Rotterdam, a city in the Netherlands, experienced significant bombing in its city centre during the Second World War. Despite the trauma associated with this event, in 1948, the city adopted a new motto: ‘Sterker Door Strijd’, translating as ‘Stronger Through Struggle’. This motto remains visible today under the city’s coat of arms, symbolising the resilience and strength of its inhabitants as they rebuilt their city. ‘Sterker Door Strijd’ has become a central aspect of Rotterdam’s development, particularly in its architecture and urban planning. It showcases a shift in the city’s memory from pain to pride and hope for the future. The motto beautifully embodies Rigney’s ‘memory–activism nexus’ from a spatial perspective, reconstructing the city’s traumatic memory of destruction into a narrative of resistance. The motto is widely known and felt by every Rotterdammer, including foreigners who live and work in the city, like me. The visual essay ‘From Struggle to Strength’ poetically focuses on the city of Rotterdam and its motto. It intimately follows my personal artistic journey and my embodiment in the city. The story unfolds as I walk and draw around the city. Additionally, I interviewed inhabitants focusing on the challenges of social housing issues in the city, such as displacement and demolition and considering how the residents are actively resisting these issues. Through these interactions, the visual essay reflects on the transformative power of memory and activism in shaping the city’s past, present and future.

Islands have a disproportionate role – as strategic locations, as imaginative or symbolic locales, as extractive zones and as ecological bellwethers – in oceanic imperial histories. They were and are places of ‘great practical use and metaphorical power’. And yet Newfoundland was seen (and continues to be seen) as marginal and peripheral, even if the biomass that was pulled out of its ocean fed – quite literally – a global network of exploitation. This article uses four overlapping maps to tell four overlapping stories: James Cook’s circumnavigation of the island in 1763–8; Lt David Buchan’s trek into the interior to contact the Beothuk in 1811 and 1820; William Eppes Cormack and Joseph Sylvester’s trek across the island in 1822; and finally, a series of story-maps created by Shanawdithit, who is apocryphally known as ‘the last of the Beothuk’. In doing so, it draws in Indigenous ‘storywork’ and cartographic histories and makes a case for storytelling as powerful methodology for examining overlooked colonial histories. These maps and stories highlight the complexity of encounter with a place rather than a coherence of colonial ideologies. Through the stories these maps help me tell, I hope to show how the peripheries of some people’s empires were the centres of other people’s worlds.

We offer a novel analysis of conspiracy theorizing, according to which conspiracy theory communities are engaged in collective projects of storytelling. Other recent accounts start by analyzing individual conspiracy theorists’ psychologies. We argue that a more explanatorily unifying account emerges when we start by analyzing conspiracy theorizing as a social practice. This helps us better account for conspiracy theorists’ psychological heterogeneity. Some individual theorists care about uncovering the truth, while others incorporate truth into their theorizing in subtler ways; viewed as a social phenomenon, though, the function of conspiracy theorizing is not to discover the truth, but to tell good stories.

Suicide remains a global public health crisis, claiming over 800,000 lives each year and leaving millions more to struggle with attempts, ideation, or the ripple effect of loss. Traditional prevention strategies often focus on crisis intervention and identifying “warning signs,” but these approaches overlook the many who suffer in silence. Drawing on personal experience of suicide loss and a decade-long journey toward suicide literacy, the author argues for a reframing of suicide prevention. She challenges stigma-driven assumptions, underscores the power of honest storytelling, and introduces the concept of “preemptive, protective conversations” as a vital upstream prevention tool. By empowering ordinary people to become suicide prevention advocates equipped with knowledge, compassion, and a willingness to talk openly, we can build stronger connections, dismantle stigma, and create a broader societal safety net. Suicide is preventable, and each of us has a role to play in saving lives.

As social media continues to grow, understanding the impact of storytelling on stakeholder engagement becomes increasingly important for policymakers and organizations who wish to influence policymaking. While prior research has explored narrative strategies in advertising and branding, researchers have paid scant attention to the specific influence of stories on social media stakeholder engagement. This study addresses this gap by employing Narrative Transportation Theory (NTT) and leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze the intricate textual data generated by social media platforms. The analysis of 85,075 Facebook publications from leading Canadian manufacturing companies, using Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient, underscores that individual storytelling components—character, sequence of events, and setting—along with the composite narrative structure significantly enhance stakeholder engagement. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of storytelling dynamics in social media, emphasizing the importance of crafting compelling stories to drive meaningful stakeholder engagement in the digital realm. The results of our research can prove useful for those who wish to influence policymakers or for policymakers who want to promote new policies.

