Sarah and Claire delivered a talk at the Oxford Martin School introducing Storylistening, and answering question from the in person and online audience.
Author: sjd27
In this academic article, Sarah and co-researcher Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard present the findings of their interview study exploring the influence of leisure reading on the scientific practice of contemporary AI researchers (funded by the Royal Society). The research is mentioned in Storylistening in relation to stories and the collective identities of researchers; and one of the categories of influence explored in WAIRR is stories functioning as narrative models, connecting this work explicitly to one of the storylistening functions. For a non-academic summary of the article, see this LSE blog.
Sarah joined Sir Professor John Aston and Dame Professor Theresa Marteau for a discussion hosted by Professor Dennis Grube at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy’s annual conference on decision-making in government.
In this UNESCO Transforming the Future webinar – held online on 3rd February 2022 and chaired by UNESCO Head of Futures, Riel Miller – Sarah and Claire outline the storylistening framework and explain its direct consequences for Futures Studies (FS), inviting new reflections on the relationships between stories and scenarios, on the roles of narrative within established FS techniques, and on the relationships between FS and Science Fiction.
After the successful online launch of Storylistening, we reflect on the main themes that came up in the Q&A in this blog for Cambridge’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy. We discuss truth and lies, rigour and incentives, and the need for plural voices and plural listening.
Claire joined host of the Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy’s Science and Policy Podcast, Dr Rob Doubleday, along with fellow guest Jon Agar (Professor of Science and Technology Studies, UCL), to discuss which scientific voices are heard in government, and whether one voice or many shapes information that is informing decision making. They explore what structures and institutions have evolved over recent decades to try and make that process more open, more diverse and more robust. Listen to their discussion here.
Claire and Sarah launched Storylistening in an online event on Thursday 25th November, hosted by the University of Cambridge’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy.
They introduced the book, and talked to Bennett Professor of Public Policy Diane Coyle about the urgent need to use stories to improve public reasoning. They were joined by Professors Genevieve Liveley, Peter Gluckman and Mike Hulme to reflect on the roles of stories in the public humanities, scientific advice, and climate change debates.
Sarah presented a paper at an academic conference on the uses of literature, drawing on material from Storylistening and from her forthcoming article, ‘Functional Criticism’, which builds on (but departs in significant ways from) existing work in postcritique. The paper established conflicting views of the value (or not) of literature and literary criticism in the history of the discipline, before presenting Storylistening‘s four functions of stories as integral to teaching literature informed by a functional critical perspective. The goals of such teaching include developing narrative literacy, encouraging interdisciplinarity, and teaching skills in deploying a variety of literary critical methods (including less common ones, such as sociological). The paper argued for the classroom encounter with texts to be one premised upon an open-mindedness essential for the generation of new knowledge. The presentation slides are available below.
Sarah and Claire joined FuturePod host Peter Hayward for an episode of this long-running and insightful podcast series. We talk about storylistening, with a particular focus on its relevance to futures practitioners and academics, and others concerned with anticipation. The episode covers how we met and started working together (and each of our interests in Futures), the main arguments of the book (including the framework of the four-fold functions of stories), with a particular focus on communicating the insights of Chapter 4 – Anticipation, including the historical and present relationship between Futures Studies and science fiction. The episode webpage contains a full transcript which can be searched for keywords, and a list of the works we mention along the way in the conversation.