Stories Of Hope Research Articles

Analysis of Character and Theme in The Flowers of War

The film The Flowers of War is related to the Nanking Massacre in the year of 1937, in Nanking, China. The paper mainly studies the story of sacrifice and hope in the war, and the relationship between the two, against the backdrop of the Nanking Massacre. The purpose of this research paper is to bring to light a different side of the war. This paper introduces the cruelty of war and the importance of women in war through the analysis of characters and themes in The film The Flowers of War, analyzing the before and after of the characters and the personality traits of different characters. This paper finds out that war is essentially exchanging the lives of one group of people for the lives of another. Men are not the only ones who can contribute to war. At the same time, the position of women in war is not negligible and essential.

How Personal and Familial Narratives Affect the Decision Making of Mature-Aged First-in-Family Students Pursuing University

Mature-age students who are the first in their family to attend university have navigated a challenging road to higher education. The aim of the present study was to understand the influence and interaction of familial and personal stories of this cohort and their choices about university study – why they initially did not go after high school, and what brought them to university years later. Six first-year students at an Australian university completed qualitative interviews which were thematically analysed. Findings indicated that early in life families discouraged higher education, but students were able to integrate these familial stories with new, life-affirming, personal stories. Students’ choice to attend university was related to psychological capital and agentic abilities via the stories of optimism, hope, efficacy and resilience. Familial stories acted as forerunners to resilience-building for envisioning life-affirming stories about future opportunities for university study and for stability a university degree represented.

Stories of Hope: Young People's Personal Narratives About ADHD Put Into Context of Positive Aspects.

There is a growing acceptance that ADHD is a multi-dimensional disorder in which not all symptoms are associated with deficits or functional impairments. This article contributes to research on the positive aspects of the diagnosis, specifically understanding the positive aspects of living with ADHD. The empirical data was based on individual interviews and self-narratives of 10 young adults with ADHD. Narrative analysis was implemented when investigating their stories. The findings showed that challenges with the diagnosis were not necessarily stably occupied, and for some, the diagnosis was thought of as a benefit and something they would not have been without. Four stories highlighted particularly the context of positive aspects: (1) insight and strategies, (2) targeted efforts, (3) balanced energy, and (4) social skills. These aspects were correlated to both the individual's strengths as well as the strengths and support that could be related to their societal and cultural environment.

How Can Digital Storytelling Open Up Spaces for Activist Citizenship Where Young Children Create Stories of Hope and Resilience Across the World?

This article examines how 8-year-old children in a primary school in England develop new understandings of hardship and survival through the process of digital storytelling. The research presented here is part of a larger global literacy ‘Critical Connections Multilingual Digital Storytelling Project’ (2012-ongoing) working across 15 countries (Algeria, Australia, Cyprus, Egypt, England, Germany, India, Italy, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Palestine, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, U.S.A.) in over 36 languages. We build on critical literacy research which argues that in creating texts, such as digital stories, with an ethic of social justice, children have to navigate tensions existing within cultures, languages, and communities. In our research, we look at what happens when children create their own collaborative digital story, interrogating these tensions surrounding ideas and realities of social justice, and decide how to represent their lives and the lives of others. We analyze the filmmaking process and how a class of 8-year-old children create a digital story, A Reflection on Water, for the project. As part of the process of creating their digital story, these children walk around their school playground carrying heavy buckets of water, raise money for Water Aid, create a website, and want children across the world to get clean water. These young children become part of a wider digital storytelling community at a global film festival, and we examine their reflections on the digital story, From my Window- De ma Fenêtre, created by older 10-year-old children in their school. A Ukrainian child joined this class during the project and their digital story shifted to incorporate their collective response to the Ukrainian crisis. In conclusion, we return to the Critical Connections Pedagogical Model and demonstrate collaborative filmmaking can open up spaces for activist citizenship with young children, and stories of hope and resilience.

Butterfly Wings: A Hopeful Story About Climate Anxiety by Samuel Larochelle (review)

Butterfly Wings: A Hopeful Story About Climate Anxiety by Samuel Larochelle (review)

Machine guardians: The Terminator, AI narratives and US regulatory discourse on lethal autonomous weapons systems

References to the Terminator films are central to Western imaginaries of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS). The puzzle of whether references to the Terminator franchise have featured in the United States’ international regulatory discourse on these technologies nevertheless remains underexplored. Bringing the growing study of AI narratives into a greater dialogue with the International Relations literature on popular culture and world politics, this article unpacks the repository of different stories told about intelligent machines in the first two Terminator films. Through an interpretivist analysis of this material, we examine whether these AI narratives have featured in the US written contributions to the international regulatory debates on LAWS at the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in the period between 2014 and 2022. Our analysis highlights how hopeful stories about what we coin ‘machine guardians’ have been mirrored in these statements: LAWS development has been presented as a means of protecting humans from physical harm, enacting the commands of human decision makers and using force with superhuman levels of accuracy. This suggests that, contrary to existing interpretations, the various stories told about intelligent machines in the Terminator franchise can be mobilised to both support and oppose the possible regulation of these technologies.

