Story Space Research Articles

Reflections on unheroic fieldwork

AbstractMore than a decade ago, at the beginning of my doctoral fieldwork, I was kidnapped and robbed one morning in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. As I negotiated the logistical and emotional aftermath of this traumatic event, I took refuge in elite, privileged spaces. In doing so, I grappled with difficult problems: my privilege, my fear and feelings of vulnerability, and my broader moral concerns about Tanzania's poverty, gross wealth inequities, and the impacts these have on public health. Here, using Harrison's framing of multiple consciousness, I reflect on my vulnerability and privilege, and how they illuminate the impact the kidnapping had on my research and my perspectives on knowledge production. I call for our discipline to continue dismantling narratives of heroic fieldwork and to make more compassionate space for honest stories of our mistakes and privileges. Doing so would allow anthropologists to more faithfully account for fieldwork's messy unpredictabilities and tangled relations.

A Story for Another World: Entering the Bad Indian Pluriverse

Deborah A. Miranda’s experimental meditation Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, first published in 2012, is a carefully woven narrative collage of the intergenerational trauma of genocide that conjures forth a time and space beyond the settler fiction of California where Indigenous peoples heal and regenerate worlds. I argue that Miranda’s Bad Indians is a queer Indigenous feminist poetic against the grammar of genocide. Bad Indian poetics are a way of being and moving beyond settler fictions towards the possibility of other worlds. The Bad Indian is both a queer relation creating non-heteropatriarchal genealogies and an articulation of Indigenous felt theory that exceeds the legibility of the human and Western affect and ways of knowing. The pedagogy of Miranda’s Bad Indian is significantly more expansive than simply a counter-narrative to settler origin fantasies, public landmark histories, or problematic grade school curriculums - it is a way of learning, feeling, and knowing to navigate, heal, and regenerate from colonialism. The Bad Indian creates the poetry of bringing otherwise worlds into being, lives in non-linear sacred time and intergenerational memory, and feels differently, queerly Indigenous. The Bad Indian as poetic and pedagogy emerges from non-federally recognized tribal descendant experiences, queering methodologies for Indigenous regeneration that defy ways we have internalized colonial borders and definitions of Indigeneity and opens space for stories that do not conform to even the mainstream narratives of Indian Country itself. This essay works through that methodology: using a mosaic of graphics, stories, and archival fragments; to demonstrate how Bad Indians allows us to create knowledge and critique differently and abolish the false borders between the critical and creative.

Industrial Accident Prevention Training with Time Travel Prevention Games: Adaptive Personalized Story Experiences by Artificial Intelligence

Industrial accident prevention is a problem of societal relevance. It is worth the investment of contemporary education theory and up-to-date information and communication technologies including Artificial Intelligence (AI). Apparent deficiencies of AI that is based on Large Language Models (LLMs) und Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs) bear abundant evidence for the need of going beyond the limits of sub-symbolic AI. Game based training is attractive to practitioners and advantageous over conventional educational methods. There is developed, implemented, and applied the original concept of time travel prevention games. The approach is generic and applies to other domains such as crime prevention and health care as well. The key idea is interactive story engagement that allows, if necessary, for virtual time travel to impact the fate. Trainees experience stories of success. Digital storyboarding is an AI design methodology derived from approaches to dynamic plan generation. Technically, a storyboard is a hierarchically structured family of graphs. Semantically, it determines a potentially infinite space of different stories. Single stories unfold at execution time, i.e. during game play, dynamically in response to human activities and environmental conditions. The game AI analyzes the history of game play represented as a string of actions and events. Operationally, string processing, counting letters in strings, finding properties of strings, and the like is key. The prepared alternatives of unfolding game play represent the interdisciplinary designer team's intelligence based on domain knowledge, education theory, learning psychology, game design principles, VR technology, and the like. The storyboard is the place where AI resides. Keywords: industrial accident prevention, prevention training, time travel prevention games, education theory, Artificial Intelligence, sub-symbolic AI, symbolic AI, adaptivity, play state, game state, storyboarding, storyboard interpretation technology

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Sexual Violence Survivors and Censorship on the Social Media Platform TikTok.

