author furnishes a few more examples to suggest the broader trends toward flatness in Chinese web novels and concludes by discussing the critical edge of the metaphor of flatness in its applicability to post-Fordist cultural analysis.

From Perspectival Myopia to Professional Transformation: An Autoethnographic Retrospection of a High School Principal from Nepal

ABSTRACT This paper presents a re-storied account of my (lead author) decade-long (2007–2017) professional journey as a high school principal in diverse educational settings in Nepal. Using an autoethnographic approach, I have theorized my leadership transformation approaches through professional storytelling, employing critical reflexivity to trace intimate leadership experiences where authoritarian approaches to leadership, disparities, and inequalities in schools run rampant. My perspectival myopia, professional vulnerabilities, and the discrepancies between my leadership ideals and behaviors resulted in issues such as perceptions of disengagement, underperformance, and dissatisfaction on the receiving end, prompting me to contemplate professional transformation. While outlining several significant steps and missteps in transforming my actional and cognitive behaviors, this paper explores my evolution toward a more reflective, democratic, ethical, equitable, and participative conceptualization of educational leadership and underscores the transformative potential of personal-professional development through adaptable perspectives and critical self-reflection, offering valuable insights for educational leaders globally.

The role of emotional solidarity–driven tourists’ nostalgia in shaping advocacy intentions

PurposeExamining emotional solidarity that drives tourists’ nostalgia has received significant attention, offering valuable insights that can aid in the selection of a travel destination. However, tourists’ nostalgia, along with its antecedents—perceived safety risk and emotional solidarity, has gained less attention within the setting of Pakistan. Therefore, this research has been carried out and validated a research framework using the stimulus-organism-response model to investigate the links between perceived safety risk, emotional solidarity—welcoming nature, emotional closeness, sympathetic understanding, perceived nostalgia, and destination advocacy intentions. In addition, this model employed destination attachment—place identity and place dependence—as a boundary condition on the relationships between emotional solidarity and advocacy intentions.Design/methodology/approachThis study collected 545 responses through two methods: offline distribution of print copies of the questionnaire and online surveys from domestic tourists who visited scenic destinations last year. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was performed using AMOS 26, and the PROCESS macro was conducted using IBM SPSS 28.FindingsThe findings highlighted that perceived safety risk negatively influences emotional solidarity—welcoming nature, emotional closeness, sympathetic understanding—, resulting in a positive effect on perceived nostalgia. Furthermore, tourists’ perceived nostalgia positively triggers advocacy intentions. The findings also confirmed the boundary conditions of destination attachment—place identity and place dependence—on the association between emotional solidarity and perceived nostalgia.Practical implicationsThree major practical implications of these findings: First, ensuring visitor safety with smart security measures, digital tools for quick response, and local community involvement. Second, highlighting local markets, art, and architecture to enrich cultural experiences and promote accessibility and diversity. Finally, using marketing to generate nostalgic experiences through local collaborations, professional storytelling, and engaging social media content to build emotional ties and curiosity.Originality/valueIn terms of originality, this is pioneering research intended at developing and validating the model in the context of Pakistani destinations. Furthermore, this marks the initial step in examining the proposed relationships between perceived safety risk and emotional solidarity in fostering tourists' perceived nostalgia, ultimately leading to a strong desire to advocate for the destination.

이야기판의 계승과 변주, 그리고 확장 : 유튜브의 이야기판을 중심으로

The emerging online narrative culture can be fully understood when it is examined with an awareness of the oral narrative traditions and storytelling cultures and norms that have existed in the real world. In this regard, this article aims to provide a deeper understanding of digital storytelling and narrative culture by focusing on how the experiences gained through traditional oral narrative storytelling and narrative culture are being inherited or transformed in online spaces.
 Focusing on the video platform “Youtube” in particular, we found that YouTube has technologically mediated the storytelling methods and principles found in face-to-face storytelling. However, the differences in the hyper-connected locality of the storytelling site and the multi-sensory format and enjoyment of the narrative text require different classification criteria from those used to identify the type and content of traditional storytelling.
 Therefore, we divided in YouTube's storytelling into three types according to the way stories are mainly composed: “telling,” “viewing,” and “Interacting.” These modes of online storytelling are common in that they dismantle many of the boundaries that have been established to describe traditional oral literature storytelling, such as the distinction between factuality and fiction, that between professional storytelling and amateur storytelling, the hierarchy of text/image/sound. It is necessary to examine these narrative phenomena in a more microcosmic way rather than simplifying them into a single concept or theme such as “digital storytelling.”