Singing After Superior Laryngeal Nerve Weakness: A Story of Hope

Singing After Superior Laryngeal Nerve Weakness: A Story of Hope

Client Perceptions of an FASD-Informed Indigenous Restorative Justice Program

Individuals with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) can experience multiple layers of adversity that increase vulnerability to justice involvement. Given the systemic overrepresentation of Indigenous Peoples in the justice system, community-based interventions are important for supporting Indigenous individuals with FASD who are justice-involved, yet little is known about individual experiences with such interventions. In this community-based study, we conducted interviews with 12 adults in an FASD-informed Indigenous justice program, revealing stories of coping, growth, and hope. Findings suggest that blending FASD assessment with restorative justice approaches can contribute to physical, human, family/social, and community/cultural resources that support wellbeing. We describe tangible strengths and processes to leverage in practice and policy for supporting justice-involved individuals with FASD across settings and communities.

Learning languages of hope and advocacy - human rights perspectives on sustainability-oriented language education

What if the way we (teach and learn to) speak about human rights crises is part of these crises? This conceptual paper sets out to explore the role of a human rights-informed pedagogy of hope in helping learners cultivate languages of hope and advocacy in the context of language education for sustainable development. Recognising that a focus on agency connects critical pedagogies of hope, human rights education, and language education, this contribution argues that the language classroom may become a space of hope by offering stories of hope, change, and transformation to help learners envision a better future and take communicative action towards these futures. Cultivating languages of hope and advocacy highlights the learners’ role as active change agents who assume responsibility in the face of their human rights duties and act accordingly. Thus, human rights-informed language education may empower learners to contribute to living together in a more sustainable and just world.

Dear Healers: A Photographic Story of Finding Hope, Community, and Partnership in Connection with Nature

After working on the frontlines of the COVID pandemic, the author reflects on finding the principles of partnerism, hope, and community in nature through the healing art of poetry, photography, and story sharing. The partnership paradigm empowers the qualities of respect, justice, balance, and innovation. Partnership practices catalyzed by the natural elements of life and the land are foundational to community and cultural transformation, raising the nature of our planetary system to be the most transformative model of partnerism in action.

Clericalism and the Problem of Leadership in Africa: Reimagination as Praxis

Abstract The praxis of reimagination explores the dynamic relationship between imagination, story, and praxis. Colonialism has greatly impacted the African church’s imagination of clerical authority. The African church needs to reimagine church authority. This requires a greater attentiveness to the story of God’s redeeming love in the person and ministry of Jesus. It also requires we recognize the equal dignity and co-responsibility of laity and clergy in the church’s mission. While the story of Christ’s sacrificial love, the climax of God’s ongoing involvement in human history has priority in the Christian imagination, the ongoing Synod on Synodality is an opportunity to tell and listen to fresh stories of hope, development, and responsible leadership in contemporary Africa.

Book Review

This review assesses Stephanie Oudghiri’s (2022) Struggling to Find Our Way: Rural Educators’ Experiences Working with and Caring for Latinx Students. Positioning her work in care and culturally responsive teaching, Oudghiri narratively examines the relationship between teachers, paraprofessionals, and Latinx students in a rural Midwestern elementary school. Story themes, analyzed under a framework of Swanson’s (1991, 1993) middle range theory of caring, uncover how educators’ personal and professional identities inform their ethics of care, or lack thereof, in the classroom. This review outlines Oudghiri’s successful use of narrative inquiry to craft an accessible, hopeful story that rural educators nationwide can learn from in order to better support their culturally diverse students.

Presidential stories of fear: Focusing congressional climate change mitigation attention in the United States

AbstractDo presidential climate change narratives increase related congressional attention in the United States? Narrative theory says since narratives leverage cognitive heuristics, they should focus policy‐making attention in institutions more efficiently than non‐narrative statements. This study identifies and tests climate change statements and narratives, including those focused on solutions, or “stories of hope,” and those focused on problems and victims, “stories of fear,” for relationships with congressional attention using time series analysis. Findings suggest a relationship between narrative and hearings, but not for non‐narrative statements and hearings. Furthermore, while narratives are related to hearings generally, stories of fear have larger effects, but only in conditions of single party control of the US Presidency and Congress. This analysis supports theory about narratives and institutional influence and offers the additional concept of stories of fear and hope as impactful on political institutions.

