Bridging the gap between academic study and
impact storytelling for social change.
THE INITIAL, SUMMARY SECTION OF THIS ESSAY IS RE-PUBLISHED HERE. TO READ THE ENTIRE PIECE, GO TO MY MEDIUM PAGE, WHERE IT WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON MAY 22, 2023.
I spent a revelatory week this winter attending narrative studies grad school in Groningen, an ancient, moat-encircled Dutch town whose large, prestigious university has been attracting students from all over The Netherlands, Europe and much of the known world since its founding in 1614.
I signed up for The Netherlands Winter School on Narrative to engage with the academic field of narratology as it’s taught in the world’s universities. I was hoping to locate some significant arguments and agreements between scholar-theorists and work-a-day storytelling practitioners, who, like me, create stories to impact people’s beliefs and behavior.
The vast majority of academic theorists and practical narrative workers are mutually ignorant of each other’s work. I’d begun thinking that has to change. I had no clear idea then about why academics and practitioners should collaborate. But writing this piece, I’ve come to believe that such collaboration is the path to creating an artistically rich and scientifically rigorous new discipline that harnesses the persuasive power of narrative as fully as possible to change our society for the better.
The Winter School on Narrative seemed a perfect place to start dismantling my own ignorance and, perhaps, meet some open-minded scholars whose ignorance I could help to dismantle. It’s an annual collaboration among three major Dutch universities that attracts an international flock of lecturers and participants, most of them from Europe and the U.S. The Winter School, now in its eighth year, is five intense days of lectures, presentations and group discussions, all in English. This year, the theme was “The Limits of Narrative” — a many-faceted idea I’d been wondering about anyway. The annual event stands out in academia by openly inviting storytelling “professionals” in addition to its core community of PhD students and other scholars. The possibility of collaboration was in the air.
What I discovered in Groningen far exceeded my expectations, for better and worse.
On the what-practitioners-can-learn-from-academics side, for example, I was introduced to the most widely accepted definitions of narratives and stories. I realized how much the field of narrative change would benefit from clear, widely accepted definitions, understood by everybody. I also found a new, powerful theoretical framework called “undernarration” that offers the promise of better explaining and, thus, better countering destructive narratives like conspiracy theories and disinformation.
On the what-academics-need-to-learn-from-practitioners side, I discovered “story-critical scholarship,” a relatively recent academic niche that is based at least partly on generalizations, assumptions and inadequate research into how narrative work for positive social change is pursued by practitioners. I’ve certainly not read all story-critical scholarship, but some of the scholars appear to disdain all storytelling-for-change — what practitioners call “impact storytelling” and scholars term “instrumental narrative.”
The story-critical group sees danger and manipulation in virtually all storytelling specifically intended to change people’s beliefs and behaviors. They situate this danger as part of a recent “storytelling boom,” dismissing a raft of scholarship that dates instrumental storytelling back to the origins of modern humanity, 35 to 50 millennia ago. Egregiously, they indict an ill-defined group they call “story consultants” for allegedly lacking ethics, knowing nothing about how narrative works and rarely or never subjecting the impact of their storytelling to the scrutiny of scientific measurement. The scholars re-visit in a contemporary context some important ethical and intellectual questions about stories that have been under examination for a very long time. They seem well intentioned. They also seem unaware that their broadly over-generalized indictment of narrative practitioners is not supported by fact.
Consider the archetypal case of knowledge denial in 1633 when the Catholic church nullified Galileo’s competing knowledge of the universe by calling it “heresy.”
There’s a large body of social science scholarship about the ways in which our society’s hierarchical structures and powerful institutions produce and control what we call “knowledge.” The body of work examining how these same power structures manufacture and sustain ignorance in various ways is much smaller, but equally important. “Ignorance has been a marginal and neglected topic in the social sciences,” Michael Smithson wrote in his groundbreaking book on the topic. (Smithson 1989) By 2015, the literature on ignorance had its own handbook, which described the field as “growing” in both diversity and the attention it attracts. (Gross and McGoey 2015).
Ignorance has proven enormously useful in maintaining the status quo of society’s power structures. All kinds of siloed, self-protective institutions — religious, political, professional, educational and cultural — vigorously ignore, deny, classify as secret and denounce knowledge all the time. Sometimes the denial is based on the race, ethnicity, origin, religion, training or occupation of the knowledge’s holder. Often, knowledge is denied because it might compete with, undermine or modify the niche of knowing that an institution believes it must control in order to maintain its position of power.