Memories and Places in Twentieth-Century Suzhou Tanci

During China's Ming–Qing era, professional storytelling genres developed in economically and culturally advanced regions, alongside a mature book culture and major developments of theater genres. Since the eighteenth century, two Suzhoudialect-based storytelling genres emerged in the city of Suzhou and its neighboring area: tanci 彈詞 (plucking rhymes, chantefable) and pinghua 評話 (straight storytelling). Unlike pinghua's connection to time, that is, the history of different dynasties, the most popular tanci stories excel in presenting space: characters from many different tanci stories traverse a narrative universe that is based on spatial–temporal imagination of a constructed Jiangnan during the "Ming" Dynasty, often with Suzhou at its center. Therefore, tanci differs from many other performative genres and functions as a highly localized practice of collective memory: as an oral performative art, Suzhou tanci negotiates with both official history and plebian lore and legends; as a daily communal activity, it invites local audiences to practice imaginative reconstruction of Suzhou's past by embracing plots and characters in specific places that have specific spatial structures. Therefore, the charm of tanci lies not in the development of new stories but in resituating old local stories in the everchanging modern city to maintain a stable group identity for the locals.

Homer’s Odyssey Once More: Magical Stories and Spellbound Audiences

In this essay, I discuss specific ways in which the Odyssey ensures its reception by broader and future audiences by employing both professional and amateur storytellers and internal listeners as guarantors of the story's viability. My focus here is on the differences between Demodocus’s professional storytelling and Odysseus's nominally nonprofessional storytelling. While the former serves to please groups of an audience who expect “safe” pleasures by listening to traditional epic tales, the latter opens an affective space between listeners and the storyteller, where the listeners’ affects are mobilized by Odysseus’s unpredictable and perhaps less skillful ways of narrating stories. Odysseus’s amateurism (as I would call it) instigates the audience’s desire to listen more and becomes a successful strategy to captivate the audience’s minds. In this age and culture often defined by the “narrative turn,” many of us are interested in telling good stories that can impact broad audiences. This much-loved, ancient work of fiction can teach us various techniques of good storytelling that can move the hearts of generations of audiences.

The Sound of Silence

One way for economists to influence society is to shape what Robert Shiller has called “economic stories”. This, in turn, puts the media in their role as professional storytellers in a central position. In this paper, I investigate how economists have been covered by print media since the 1960s: How has the quantitative visibility of economists developed over time? And how can news stories covering economists be characterized in terms of their content and framing? To answer the first question, I provide a comparison of economists’ quantitative media visibility in international newspapers. Exploring the second question, I build on a corpus of more than 12,000 German newspaper articles to conduct a case study on the German Council of Economic Experts, Germany’s most prominent group of economic experts.

СТОРІТЕЛІНГ В СИСТЕМІ МАРКЕТИНГОВИХ КОМУНІКАЦІЙ КОМПАНІЇ

Authors researched the essence of the concept of storytelling in the marketing communications of the company. Storytelling is a progressive marketing tool that raises awareness about the company, which eventually is better converted into long-term customer loyalty. Storytelling allows you to expand the range of forms of displaying the necessary marketing information, more effectively involving employees, partners, new customer segments in the communication. Storytelling in marketing communications is the transmission of the necessary information in the form of a story to capture the attention of the target audience and create the necessary motivation. Storytelling, as a tool of marketing communications, can "humanize" the brand, demonstrate the company’s value system, add shapes to its image, accelerate the process of marketing decisions. It has been proven that storytelling as an art of telling stories is an important mean of marketing communication, because stories attract people’s attention more, are better remembered, and arouse emotions that are almost impossible to evoke with ordinary commercial messages. Authors reveal that this format of marketing communications is more customer-oriented, as it emphasizes the personality of the consumer and his needs and highlight the main types of storytelling and features of different types of stories that should be used to promote goods/services in the market. The stories in the company’s marketing communications can be real and presented in different ways. Storytelling has been found to increase sales, provided that stories reach and attract the target audience, are relevant to their interests, and are "presented" in the right place at the right time. Authors analyse the experience of the world’s leading companies that use storytelling in their marketing communications and outline the main marketing tasks, which professional storytelling allow to resolve. They also provide recommendations for improving storytelling in the company’s marketing communications. The results of analytical research can serve as a basis for decision-making to improve the effectiveness of the company’s marketing communications policy, primarily through storytelling, customer loyalty and brand competitiveness.