The Three Sisters: the first three Beatitudes as guiding an embodied response to the discovery of the unmarked graves at residential schools across Canada in 2021

ABSTRACT Using the Indigenous Three Sisters gardening technique as a guiding metaphor, this paper will explore a wholly embodied response to the disturbing headlines of the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at residential schools across Canada in 2021. Just as the Indigenous Three Sisters cooperate together for mutual flourishing, the Beatitudinal trio of humility, grief, and meekness will be promoted as characteristics of a wholly embodied response to this specific issue and the large issue it represents, which is an oppressive and troubled historic relationship between Indigenous and white settlers. This paper will use Terry A. Veiling’s double exegetical approach of ‘on earth as it is in heaven’ as the underlying practical theology framework. Perspectives of various Indigenous Canadian theologians along with hopeful stories of white settler Canadian church leaders whose performative and incarnational responses resemble the three sisterly Beatitudes will be included throughout. I see the flourishing of the Three Sisters together as a helpful and practical metaphor for the Canadian church as we consider how humility, grief, and meekness can help us neighbour well with Indigenous people.

(Practical) Theology: A story of doubt and imagination

Theology as a story of doubt and imagination is to be understood against the background of interdisciplinary social science and in contrast to the traditional paradigm of theology as a system of propositional certainty. The concepts of doubt and imagination are part and parcel of narrative research and can also be linked to postfoundational philosophy. The relevancy of this theological paradigm will be discussed on the basis of the following: (1) It is in touch with its own doubt, (2) It is in touch with its own story (tradition), (3) It can therefore interact with other stories, stories of hope and despair, stories of suffering, stories of power and of marginalisation, (4) It can also imagine alternative stories.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The interaction with ‘other stories’, which is one of the important outcomes of this postfoundational approach, makes it possible for theology to be a humble but important participant at the interdisciplinary conversational table.

“You have harmed us”: Stories of violence, narratives of hope among the Port Gamble S'Klallam

AbstractIn 2015, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) released a formal report containing hundreds of testimonies documenting the physical, psychological, and epistemological violence inflicted on Indigenous youth in federally funded and church‐run residential schools. The TRC is part of a growing body of academic and publicly oriented scholarship that takes a documentary approach to reckoning with historical trauma in North America. By focusing on harm and loss, this sort of damage‐centered research unintentionally reinforces unidimensional narratives of Indigenous history and personhood. As Eve Tuck (2009) argues, a desire‐based approach grounded in notions of complex personhood offers an alternative framework for grappling with the legacy of settler‐colonial violence. In this article, I draw on Tuck's approach to interpret a body of object‐based interviews with Port Gamble S'Klallam community members. During these interviews, objects and historic photographs shared with community members elicited stories of interpersonal and structural violence around their experiences with education. Importantly, these materials also evoked stories of refusal, cultural resiliency, and hope. In revealing the complexity of Indigenous experiences with Western‐style education, object‐based interviews present archaeologists with a holistic method for documenting Indigenous histories in ways that challenge damage‐based narratives.

UNcovering Stories of Displacement and Hope

Written by Begoña Echeverria and directed by Annika Speer, Picasso Presents Gernika explores the child refugee crisis resulting from Hitler’s 1937 bombing of the Basque town Gernika and Picasso’s artistic response, Guernica. The script weaves primary source material and documentation with imaginative fiction to consider the connections between war, art and human suffering. This article discusses our effort to bring more attention to the saga of the Basque children through theatre and to draw parallels between their plight and the circumstances of refugees world-wide. We relay the stories and emotional reactions that arose in response to our staged reading, Picasso Presents Gernika, at United Nations Headquarters in New York City on 20 June 2022, for World Refugee Day. Our event centred voices from and images of those most vulnerable and most often ignored in official accounts of war and displacement: children and women. The staged reading at the United Nations occurred four months into the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Given the crises in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria and the ongoing family separations on the US–Mexico border, the staged reading accompanied by remarks from representatives of United Nations High Commission for Refugees sought to highlight the political immediacy of the issues of invasion and displacement as well as the power of theatre to contribute empathically to the discourse.

Traversing trauma: Resilient women’s religious and spiritual stories of hope and strength.

Traversing trauma: Resilient women’s religious and spiritual stories of hope and strength.

Dalit Histories, Pandemic Histories

Dalit Histories, Pandemic Histories

Digital development: Stories of hope from health and social development By SundeepSahay, ArunimaMukherjee, GeoffWalsham, Thomas HyllandEriksen, Warwickshire: Practical Action Publishing. 2022, 164 pp., paperback £23.95. ISBN 978‐1‐78853‐206‐8

Information Systems JournalEarly View BOOK REVIEW Digital development: Stories of hope from health and social development By Sundeep Sahay, Arunima Mukherjee, Geoff Walsham, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Warwickshire: Practical Action Publishing. 2022, 164 pp., paperback £23.95. ISBN 978-1-78853-206-8 Chrisanthi Avgerou, Corresponding Author Chrisanthi Avgerou c.avgerou@lse.ac.uk London School of Economics, London, UK Correspondence Chrisanthi Avgerou, London School of Economics, London, UK. Email: c.avgerou@lse.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this author Chrisanthi Avgerou, Corresponding Author Chrisanthi Avgerou c.avgerou@lse.ac.uk London School of Economics, London, UK Correspondence Chrisanthi Avgerou, London School of Economics, London, UK. Email: c.avgerou@lse.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this author First published: 26 February 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/isj.12432Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation