This document discusses the power of narratives and stories in forming personal and social identities. It provides several quotes from academics that discuss how people understand themselves through the stories they tell, whether remembering the past, dreaming of the future, or making sense of the social world. The document also notes how certain stories can be colonizing or promote a one-dimensional view of people, and suggests focusing on everyday life, small things, connections, and collaborative ways of telling stories as an alternative.

1. STORIES, POWER, and DISTRESS
Brendan Stone

10. www.storyingsheffield.com
@storyingshef
• Course
• Research
• Public engagement
• Method

11. To know "who" a person is it will be
necessary to have some appreciation
of the story in which the person
understands him- or herself to be a
protagonist.
Juan Galis-Menendez, ‘Paul Ricoeur on Narrative and
Personal Identity’

12. “...we dream in narrative, day-dream
in narrative, remember, anticipate,
hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan,
revise, criticize, construct, gossip,
learn, hate and love by narrative…"
Barbara Hardy, ‘Towards a Poetics of Fiction...’

13. “The autobiographical act recapitulates the fundamental rhythms of
identity formation […] I am arguing that narrative is the sine qua non
of identity formation.”
Paul John Eakin
“it is through narrativity that we come to know, understand, and make
sense of the social world, and it is through narratives and narrativity
that we constitute our social identities”.
Margaret R. Somers
“A basic condition of making sense of ourselves is that we grasp
our lives in a narrative.”
Charles Taylor
“A person creates his identity by forming an autobiographical narrative – a
story of his life’, and must be in possession of a full and ‘explicit narrative to
develop fully as a person.”
Marya Schechtman.

16. Stories of
Lack
Deficit
Dysfunction
One-dimension

17. Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted
“…one moment made to stand
still and to stand for all the
other moments, whatever they
would be or might have been.
What life can recover from
that?…”

18. • The storied life
• A storied culture (power)
• The colonising power of stories
• The possibility and difficulty of reconfiguration (resources?)
• Therapy and other stories of ‘dysfunction’
• The social /intersubjective nature of stories & identity
• Individualisation and absence of context in medical model
• The potentially alienating effects of “narrative”
• An interest in the fragmentary, the “enigmatic”
• The “everyday” as a resource
• From liabilities to assets
• From extraordinary to ordinary
• Interrogating ‘expertise’ – who is the expert?

19. • Everyday life
• Knowledge
• Small things
• Connections
• Collaboration
• Ways of telling