Linking Scholarship and Practice: Narrative and Identity in Science

In recent years, science communicators have enthusiastically embraced storytelling as a means of dramatizing the process of science and humanizing the scientists who conduct it. Compared to evidence-based argumentation, narratives do tend to be more engaging, more comprehensible, more believable, and more persuasive to non-specialist audiences. However, the gaps between research and practice in this field are considerable, in part because both comprise many distinct areas of expertise. Here, we draw on our experience as a professional storytelling organization and seek to narrow some of these gaps by linking the scholarship to our practice, and to encourage engagement with scholars about future directions in the field. This perspective article intends to synthesize theory and practice to address two major questions: What is the impact of stories on audiences? What is the impact of stories on their tellers? We consider both questions in the knowledge that science and science communication are only beginning to address the historic and ongoing underrepresentation of stories from many racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender, and socioeconomic groups. We focus on how stories influence social stereotypes about scientists, as well as identity and belonging within science, and conclude with the link between narrative identity and mental health and well-being.

Transcultural Storytelling

Often storytelling is framed as being rooted in a particular culture and told by the flickering fireplace or campfire light. This has invited comparisons with storytellers telling in contemporary multicultural public contexts, such as schools, libraries, and community centers. This is often characterized as a difference between traditional and contemporary storytellers or between traditional and professional storytellers. Here these distinctions are questioned. Instead, a consideration of endocultural and transcultural storytelling is proposed. Zora Neale Hurston's writing and career is discussed as demonstrating the positionality of a transcultural storyteller.

What can we Learn about Research Narratives from Professional Storytellers?

This short note on practice reflects on how “research narrative” is a much-used, but misunderstood term. Compelling stories about our research are important: for public-facing communications and for academic tenure confirmation and promotion. They are also important for researchers to gain a clearer sense of their own vision and values in the research process: they are not just a communication skill, they’re a career skill. But often researchers in STEM disciplines do not have the practical skills to write stories. We draw on our own practice as creative writers to share some simple and effective methods to bring arts expertise into STEM research narratives.

Storytelling among child welfare social workers: Constructing professional role and resilience through team talk

Child welfare social work is emotive and demanding work, requiring highly skilled and resilient practitioners. In a context of austerity, increased public scrutiny and accountability, defensive practice has been identified as a feature of professional practice. However, little is known about the processes through which social workers develop resilience or come to adopt a defensive stance in managing the demands of their work. This article focuses on professional storytelling among child welfare social workers. It examines how social workers construct their professional role through team talk and the implications of this for our understanding of professional resilience and defensiveness. Drawing on an in-depth narrative analysis of focus groups with social work teams, eight story types are identified in social workers’ talk about their work: emotional container stories, solidarity stories, professional epiphanies, professional affirmation stories, partnership stories, parables of persistence, tales of courageous practice and cautionary tales. Each story type foregrounds a particular aspect of child welfare practice, containing a moral about social work with vulnerable children and families. The article concludes with the implications of these stories for our understanding of both resilience and the pull towards defensiveness in child welfare social work.

THE GREEK FOLK TALE: TYPOLOGY AND ANALYSIS

The article outlines typology of the Greek folk tale, its structure and plot peculiarities. The folk tale is a reproduction of thoughts and beliefs and every reader experiences the folk tale in a different way according to his or her experiences. Therefore, the folk tale is not just a remnant of the past, but a collection of cultural elements which are gradually put together by the narrators and which reach the readers or listeners as a cultural blend that they need to decode. The Greek folk tales have been known since ancient times. Herodotus includes folk tales in his Histories, while Aristophanes mentions a story-teller named Philepsios. Moreover, Aristotle states the fact that children’s education includes listening to fables and folk tales. Later professional storytellers appear in the Greek society. During the Byzantine period there are very few references to folk tales and the only thing we can mention is that there were mime artists who used to entertain the rulers and lords with their narrations. During the period of Ottoman empire in Greece, the folk tale and other forms of folk culture became the main expression of social reality. The storytellers of that time contributed to the preservation and development of folk oral tradition and, as a result, folk tales were told by sailors, shepherds, they were heard during the long trips of caravans, and they were also very common in agricultural life.

