Stories, Storytellers, and Storytelling

This book advances social scientific interest in a field long dominated by the humanities: stories, and storytelling. Stories are a whole lot more than entertainment; oral narratives, novels, films and immersive video games all form part of the sociocultural discourses which we are enmeshed in, and use to co-construct our beliefs about the world around us. Young children use them to learn about the world beyond their immediate sensory experience and, even in an era of interactive electronic media, the bedtime story remains a cherished part of most children’s daily routine. Storytelling is thus the first abstract formal learning method we encounter as human beings. It is also probably transcultural; perhaps even an immanent part of the human condition. Narratives are, at heart, sequences of events and presuppose and reinforce particular cause-and-effect relationships. Inevitably, they also construct unconscious biases, prejudices, and discriminatory attitudes. Storying (a term we use in this book to encompass stories, storytellers and storytelling) is complex, and this book seeks to make sense of it.

Tom Vine is an Associate Professor at Suffolk Business School, UK, where he leads the PhD programme. He is an ethnographer and organization theorist with specific interests in agency, belief, complexity and paradox. When he’s not grappling with Nietzsche, Tom enjoys charity shop crawls, restoring old boats, and cold water swimming in the rivers of East Anglia.

Sarah Richards is Head of the Graduate School at the University of Suffolk, UK and Associate Professor of social policy, specialising in childhood studies. Sarah has extensive teaching experience in higher education. At the University of Suffolk, she has taught across a range of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes where her teaching primarily focuses on social policy and creative research methods. Sarah’s publications feature her work on international adoption policy and longstanding critical interest in methodological and ethical debates on research with children.