This article shares a unique form of public humanities created with an ethical community partnership between a university team, a community nonprofit organization, and a museum. Our podcast focuses on the stories of the staff of an organization that is affiliated with the International Rescue Committee and that resettles refugees, asylees, and immigrants. Most of the staff were immigrants themselves and shared their experiences as both outsiders and insiders in the communities that they serve. Given this historical moment of intense anti-immigrant sentiment, we aim for this podcast to serve for conversation and education about immigration not only in our local area but also in similar small cities and towns. Our podcast takes place in an upstate region of New York, approximately 200 miles outside of the city. We share our experience of putting into practice the methods and concepts drawn from public humanities, critical community engagement, ethnic studies, digital humanities, and podcast studies.

We resonated with the idea that dreaming is important, and that climate fiction is a way of dreaming with environmental educators. A well of resistance lives in art collaborations around the world which harness the power of the collective to face terrible realities and twist, bend, and dance them into alternative hopeful pasts, presents and futures. Engaging with other people and more-than-human lives, through creative collaborations have led us to understand complex and unfamiliar perspectives in ways that are unreachable alone, regardless of how much academic study we do. This story emerged from online meetings that crossed time zones and oceans: Vancouver to Istanbul. Our climate fiction surfaced from improvised, spontaneous story creation. It was as if the story was waiting for us to find her, if we acted with care and love while facing directly our own dark shadows and fears about climate catastrophe. This story of Cassandra, alongside our interpretations of its emergence, invites the reader to draw from any evoked confusion or other feelings as well as their own learnings to reflect on burdens of knowledge not acted upon. Leaning into confusion is a way to open up to the power of uncertainty for environmental education.

The question of the genre of The Kolyma Stories continues to perplex readers: the tales resemble fiction and are at the same time intended to serve as document, evidentiary proof of the evils of Stalinism. In this article I reconsider Walter Benjamin’s “Storyteller” essay, arguing that Shalamov is, in significant ways, a Benjaminian storyteller, updated to catastrophically unfree conditions minus any nostalgic lens. Taking Shalamov’s prose not just as document and fiction, but more specifically, as document and story allows for a deeper understanding of his creative process, aesthetics, and how his prose is intended to act on the reader. Shalamov becomes a storyteller in part to break free from what he saw as the didactic tradition of the Russian novel. I compare Benjamin’s notions of storytelling to Shalamov’s concepts of “new prose,” and then scrutinize Shalamov’s contradictory stance on whether his stories contain “lessons” (advice is central to Benjamin’s framework). I touch on the fusion of document and folktale in several stories, referring to Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale. Finally, I examine “Galina Pavlovna Zybalova” (1970–71), which, I argue, demonstrates how skazka and story function in relation to memory and advice.

In this paper, we focus on a particular example of human–wildlife conflict involving Dungalaba (Dungalaba, Saltwater Crocodile, C. porosus — this paper will interchange between the various names of the species. It is preferred to us various names as we would like to acknowledge the various ways in which people come to understand and recognise the species) (Saltwater Crocodile) in the Northern Territory, Australia. We seek to both better understand and improve relationships with such potentially dangerous animals, positioning this as an educational endeavour. Drawing upon interviews with a small number of relevant stakeholders, we utilise storytelling as a method for informing contemporary relationships with Dungalaba. The method of storytelling has been used effectively by Indigenous Australians for thousands of years to pass teachings of our older people for the benefit of future generations. During interviews, research participants told stories of their lived experiences, which informed the creation of narratives that depict current relationships of conflict and past relationships of harmony. We discuss these narratives and how they may educate for respectful interactions and mutually beneficial coexistence between humans and Dungalaba. This paper contributes to the growing body of work that embraces Indigenous ways of knowing for improved environmental relations. Furthermore, this paper offers specific possibilities for the use storytelling as a tool within crocodile safety education programs within the Northern Territory.

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.