Mothers of Sierra Leone leverages the power of filmic storytelling to improve maternal health outcomes in Sierra Leone, a country with one of the planet’s highest maternal mortality rates. Since 2019, we have operated as part of Lehigh University’s Global Social Impact program, working with a team of interdisciplinary students to amplify the voices of Sierra Leonean women rather than transmit Western medical expertise. Our project is based on two premises: (1) we will not solve the healthcare crisis in Sierra Leone through technology and (2) women experience better healthcare outcomes when they are confident and comfortable to advocate for themselves. Our focus group and survey data indicate that our filmic storytelling improves women’s confidence to advocate for themselves and increases their knowledge of available health services. Maternal mortality may be one of the most expansive health challenges facing our planet today because we struggle to comprehend or delimit its parameters, including structural and systemic racism, networks of capitalism, insufficient infrastructure, disparate access to medicine, and patriarchal violence. Our failures to tell public, accessible, and equitable stories about maternal mortality exacerbates and often exoticizes this crisis.

Storytelling is essential in climate litigation. The narratives that are told in and around legal cases shape public discourse and our collective imagination regarding the climate crisis. The stories that plaintiffs and their lawyers choose to highlight hold immense power to either reinforce or challenge dominant assumptions and worldviews. This article analyzes how storytelling has been utilized in climate lawsuits, with a particular focus on those that involve future generations. It highlights the need to craft narratives that foreground entanglement and relationality rather than notions of competing interests. We offer recommendations for strategically using storytelling and framing techniques to build public engagement, spur equitable climate action and transform legal systems.

Multiple welfare states are re-emphasising the need for street-level bureaucrats’ (SLBs) discretion to stimulate responsive service provision. However, little is known about how SLBs with diverse backgrounds in inter-departmental settings deliberate what it means to use discretion well when different rules, eligibility criteria, and interpretations apply to a client. We address this gap by investigating the stories that participants of a Dutch policy experiment told each other to justify which clients should be granted a flexible interpretation of entitlement categories amid scarcity. We found that ‘caretakers’ used the ‘victim of circumstances’ and ‘good citizen’ plot-type to convince ‘service providers’ that the use of discretion was the right thing to do, whereas the latter used the ‘not needy enough’ or ‘the irresponsible citizen’ plot-type for contestation. Our analysis shows that storytelling helped SLBs to make sense of and bring cohesion to complex situations. Moreover, the analysis shows how stories can have a strong emotional appeal and create a sense of urgency to act collectively, yet can also create divisions and opposition among SLBs. As such, storytelling influences how SLBs think and feel about the client, themselves, and each other, and influences how discretion is used at the front-line of public policy.

The Research Journey Map is introduced to guide researchers on creating engaging, meaningful and impactful presentations and publications. Built on the foundational work of the Hero's Journey by Joseph Campbell, this template helps technical researchers communicate information, data, systems and artifacts that result from research so that audiences grasp and embrace the research findings.

The ideational definition of populism proposes that a narrative is populist if it is characterized by a Manichean cosmology that divides the political community between a “people,” conceived as a homogeneously virtuous entity, and an “elite,” conceived as a homogeneously corrupt entity. Departing from that conceptualization, this work first investigates the specific stories that Andrés Manuel López Obrador uses to spread his populist worldview, which we call “storytelling.” We define the idea of storytelling as the art of telling a story where emotions, characters and other details are applied in order to promote a particular point of view or set of values. Second, we explore whether some of those stories produce greater negative affective polarization, here defined as the extent to which rival sociopolitical camps view each other as a disliked out-group. Findings suggest that some specific stories—in particular, what we call “stories of conspiracy” and “stories of ostracism”—indeed tend to induce more polarized attitudes among citizens.

In 1893, Simon Pokagon, a leader of the “unremoved” Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, published a birchbark pamphlet titled The Red Man’s Rebuke. This story condemned settlers for dispossessing Native peoples of their lands and removing them west of the Mississippi River in service of their “civilization.” Pokagon’s Rebuke remains one of the most cited texts in Native American history. But what happened to Pokagon’s message after the Chicago World’s Fair? This paper analyzes five Potawatomi Removal stories told at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that Midwestern settlers found their answer to “the Indian side” of the Removal question by telling the “Potawatomi” perspective of local history; featuring “authentic” representations of Native peoples in their stories and as witnesses to their efforts; perpetuating a myth that all the Potawatomi had been removed; condemning the actions of their “dishonorable and dishonest” forefathers; and publicly acknowledging that they were occupying stolen land. By claiming that the sons of the present were not the forefathers of the past, non-Indians were settling the story of Potawatomi Removal. In the process, they gave their community and their region a past that was simultaneously romantic and tragic, positioning themselves as its inheritors and interpreters.

Although older people who live alone might be in a vulnerable situation, they have often managed their everyday life for a long time, frequently with health challenges. In this article, we explore how nine older persons who live alone, who receive home care and are identified by home care professionals as being frail, manage their everyday lives by inquiring into their stories about living alone and receiving home care. We conducted three qualitative interviews with each of the nine participants over a period of eight months and analysed the data using thematic analysis and a narrative positioning analysis. Using the concept of resilience as our analytic lens, we identified three thematic threads: continuity, adaptation and resistance. In the narrative positioning analysis of three participants' stories, we identified that the participants used the processes of continuity, adaptation and resistance strategically and interchangeably. The study thus provides insight into how older people who live alone and use home care services narrate their balancing of strengths and vulnerabilities, and engage in the construction and maintenance of a sense of self through positioning in relation to master narratives. Older people's narrations are nuanced and complex, and this study indicates that encouraging storytelling and engaging with older people's narrations might support how older people enact resilience and thus their management of everyday life when living alone and ageing in place.