Conversations 2019: Narration and renarration as regulation

In the 2019 Conversations series, every Tuesday in September we will consider narration and renarration as regulation.

This seminar series will highlight and investigate the regulatory roles of stories in framing, categorising, modelling, communicating and sense-making across a variety of domains and media. It will also explore the transformative potential of counter-storytelling or re-narration.

Four panels will interrogate the theme:

3 September: Shaping society through stories: narrative as regulation

Fairy tales, movies, art, the media – they all convey stories that produce, and reproduce, the norms and values of a society within a given time and space. What did the stories of your childhood teach you about virtues and vices, masculinity and femininity, heroes and villains? What do the daily newspapers, the evening news, or the latest tweets say about personal responsibility or collective action, about what we as a society should value or fear? How do these stories seek to regulate our behaviour?

10 September: Changing the story: narration and framing in regulation and governance

This panel explores the role of narratives in framing how problems are understood and their consequent impact on how policies and regulation are developed, received, opposed and ignored. We ask: how and why do narratives have such powerful roles? To what extent can policy-making be characterised as story-telling, and how does this work to both empower and silence different voices and possibilities? What are the implications of these insights for regulation and governance and for the role of scholars in this process?

17 September: Narration and re-narration through multiple genres and creative media

This seminar brings together four academics who have used documentaries, podcasts and commercial non-fiction to showcase their work, and found that they were able to reach wider audiences than through conventional research products alone. How can story-telling fit within the conventions of academic/policy writing? How do the forms and media through which stories are narrated influence what regulatory impact they have?

24 September: Changing the story book: Re-narration, re-storying and possibilities of transformation

Re-storying is a powerful strategy that has been used in different contexts, particularly as a way of re-centering marginalised or silenced voices. Re-storying dominant narratives can challenge tacit knowledge and many taken-for-granted beliefs. What is the potential for re-narration to lead to regulatory and governance transformation?

Image: by Joybot, Flikcr, under CC BY-SA 2.0.