Short Abstract

How do stories move people? This workshop asks how narratives affect, how they are told through words, bodies, objects and more-than-human agents, and who can and wants to tell them and is heard by whom. We invite ethnographic papers on narrative, affect, materiality and the politics of voice.

Long Abstract

People are affected by stories, and they affect others by creating, telling and listening to stories. Political movements, religious communities, artificial and digital worlds, families and all kinds of institutions are constituted through narratives that describe and create a shared past, a collective present and possible futures. At the same time, people tell stories to criticize such orders, to claim their place in them or to abolish them. This workshop asks how narratives shape people’s lives, and who wants to and is able to tell which stories and be heard by whom.

We start from the observation that people “live by” stories. This notion is affective, material and political: Narratives affect people by orienting them toward some things and away from others, by producing belonging or resentment, hope or fear. Storytelling takes place through arrangements of bodies and things: people, objects, places, spirits and landscapes that, in many cosmologies, act and speak themselves. It is also political because voice is unequally distributed, and colonial formations have shaped this distribution in lasting ways.

We invite ethnographic papers that address one or more of the following questions: How do stories move people, and how do they stabilize or contest social and political orders? Through which words and metaphors, materials, bodies, and more-than-human agents is storytelling done? Who has voice, whose stories dominate, and how do actors work against narrative inequality? We welcome contributions from all regions and are particularly interested in papers that explore creative, experimental or collaborative forms of storytelling.