Public Narratives Research Articles

Memorial Narrative and Procedural Aspects of Cultural Exclusion

The article focuses on the process of deploying a public memorial narrative and its impact on cultural memory and the processes of cultural exclusion. The author proposes to look at several aspects using new methodological solutions: how the public memorial narrative is formed; why the narrative does not fall apart if different people participate in its deployment; how the memorial narrative preserves excluded experience; how the research of cultural memory benefits from video game study approach. The main goal is to find out how the excluded cultural experience is preserved, if the main task of deploying a public narrative is to displace the “superfluous”. Several analytical concepts are proposed: the key point, the interpretive bundle, the zero point, the descriptive bolvanka, the procedural rhetoric of cultural memory, the chronotope of the public memorial narrative and others. Through these notions it is possible to explain some processes of narrative pragmatics related to emotions, behavior, presumptions and stereotypes. The article is intended for a wide range of readers interested in public history, the history of emotions, narratology, the theory of cultural exclusion and frontier zones.

Perspectives on biotechnology: Public and corporate narratives in the GM archives

Societal Impact StatementThe contentious debate over genetically modified (GM) crops in Britain has entered a new era following Brexit and the development of gene editing. At the same time, the events of the 1980s and 1990s are now entering historical archives, including the GM Archive at the Science Museum in London. This article explores how fears of unnaturalness and arguments from historical continuity informed the British GM controversy. It also analyses the limitations of these modern archives. The concerns surrounding the naturalness and continuity of biotechnology have recently been resurrected following suggestions that gene editing will be employed in plant breeding.Summary This research examines the introduction of genetically modified (GM) crops to Britain, including the backlash from environmentalist groups and the public that led to a de facto government moratorium on their commercialisation in 1998. Harnessing archival materials from the Science Museum's GM Archive, this paper shows that GM was viewed as an alien or unnatural technology in Britain, while campaigns from Monsanto and scientific supporters of GM attempted to show how recombinant DNA technology was simply the latest step in a long history of plant breeding. By moving outside the archive, it becomes clear that the creation of this narrative from continuity was a standard industry strategy. Appeals to the history of plant breeding was a strategy adopted by Monsanto well before the British GM controversy, while twentieth‐century food scares had already undermined public trust in government and industry. Public concern over the naturalness of biotechnology remains. Meanwhile, contemporary advocates of gene editing have begun to make similar arguments to those deployed in the 1990s, highlighting the similarity of gene editing to natural variation and selection.

Crafting Public Narrative to Enable Collective Action: A Pedagogy for Leadership Development

Crafting Public Narrative to Enable Collective Action: A Pedagogy for Leadership Development

Attributing public ignorance in vaccination narratives

The notion of an ‘ignorant public’ is attributed in outbreak scenarios through vaccination narratives that are institutionally reinforced by governments and the media across different contexts. The ignorant public narrative is a discursive shift that reduces public concerns about vaccines to a lack of knowledge, obscuring how these concerns are indicative of mistrust and anxiety or efforts to counter the dominance of acceptable and legitimate knowledge. This narrative risks a deflection of challenges in the structural determinants of vaccine uptake and depoliticise rumours and mistrust that arise during vaccination campaigns. Examples from Sierra Leone, Uganda, and India show how ‘ignorant public’ framings are used as explanation for vaccine hesitancy through assigned roles for institutions and publics, and the consequences this narrative has for vaccination encounters. These examples are based on ethnographic fieldwork and media analysis carried out before, during, and after outbreaks, of newly introduced vaccines for both human and animal health. Drawing on science communication and development studies, we show how this narrative then positions governmental concern about vaccine hesitancy as being a (largely) imagined issue of public ignorance. We argue that when institutions tasked with strengthening vaccine uptake see public ignorance as the key problem, this can obscure other problems, such as competing interests and experiences, and also minority group treatment. As a result, public governance is rationalised by assigning the ignorance label to certain public groups that stand in contrast to scientific and government expertise, and so accountability for low vaccine uptake is transferred onto the public.

Legal implications of the climate-health crisis: A case study analysis of the role of public health in climate litigation.

