Author: sjd27

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LSE Blog – Why narrative evidence matters for public reasoning

As the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated narratives, qualitative or quantitative, can shape, guide and make sense of public policies. However, the way in which the listeners and readers of these narratives receive and engage with them is often taken as a given. In this short introduction to the concept of storylistening on the LSE Impact Blog, we outline how different narratives can contribute to and enhance the use of evidence in policymaking and present a framework for how qualitative and humanistic research can play a key role in this process.

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INGSA Horizon Series Interview

In 2021, the International Network for Government Science Advice (INGSA) is producing an interview series with some of the key global practitioners at the interfaces between science, policy and society. This INGSA Horizon Series looks beyond the immediate lessons of the pandemic to how the complex systems of our society need to adapt to face future wicked challenges. Sarah interviewed Claire about the implications of Storylistening for practitioners working at the science/society/policy interface.

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Thinking about the future is hard: what covid-19 taught about how to do it better

Claire wrote for the International Public Policy Observatory about how public decisions get made, and about how narrative models and narrative futures methods might help inform them. “Jane Austen’s novels vividly model aspects of middle-class life in her lifetime but do not directly model much about colonialism; an epidemiological model shows disease outcomes but not educational ones, and so on. The model has to be simple to be useful, but if it’s useful then there is a risk that its users rely on it too much and pay insufficient attention to the other important parts of the world which the model must ignore in order to function. This gap applies both to computational models, with their compelling charts and numbers; and to narrative models, with their seductive detail and rhetoric.”

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AI and Stories

Sarah contributed to a panel at the annual CogX festival discussing the future of AI from humanities’ perspectives, including historical and literary critical. Sarah talks (from 20 minutes 33 seconds in) about science fiction, about how AI stories directly inform AI research, and about how AI research is driven by storytelling. She suggests that the very idea of ‘AI’ itself might be thought of as a ‘grand narrative’. She considers the cognitive value of stories, and how storytelling and storylistening offer alternative methods for thinking about what is called ‘AI ethics’.

Academic

Decolonising the Future

Art by Joshua Mays @joshuamaysart on Instagram

In April, Sarah presented material on decolonising the future, climate change, and N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy from Chapter 4 of Storylistening at an academic conference: the annual meeting of the British Society for Literature and Science. Her talk was part of a panel on Literature, Science and Policy, with presentations also given by Professor Genevieve Liveley, on narratology and cyber security policy, and by Lt Col David Calder, on science fiction’s critical utility in a military context. You can listen to the presentation here:

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Is climate change actually being taken seriously?

Sarah contributed to an episode of the first series of the University of Cambridge’s podcast – Mind Over Chatter – to explore how stories relate to climate change. She was in conversation with Richard Staley (Reader in the History and Philosophy of Science department and co-lead on the Making Climate History project) and Lord Martin Rees (cosmologist, astrophysicist, and Astronomer Royal).

The episode was produced by Nick Saffell, James Dolan, and Naomi Clements-Brod.

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Storylistening at UNESCO

Sarah tried out some early ideas from the Storylistening book at the UNESCO Futures Literacy Forum in Paris in December 2019. She was interviewed at the event and talks here about her hopes for the storylistening session, what she understands futures literacy to be, and how stories are crucial to imagining the future and making decisions in the present.

Academic

Narrative and Science

As part of the Royal Society’s Reimagining Science project, in May 2019 we were involved in hosting a one day workshop on Narrative and Science with the Royal Society and the British Academy. Sarah wrote one of a number of stimulus papers commissioned by the academies. The paper on the function of stories is an example of early research for the book which led to the four function chapter structure of Storylistening. It’s superseded of course by the further research conducted over the following two years, but remains interesting perhaps as an insight into the development of our thinking.