Ebook: Stories Changing Lives: Narratives and Paths toward Social Change

Personal narratives’ relation to social change is a frequent topic in the narrative-psychological and wider narrative social science literature. It is, indeed, a driving interest for many of those doing and reading narrative social research. This book aims to analyze not only the strong but also qualified significance of personal stories for progressive social change. It pursues this analysis by investigating particular aspects of narratives that narrative psychological research describes and explains and that seem to contribute importantly to narratives’ ability to make or catalyze social change. While narratives’ relation to social change is a common assumption and preoccupation of narrative researchers, fewer publications take this relationship as a central and explicit focus. This book aims to deepen narrative research’s engagement with progressive social change by addressing it consistently and from a number of different narrative-psychological research perspectives. The book acknowledges the strength and the importance of regressive and discriminatory narratives, narratives’ limitations, and research on these. However, it focuses on progressive social change possibilities, which seem especially important to consider at the current time. The book comprises three sections: Personal Stories and Social Change; The Language of Social Change Narratives; and Narrating Histories of the Past, Present, and Future. Throughout, the book foregrounds the multimodalities of narratives; the value of the multiplicity of stories, genres, positions, and intersectionalities; recent work on decolonialities; and the interdisciplinarity, historical reach, and transnationalism of narrative research.