Sexual violence is a public health threat in the USA and past research has found that survivors who seek support and disclose their experiences tend to have greater positive outcomes, such as positive life changes, reduced post-traumatic stress disorder, and fewer depressive symptoms. While social media have become an important site of disclosure, over-moderation of sex and sexuality on social media platforms due to the passing of the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act may inadvertently lead to the removal of survivors' posts and hinder their ability to build communities of support. In line with critical discourse analysis, this study examined the discursive strategies utilized in online disclosures made by sexual violence survivors on the social media platform TikTok to determine if they make use of algospeak, a neologism referring to the strategy of misspelling words or using coded language to avoid detection and deletion by site moderators. Analysis of the data indicated that sexual violence survivors do make use of algospeak, as well as direct and indirect language, to share their disclosures, and that, while TikTok claims to provide space for survivors' stories, its guidelines and approach to language about sex and sexuality may create barriers to building supportive communities.

THE HISTORY BEHIND THE FICTION: THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT PRESENTED IN SAXON STORIES , BY BERNARD CORNWELL

The purpose of this article is to present the historical context of the narrative space of the literary series Saxon Stories (2004-2020), by British author Bernard Cornwell. After briefly summarizing the plot of the first three novels in the series, we aim to explore the historical backdrop by discussing the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian peoples, as well as their interactions in the 9th century British lands. Notably, the cultural exchange between these groups is significant. Moreover, the relations between these two peoples led to cultural “hybridity”, which influenced the formation of English society and identity. This aspect is particularly relevant to the historical novels comprising Saxon Stories, as the protagonist and narrator, Uhtred, embodies this hybridity. Throughout the narrative, Uhtred experiences a sense of division between the two cultures: he is not able to state whether he considers himself an Anglo-Saxon or a Dane

Surviving by storytelling – a research through design exploration of online poetry and mental health workshops

ABSTRACT Background The paper explores an online poetry and mental health project titled “Surviving by Storytelling”. The paper reflects on the knowledge which has been iteratively generated during the project and considers the unique challenges to delivering these workshops online. Methods Research through design (RtD) methodology was used to evaluate the project, which involved reflective discussions between workshop facilitators and a review of the artefacts generated throughout the project. Results The results revealed five themes: poetry workshops should be therapeutic, but not psychotherapy; creating a safe space for stories to breathe; facilitators should consider their positioning as writers or experts in relation to attendees; managing the potential harms of poetic exploration; and managing the loss of interpersonal symbols and spaces. Conclusion The provision of online poetry workshops on the topic of mental health can present unique complexities and the results from this paper can help to inform future practice.

Reflections from members of a collaborative social work practitioner–academic research team investigating the career progression experiences of black social workers

This article shares the reflections of members of a collaborative practitioner–academic research team in social work. The team investigated the career progression experiences of black social workers working in statutory social work services in South-East London. Our intention in this article is to share our experience of researching a subject that holds emotional and political resonance. We do so by offering individual perspectives from different team members on how their project involvement affected them both personally and professionally. We also discuss some of the general themes identified in our reflections. These include practitioners growing in research confidence, the need to create a safe emotional space for stories of researcher discomfort and uncertainty to be heard, the effects of undertaking research on professional social work identity, and curiosity about whether our research endeavours can change social work career progression policies and practices for black social work colleagues. We caution that a safe emotional container is required when researching personally and professionally sensitive, subjects such as racism and discrimination in social work. We hope that our article inspires social work practitioners to become involved in research activities.

Competition among visual, verbal, and auditory modalities: a socio-semiotic perspective

Abstract This article presents a fresh perspective on the interplay among visual, verbal, and auditory modalities, positing that these modalities, as semogenic resources, compete to express dynamic meanings. The theoretical paradigm emphasizes that whether a modality or an element within a modality gets or loses semantic status, it will elicit an additional layer of social meaning to depict a comprehensive picture of a story together with an explicit semiotic meaning. The article adopts a qualitative method to analyze the data, which are drawn from The Good Wife and My Roommate is a Gumiho and annotated in ELAN 6.3. It was found that modal competition can shed light on the dynamic meaning-making processes in semiotic and societal orientations. Modal competition may distort space and time of different stories, and reconstruct a different discursive spatio-temporal dimension in the TV world. It can diversify the dynamic orientations from New to Given in visual, verbal, and auditory texts of multimodal discourses to tell stories. Modal competition provides a lens to understand the multidimensional reality and to appreciate the aesthetics of a modern TV series.

Unnatural World—the Study of Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five from the Perspective of Unnatural Narrative

As one of the most outstanding contemporary novelists, Doris Lessing, a famous British female writer, won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. Doris Lessing’s new work Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five has been studied at home and abroad mainly in the aspects of feminism and Sufism in the work. Based on the unnatural narrative theory of post-classical narratologists Jan Albert and Brian Richardson, this paper analyzes the unnatural narrative factors in the stories from three aspects: unnatural space, unnatural role and unnatural behavior. The unnatural of the novel is to prove the unnatural nature of the world in the novel from three aspects: impossible story space, story role and characters’ behavior, and analyze the author's intention behind these unnatural factors -- the world is an interconnected whole, and the progress of human civilization requires people of all countries to be open-minded, inclusive, communicate with each other and learn from each other, in order to jointly promote the overall progress and prosperity of world civilization.

Vulnerability and narrative inlater life.

Narrative gerontology considers how people age biographically as well as socially and biologically. Vulnerability as aprocess category and state of being remains undertheorized in the context of narratives of later life. It is argued that the narrative space for stories from old age privilege backward-looking stories that focus on positive milestones and support cultural narratives of a"life well lived." Sad, emotionally laden or uncertain/unfinished stories that reveal vulnerabilities are rejected and potentially viewed as problematic. Using an illustrative case example of astudy of resilience narratives and aging, this paper considers how the study authors position and identify resilience. Some interpretative judgements used in the research regarding who is resilient based on expressions of vulnerability are highlighted. Overall, the tensions between cultural and personal narratives that position older people as vulnerable subjects are considered and it is argued that vulnerability can be agreat source of strength and meaning in later life.

‘I was right here, the whole time, none of you could see me’: Background Ghosts, Fear, and Vision in Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting (2018–2020)

This article focuses on Mike Flanagan’s Haunting series and brings the pervasive background ghost to the foreground of analysis by studying that which is, as expressed by young Nell in The Haunting of Hill House, ‘right here the whole time’ and yet cannot be seen. Using Jacques Derrida’s seminal notion of ‘spectre’ and its related ‘visor effect’ concept to build textual analyses of both The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, this study demonstrates the ways in which the background ghost both reflects and challenges conventional horror dynamics of visuality and spectacularity. Such dynamics extend beyond the story space and involve the implied and near-sighted spectator, at once imperfect ghost-hunter and hunted by the background ghost. Such pervasive mechanics of haunting allow Flanagan to create a space of highly contemporary terror oozing from the screen to the implied viewer.

Costumes that tell multispecies stories: Critique of Sympoiesis: A Bio-Inspired Dance Performance

This research report critiques the multispecies (human and other-than-human) connections created by the costumes inSympoiesis: A Bio-Inspired Dance Performance. Focusing on individuals from three kingdoms:Physarum polycephalum(Protista),Alocasia zebrina(Plantae) andHomo sapiens(Animalia), the performance aimed to share the story of their entanglement. This report unwinds the research and outcome, demonstrating how the other-than-human species’ interdisciplinary research guided the conception of the costumes, choreography and set design. The research has been framed here in the theoretical context of ‘costume agency’, ‘response-ability’ and ‘care’, showing how the concepts infused the design and making process. I reflect on the ethical questions raised while working towards an ecological vision of costume, in terms of both making and designing. Through this article, I argue that creating a space for multispecies stories onstage will require a change in the way we study, design and make costumes.

Keynote: Story Culture Live: Black American Story Spaces as Actionable Antiracism Work

Keynote: Story Culture Live: Black American Story Spaces as Actionable Antiracism Work

REALISME MAGIS SEBAGAI REPRESENTASI KRITIK KEADAAN DALAM MANUSIA KELELAWAR KARYA DAMHURI MUHAMMAD

Indonesian people are one of many eastern countries that still believe in the tradition of honoring their ancestors, therefore people still believe in mystical things. This has led some writers to use people's 'trust' in mysticism in their literary works. This article provides insight into how Wendy B. Faris' magical realism theory can be applied in the analysis of fictional stories. by analyzing magical realism in the selected short story by Kompas, “Bat Man” Damhuri Muhammad in 2022, through magical realism elements; (a) irreducible elements; (b) world phenomenal; (c) dimensions of the amalgamation; (d) unsetting doubts; and (e) disruption of time, space and identity in short stories. The five seek to establish a connection between real and magical life through the boundaries between the elements that have been broken. The use of this theory helps broaden the understanding of magical realism as a literary approach that allows social criticism through magical representations of complex social situations. The results of the study found that the 'bat man' who died horribly in this story represents the situation towards the hunting of bats that caused the spread of the virus, showing the arrogance of humans who seem to be brutal towards other living things. Keywords: Critique of Circumstances; Bat-Man; Magical Realism; Wendy B. Farris

Sailing to save the planet? Media-produced narratives of Greta Thunberg’s trip to the UN Climate Summit in German print newspapers

Narratives and stories are important communication tools and as such essential subjects of social geography. This paper analyses the retelling of Greta Thunberg’s sailing trip across the Atlantic to the Climate Action Summit in New York in 2019 in leading German newspapers and magazines and how her intentions are transformed through this reporting into different narratives. The research mainly focuses on examining the influence of space and place, as geographical research has revealed that spatial determinants are crucial in risk communication and knowledge generation on climate change but have yet to be studied considering stories. The paper, therefore, extends the story-based approach from communication sciences by geographical research on the role of space and place in action-based stories. Therefore, the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) is used to decode the spatial environment in narratives as an active element that shapes the narrative, and the way characters can (inter)act within these settings. The paper further develops the NPF framework through a geographical lens by focusing particularly on the selection options of spaces for social interactions and affective bonds. Thus, it becomes evident how spatial contexts and environments shape the interactions between individuals and crucially influence the types of narratives that emerge.

Visual identity in organisations and impact on employees' motivation: a case study in a governmental organisation

This paper investigates the development of a design object called Logistics Field Mat and how its narrative space can create a collaborative game environment. It followed the Design Science Research (DSR) approach and Peffers’ protocol to identify a problem, develop a design object, demonstrate its potential, evaluate and apply it to five robotics games, and communicate the findings. The results indicate a narrative space generated by the mat composed of a well-defined setting, a spatial structure, a story space, a narrative world, and a universe that can foster player engagement by positioning the field mat as an educational tool. Furthermore, the mat remediates two media: game boards and maps. This remediation highlights the narrative space and transforms it into a meaningful space.

Partnership Between Psychiatrists, Faith Leaders Untapped Key to Expanding Reach of MH Care

Partnership Between Psychiatrists, Faith Leaders Untapped Key to Expanding Reach of MH Care

Fluid stories: Indigeneity flowing through the urban narrative. The example of Ōtākaro, New Zealand

Our ancestors are master story tellers. They interweave our past, present and future for us. They deliver our genealogy, connecting people and their environment, conveying identity and obligation. Can you hear their voices in the city as you move along its waterways and paths and through its structures? In recent decades there has been a resurgence in the use of Indigenous languages, knowledges, culture and stories in urban areas. For some of us, there is a sense of optimism that comes from the success of initiatives that reassert the potency and integrity of Indigenous worldviews in the urban setting. Initiatives that contribute and re-remember a richer story. In this paper, I explore how Indigenous-led urban strategies in central Ōtautahi|Christchurch are serving to prize open a space for Indigenous stories in the settler-colonial city and thereby support Indigenous peoples to be and see themselves through the resulting reconnection to place, culture, history and kin.

Sanism and Narrative Research: Making Room for Mad Stories

AbstractThis article considers challenges and possibilities that narrative researchers in music education might encounter when attempting to recount stories of Madness. Narrative restorying often follows a three-dimensional space structure that includes the commonplaces of temporality, sociality, and place (Clandinin, 2016; Clandinin et al., 2016; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). Mad stories, however, do not easily restory into this structure. I center my own experiences of being bipolar to explore how such experiences particularly disrupt dimensions of temporality and sociality and assert that narrative researchers might learn to make room for Madness when telling stories. Moreover, I reflect on the impact of sanism—the oppression that Mad people experience—on Mad stories. In considering how narrative researchers might make space for Mad stories, I offer an expanded four-dimensional narrative structure alongside critical storytelling and draw upon the work of Patricia O'Toole (1994) and Roberta Lamb (1993–1994) to explore how researchers might represent such stories.

To Write in Unwellness: Documenting A/P/A Voices

In this collectively written essay, we write as volunteers with A/P/A Voices: A COVID-19 Public Memory Project to share and hold space for this archive's stories, images, sounds, and silences. A/P/A Voices first emerged in Spring 2020 when a group of public-facing scholars, activists, and cultural workers converging at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU recognized the critical need to document the myriad experiences of Asian Americans, Asian immigrants, and Pacific Islanders during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the past year and a half, A/P/A Voices volunteers have conducted over seventy-five oral histories with community organizers, mutual aid workers, healthcare workers, and cultural workers across the country, and over seventy-five artifacts (artwork, videos, other ephemera) have been donated by participants.