BackgroundStrong scientific evidence affirms that climate change is now a public health emergency. Increasingly, climate litigation brought against governments and corporations utilizes international human rights, environmental and climate laws and policies to seek accountability for climate-destructive and health-harming actions. The health impacts of climate change make litigation an important means of pursuing justice and strategically challenging legal systems. Yet there is scant documentation in the literature of the role that public health has played in climate litigation and the legal weight public health narratives are given in such contexts. Therefore, we assessed to what extent courts of law have used public health harm in legal adjudication and sought to provide practical recommendations to address barriers to positioning legal arguments in public health-centric frames.MethodsWe reviewed legal databases to identify all publicly reported, documented, cases of climate litigation filed in any country or jurisdiction between 1990 and September 2020. For the 1641 cases identified, we quantified the frequency of cases where health concerns were explicitly or implicitly raised.FindingsCase numbers are trending upwards, notably in high income countries. Resolution remains pending in over half of cases as the majority were initiated in the past three years. Cases were primarily based in climate and human rights law and brought by a wide range of groups and individuals predominantly against governments. About half of the decided cases found in favour for the plaintiffs. Based on this, we selected the 65 cases that were directly linked to public health. We found economic forces and pricing of health risks play a key role, as courts are challenged by litigants to adjudicate on the responsibility for health impacts.ConclusionsWhile courts of law are receptive to public health science, significant legal reform is needed to enhance leveraging of public health evidence in legal judgements of climate litigation cases. The integration of a public health mandate into a new eco-centric legal paradigm will optimize its potential to promote human well-being—the core objective underpinning both international law, human rights, and public health. Existing legal doctrines and practices can be enhanced to increase the weight of public health arguments in climate legal action and consequently ensure legal rulings in climate litigation prioritize, protect and promote public health.

Framing Post-2011 Syria in the Translation of Samar Yazbek’s Bawa:ba:t ard alʿadam: The Crossing My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria

Drawing on narrative theory and theories of paratext, this article examines the translation of Samar Yazbek’s 2014 Bawa:ba:t ard alʿadam into English, paying close attention to how this text is translated, packaged and circulated for the consumption of Anglophone literary market. It argues that the translation and packaging of Yazbek’s text becomes a means of foregrounding or suppressing certain narratives and of positioning and enacting agency. Considering the metamorphosis of a once peaceful, secular revolution into radicalised insurgency hijacked by Daesh and other extremist groups, this article argues that translatorial agents demonstrate a proclivity to feed entrenched stereotypes and public narratives about the protagonists of the Syrian civil conflict through translation and translation peritexts. Through the use of various textual, contextual, and peritextual framing strategies, the translation appears to be entangled with pre-existing and ideologically-motivated public narratives circulating in the West. These narratives include Orientalist depictions of the Arab World and contentious discourses on veiling, oppression, and terrorism, which are reflected in how the highly politicised narratives of the source text are translated, and the way peritextual materials are designed and packaged by the publisher. These effects have ultimately produced the text for the Anglophone readership both familiar and exotic. .

On Retroactive Instrumentality

AbstractThe topic of instrumentalism has engaged many scholars of contemporary educational thought. One can distinguish the positions of anti‐instrumentalism from those that stress noninstrumental values of education, both conceived in the context of neoliberal/neoconservative and consumption‐driven reality. In this text, Maria Mendel enters into this engagement from the perspective of the current political consumption of memory. While taking up the problem of the role public pedagogy plays in contemporary nation‐states — especially in the current turn toward the past — Mendel focuses on both educational and sociopolitical issues in the context of what she calls “retroactive instrumentalism.” When return to the past is the “principle of the contemporary,” she argues, instrumentalism does not necessarily result from intentional planning ex ante. If education is broadly understood as a practice of public space formation, it may be composed of experiences that do not have to be “traditionally” purposeful and oriented toward the future. They may gain their instrumental character ex post. To illustrate this possibility, Mendel analyzes snippets of Polish reality concerning the construction of “the good nation.” Many of the elements of public pedagogy in this case contain unifications that pertain directly to the instrumental character of the learning experiences employed by a society as it transforms into a nation. The instrumentalism of those elements is discovered post factum. In its ontological dimension, then, education may gain or solidify its instrumental character ex post. Based on the analysis proposed in this text, one could say that when instrumentality is retroactive, it becomes displaced intentionality — that is, it provides an instrumental story that disguises the intentions of the one writing the narrative. Mendel concludes by using the Aristotelian notion of phantasia, which regards “being without a matter,” to encourage productive thought about how to create public narratives that are free of instrumentalism. This grounds a version of public pedagogy that is oriented toward the animation of people's active imagining and thus becoming public. By epistemologically shifting learning into a public space, such public pedagogy serves to recultivate society and humanity as plurality, diversity, and coproduction of the public.

Undrowned Story: The Landscape on the Volgo–Baltic Waterway as the Volga Hydropower Cascade Submersions Memorial

Vast territories along the Volga River basin were intentionally submerged in the 1930s to 1980s for the sake of creating the Volga hydropower cascade. Many people suffered displacement, and hundreds of cultural and historical sites were destroyed or left under water. However, these events were never recognized as a national tragedy in the official public narrative. This article is dedicated to a grassroots project aimed at creating a ‘lieu de mémoire’ for this difficult heritage by preserving the ruins of a submerged church. The ruins marking the transformed landscape bear memories of the events that accompanied that transformation as well as the role of an individual and local community in commemorating the traumatic events. Intentionally preserved ruins are extremely rare for Russia, yet they powerfully link tangible and intangible heritage and give voice to repressed narratives.

Talking about volcanoes: institutional narratives, the nature of risk, and Mount Mayon in the Philippines.

Volcanoes are talked about as if they are one and the same thing. If they are differentiated, they are referred to as active or inactive, and classified according to their structure and composition. Volcanoes, however, do not mean the same thing to all people. Mount Mayon in Albay province, Philippines, is a case in point. Through interviews with a volcanologist, an engineer, a politician, a historian, and a local resident, this paper explores what people think a volcano is and the risks it poses. These informants do not share a common narrative. Their personal storylines are embedded in public narratives that are fixed in time and place, and master narratives that reflect the social values and standards of their group or profession. How stories are told, what is said, and the context within which they emerge constitute an institutional narrative that is important to understanding better how people perceive risk and improving disaster risk management.

Occupational prestige and job satisfaction in high-stress public safety work

Abstract Many factors play into public safety officers’ levels of stress, with relevance to community relations and public safety. This study examined perceptions of occupational prestige, job satisfaction, and resilience, drawing on a sample of 68 officers from two US municipal police agencies and one county jail. Focus group findings about the prestige of public safety work indicated that although officers were aware of—and sometimes adversely affected by—the negative public narrative and perceptions of information asymmetry, many also reported on positive interactions with the local communities that they served. Findings about job satisfaction illustrated officers’ pride in their performance but awareness of the need for resiliency and coping strategies in the face of occupational and administrative stressors and impact on their personal lives. Given the current broader discourse about criminal justice professions, attention to officers’ perceptions of their work is an important input to both policy and public safety.

“The World's Greatest Hypocrites”: White Men and Diplomatic Reporting in the Early Cold War

When incorporating the press into historical narratives, scholars have often relied on published newspaper and magazine articles without interrogating how those pieces were produced. This article relies on the under-used archival papers of journalists in the early Cold War period to argue that they actively created a Washington consensus on foreign policy that kept economic determinism out of the U.S. public's understanding of policies like the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. In private, however, the more anticommunist public narrative was contradicted by a discourse that emphasized the importance of access to colonial raw materials. This private discourse was enabled by the Washington press corps’ social spaces, which were segregated by race and gender and helped create a worldview that acknowledged the hypocrisy of the U.S. government but not their own.

Chasing Geographical and Social Mobility: The motivations of Nigerian madams to enter indentured relationships

This article draws from interviews with Nigerian women convicted of trafficking for sexual exploitation in Italy to challenge the simplistic public narrative of traffickers as ruthless foreign men who coerce naïve women into migration and sex work. Madams’ narratives shed light on a reality of trafficking where both traffickers and victims share similar desires to overcome constraints imposed on their geographical and social mobility through their migration to Europe. Therefore, the article calls for the inclusion of traffickers’ perspectives into the knowledge on human trafficking, which is mainly victim-centred and justifies the current anti-trafficking approach aimed at victims’ protection and traffickers’ punishment. In the research context, taking into consideration the perspectives of all trafficking actors involved suggests the need to rethink Nigerian women’s indentured migration to Europe through sex work (and policies around it) in terms of attempts to achieve geographical and social mobility rather than transnational criminal activities. Finally, the article provides recommendations on how to address these issues both within the current anti-trafficking policy domain and beyond it, by calling for more open borders.

The psychology of mineral wealth: Empirical evidence from Kazakhstan

Despite rapidly-expanding academic and policy interest in the links between natural resource wealth and development failures – commonly referred to as the ‘resource curse’ – little attention has been devoted to the psychology behind the phenomenon. Rent-seeking and excessive reliance on mineral revenues can be attributed largely to social psychology. Mineral booms (whether due to the discovery of mineral reserves or to the drastic rise in commodity prices) start as positive income shocks that can subsequently evolve into influential and expectation-changing public and media narratives; these lead consecutively to unrealistic demands that favor immediate consumption of accrued mineral revenues and to the postponement of productive investment. To our knowledge, this paper is the first empirical analysis that tests hypotheses regarding the psychological underpinnings of resource mismanagement in mineral-rich states. Our study relies on an extensive personal survey (of 1977 respondents) carried out in Almaty, Kazakhstan, between May and August 2018. We find empirical support for a positive link between exposure to news and inflated expectations regarding mineral availability, as well as evidence that the latter can generate preferences for excessive consumption, and hence, rent-seeking.

From the Editor

From the Editor

Let No Man Judge: Remembering the Calypsonian and Containing Risk

AbstractWhen calypsonian Merchant died of HIV-related causes in 1999, his life and death became a conduit for the public discussion of HIV/AIDS in Trinidad and Tobago. Merchant was remembered simultaneously as a womanizing, working-class calypsonian and as a closeted gay man. These public narratives, like narratives of other individuals associated with disease or epidemics, used music to allocate risk to marginalized groups and, by implication, away from much of the general Trinidadian public.

Collective Amnesia and Generational Memory in Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography

The war of 1971 has been widely represented in all forms of media in Bangladesh. However, Pakistani literature offers a stark contrast, as references to the war are sparse. The representation of the war in Pakistani official discourse is also understandably contradictory to that of Bangladesh. Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography (2001) is one of the few Pakistani novels setting the 1971 war as its backdrop. This article attempts to understand the role of literary narratives to offer a perspective which diverges from the nationalist public narrative. It endeavours to locate the novel in a world of proliferating international apologies for historical misdeeds. It delineates the cyclical nature of violence and hatred as demonstrated in the novel by drawing connections between various historical events and their memories, as it attempts to understand how the relationship between personal and political shapes individual and national identity. This article demonstrates through a close reading of the novel how narratives are used to forge collective amnesia and collective denial of responsibility, interrogating generational guilt and national self-examination as illustrated in Kartography.

Motvilliga vittnen

Reluctant Witnesses: Swedish Memoirs from the Soviet Karelian Purges Several hundred Swedes emigrated to Soviet Karelia in the beginning of the 1930s. Many of them remained there when the Great Terror began, and they became targets of repression. As of now, there is no coherent public narrative in Sweden that acknowledge the Swedish survivors; most survivors never talked publicly about their experiences, let alone wrote about them, and the few who did, did so reluctantly. This article discusses four memoirs written by Swedish survivors of the Soviet repression and the silence that still surrounds these memoirs. The narratives themselves, as well as the reception of the narratives, bear witness to the difficulty of narrating experiences that have not yet been publicly acknowledged. Based on the Swedish witness accounts, this article aims to examine 1) the difficulty of testifying in the absence of a public narrative, and 2) the ability of witness literature to challenge and change established historical narratives.

Public narrative and sustained civic engagement: The Wichita County Water Conservation Area in Rural Kansas

ABSTRACT Sustained civic engagement is important to the success of social movements, which contribute to community development outcomes. Our qualitative case study of the Wichita County Water Conservation Area (WCA) suggests that sustained civic engagement among producers in Western Kansas can be understood as a positive feedback loop whereby organizers use public narrative to increase social, cultural, and political capitals in their community. The Wichita County WCA team uses public narrative to increase interpersonal solidarity (social capital) and develop a shared sense of meaning and purpose (cultural capital), while taking a diffuse and relational approach to leadership (political capital). They manage emotions such as fear, grief, despair, and frustration in a manner consistent with the Public Narrative model of social action. Our findings suggest that organizers should consider using a public narrative approach to sustain civic engagement in rural communities.

Unpacking the Belt and Road Initiative: Does Its Public Diplomacy Narratives Match Its Implementation?

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a well-acknowledged central economic and diplomatic policy of the Chinese government, which was proposed by President Xi Jinping in 2013. This paper intends to discover the relationship between the public diplomacy narratives of the BRI and its implementation. By using content analysis, this paper analyzes Chinese President Xi’s speeches from 2013 to 2020 about the BRI, as well as official statements of the Chinese central government. It identifies the public diplomacy narratives of the BRI: an assemblage of constantly changing policy settings that accommodates various economic and political interests. Also, this paper draws on differences between countries joining the BRI or not, and several case studies to elucidate the implementation of the BRI.Different from repetitive literature that explores either the BRI narratives or its implementation, this paper contributes by combining and comparing the two. Despite positive interpretations of the BRI the Chinese government has adopted, the paper argues that there are no deceptive tricks with skeletons in the closet of the Chinese government, as the BRI public diplomacy narratives are, in general, consistent with its implementation.

Shredded

Abstract From 2012 to 2016, the Colombian Government and the FARC-EP guerilla group sought to end the region’s longest non-international armed conflict. Under the auspices of the international community, this process drew from a complex series of practices and knowledge often known as ‘transitional justice’. Indeed, international expertise — in law and other fields — was also actively mobilized by both parties, as well as civil society and the anti-peace opposition, to contest the meaning of these terms. On paper, the peace agreement adopted a cutting-edge and comprehensive system aimed at delivering truth, justice, reparation, and non-repetition (the SIVJRNR), including both judicial and extrajudicial mechanisms following international standards and best practices. Yet in practice, the situation became increasingly dire after the peace agreement was narrowly voted down in October 2016. Two years later, having entered government, the former populist opposition proudly announced its plan to shred the peace accord and the SIVJRNR (including its crown jewel: the Special Jurisdiction for Peace or JEP). In this context, this article seeks to identify and understand the strategies which might be adopted by transitional justice institutions to prevail against waves of populist misinformation and backlash. The Colombian experiment can offer important insights on how humanitarian actors can generate public narratives of reconciliation in our current dire times of mistrust.