Consider the archetypal case of knowledge denial in 1633 when the Catholic church nullified Galileo’s competing knowledge of the universe by calling it “heresy.” This was anything but an isolated incident, of course. Powerful people and institutions cancel knowledge or enforce ignorance for self-serving reasons every day. Writing this essay, I began to see narrative — especially in its role as powerful persuader — as an area of knowledge constantly afflicted by the social production of ignorance. I am writing this for the two main audiences implicated in producing narrative ignorance.
First, I wrote this for myself and my U.S. colleagues, practitioners in impact storytelling and allied fields — organizers and communicators in social justice and progressive politics, narrative and cultural strategists, data scientists, qualitative researchers, solutions journalists, writers and artists, foundation leaders and staff, communicators in truly progressive and prosocial corporations, and others working for a more equitable and democratic world. I’m hoping members of this audience will read this essay even if they avoid much of what’s produced by academia. Ignoring gifted scholars and the expansive, multi-disciplinary literature of narrative studies is neither smart nor helpful. Neither is ignoring the definitions and language developed by narrative scholars, who use a widely accepted set of terms which are clear and consistent with common definitions. Narrative change work can be greatly improved by using terms that are widely understood, and by gaining a grasp of scholars’ concerns and of sound theories and their implications.
This article is also for academics in the many disciplines that touch narrative studies — narratology, history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science, communications, management, marketing, semiotics, comparative literature, philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, the arts (literature, drama, film, etc.) and more. Disdaining, ignoring and overgeneralizing about narrative practitioners is poor scholarship. It rejects useful knowledge. Many narrative practitioners are working with large social-change organizations, foundations, major political campaigns, and corporate marketers, all of whom invest heavily in developing scientifically valid research to understand narrative persuasion. These organizations regularly fund large-scale audience research that most academics in narrative studies have either not considered or cannot afford. Academic narratology can benefit materially from the research protocols that practitioners have refined and the results of large-scale experiments, qualitative research and quantitative content testing.
“Whenever new knowledge appears, something old will have been rejected, and the process of rejection is itself a social process.”
There’s a lot to be gained, in short, by building bridges between theory and practice; between and within academia and social change work. This essay is meant to provide a brick or two for the construction of such bridges. Simply put, scholars and narrative workers can help each other, not just for their own benefit but for the benefit of the work and the world.
As I say above, I am a “narrative worker.” I’ve worked as a writer, a journalist, a content marketer, digital storyteller and, now, a narrative strategist. I’ve been focused for a few decades now on how narratives can be shaped and delivered to convey meaning, to touch people’s hearts and change their minds; to persuade them, in one way and another, that a better world is possible and that they have a role to play in making that world real. I’m interested in how to rewrite the deeply harmful narratives that constitute much of the world’s cultures and shape our societies. Since 2015, when I swore off working for corporate clients, I have been engaged exclusively on narrative projects for social change with grassroots organizations, nonprofits, foundations and progressive political campaigns.
One important caveat: There is, arguably, an infinite variety of narratives — novels, poetry, legal briefs, physics textbooks, cave paintings, mosaics, song lyrics and so on and on. All these narrative kinds contain values and arguments that, intentionally or not, influence society, as the communications scholar Walter R. Fisher argues so powerfully in his major book Human Communication as Narration. (Fisher 1987) This essay may apply to all narratives, but is specifically focused on narratives whose creation and telling are primarily motivated by the intent to make the world a better place for the vast, vast majority of all people. The narratives I’m writing about work by persuading specific audiences to change their emotions and beliefs; to change, in effect, what they think they know and how they feel about it. The intended result is to move people to take certain actions to change their world and the way it works.
Necessarily, this is also about the instrumental narratives deployed throughout history to keep the powerful few in power, to keep the many divided in order to limit their freedom and agency, and to maintain the world as a domain for the privileged, no matter the cost in blood and sustainability. Mary Douglas, who greatly influenced studies of the production of knowledge and ignorance, as well as the mechanisms of forgetting and remembering knowledge, once explained, “Whenever new knowledge appears, something old will have been rejected, and the process of rejection is itself a social process.” (Douglas 1986) This single sentence tells us why established institutions seeking to defend their power will tend to defend the old narratives and reject newer ones.
What follows are four insights — all potentially very useful in narrative change work — that surfaced during and after my week in academia. These takeaways are described in four semi-independent short essays — the first four sections in the TOC below. Following that are an epilogue on ignorance, the references (for further reading) and a couple appendices. These sections are presented in a certain logical order…
THIS ESSAY CONTINUES ON MY MEDIUM PAGE, WHERE IT WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED.