“Baojuan of Five Spirits” as a source of folk beliefs in Suzhou city, Jiangsu, China

«Вестник Санкт-Петербургского университета. Востоковедение и африканистика» — рецензируемый междисциплинарный научный журнал, призванный стимулировать развитие оригинальных, независимых, достоверных, многосторонних исследований в области востоковедения и африканистики.

“The Next Last of the Breed”: Dynastic Succession and Resistance in an Appalachian Storytelling Clan

Abstract Appalachian storyteller Ray Hicks was often described metonymically as “the last of his breed.” After Ray’s death in 2003, it emerged that several younger extended family members were capable of re-telling his stories. While space exists in the professional storytelling world for next-generation tellers to step into the family storytelling mantle, internal and external factors have resisted this development. The essay explores attitudes toward private and public performance, memory, identity, and honor among the descendants and relatives of a dominant Appalachian tradition-bearer.

Subjects and Narratives in Archaeology

Subjects and Narratives in Archaeology

Stories of (self)-introduction for communicative effectiveness of an institutionalized storytelling performance

Over the last few decades, increasing interest in oral narratives as a point of entry into understanding self-presentation and construction of personal and social identities has led to several studies which adopt a contextualized approach to analyses of everyday conversational narratives. In this study, adopting a similar contextualized approach but focusing on a less spontaneous and more institutionalized type of oral storytelling, I examine the narrative told as an introduction to a professional storyteller before her storytelling performance, as well as the oral tale inscribed with institutional messages told during her storytelling performance. I discuss how the construction of storyteller’s identities in the narrative of introduction preceding the telling of an oral tale was an important strategy that enhanced the communicative effectiveness of the storytelling performance in disseminating the institutional messages. The study extends our understanding of the ways in which various institutions in contemporary society have been using storytelling performances by professional storytellers as a communicative, educative and meaning-making tool.

It's story time!: exploring the potential of multimodality in oral storytelling to support children's vocabulary learning

AbstractAlthough many studies have been done on the benefits of parent/teacher‐child interactions during shared storybook reading or read‐aloud sessions, very few have examined the potential of professional storytellers' oral discourse to support children's vocabulary learning. In those storytelling sessions conducted by professional storytellers, the process of telling a story is typically not accompanied by a book, but only by the teller's well‐coordinated gestures, facial expressions and voice modulations. In this study, I perform a multimodal analysis of storytellers' oral discourse recorded during two storytelling sessions for four‐to‐five‐year‐old children. The study aims to (1) find out the specific types of vocal and visual features accompanying the spoken words which were unlikely to be known by the children but used by the storytellers for representations of events and characters, and (2) explore the potential of these multimodal features in oral storytelling to support children's inferring of word meanings. The study offers insights into multimodality in oral storytelling and implications for exploring the potential of multimodal features in this form of literacy practice to support children's vocabulary learning.

“There's a Crocodile!”: Training Preschool Teachers to Engage Children through Interactive Oral Storytelling

Abstract: Despite the fact that oral storytelling engages our capacity to pretend and that preschool teachers report that children are highly engaged by professional storytellers, the impact of training preschool teachers in storytelling has not been sufficiently studied. This qualitative intervention study explores the impact of training in storytelling on early educators' teaching. Findings reveal that the teachers learned to (1) make teacher-led experiences more engaging, (2) become aware of their tendencies to dismiss children's ideas, and (3) become more skilled at accepting children's contributions. These findings have important implications for teacher education and suggest that training in storytelling may offer a unique contribution toward preparing teachers to be skilled at engaging young children and to be responsive in their teaching.

Introduction to the Special Issue: Global Storytelling

In an age of transmigration and border-crossings, many academics and professional storytellers have looked to storytelling as a way to broaden and deepen our participation in a global community. “G...