Speakers

WHAT MAKES AN IMAGINED FUTURE CREDIBLE?

Narratives of the future are crucial elements of decision making in the economy and beyond. Indeed they are a crucial source of the dynamics of capitalism. Since there are no future facts, assessments of the future necessarily need to rely on narratives that cannot be limited to the presentation of facts. This means they cannot be true or false, but they can be credible or non-credible. To trigger decisions, the narrative must convince actors that it is at least sufficiently probable that events will indeed play out as portrayed. But where does this credibility come from? This is the question I want to discuss in my presentation

I will propose a simple model which consists of three elements. I distinguish first the story-maker or persuader, the person (or institution) that creates specific imagined futures and often wants to convince somebody else (or a group of actors) of the accuracy of the narrative. Second, the story-taker or agent who ultimately makes the decisions through which resources are put at risk and who needs to become convinced of the credibility of the imagined future. The third element in the model is social context, the features of the social and material environment that position the agent in a network and influence assessments of credibility.

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Jens Beckert is a professor of sociology and a director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. He studied sociology and business administration at the Freie Universität Berlin and the New School for Social Research in New York. His research focuses on the fields of economic sociology, organization theory, the sociology of wealth and social theory. Recent publications: Imagined Futures. Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics, Harvard University Press, 2016. Uncertain Futures. Imaginaries, Narratives and Calculation in the Economy, Oxford University Press 2019 (edited together with Richard Bronk).

TRAUMA PORN OR WITNESSING? NARRATING DOMESTIC WORKER EXPERIENCES

Recent years have seen a massive rise in the numbers of women migrating internally and internationally for domestic work. This unregulated industry has been the site of cruel exploitation, documented in news media, academic work, and told by domestic workers in legislative campaigns. But rather than challenging the terms of domestic worker abuse, these narratives may produce a “trauma porn” that invites voyeurism and spectacle, highlighting bad employers rather than systems. In this talk, I look to alternative ways we might study domestic worker experiences by evoking the multiple and everyday spheres that constitute their lives: from the shantytowns where they live, to the forces of extractive capitalism, dispossession, and debt that compel their choices. I examine the role of ethnography and fiction in providing tools and frameworks for studying domestic worker experiences. What different forms of witnessing might they make available?

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Sujatha Fernandes is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Sydney. She taught at the City University of New York for a decade. Her academic, activist, and literary work explores social and labor movements, participatory media and art, global Black cultures, migrant workers, and climate storytelling. Her writings are concerned with the stories of those erased by history, multi-racial working class solidarities, colonialism, neoliberalism, and socialist alternatives. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, The Nation, Orion Magazine, and other places.

Fernandes is the author of five books. She has written two monographs: Cuba Represent! Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures (Duke University Press, 2006) and Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela (Duke University Press, 2010), which was reprinted in Spanish by Editorial Imago Mundi. Her travel memoir, Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation (Verso, 2011) was reprinted in Australian and Chinese editions. In 2017, her book Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling was published by Oxford University Press as part of the Oxford Studies in Culture and Politics. Her most recent book is a collection of essays entitled, The Cuban Hustle: Culture, Politics, Everyday Life (Duke University Press, 2020).

Fernandes currently holds a a three year Discovery Project grant from the Australia Research Council to work on a project about stories of migrant workers and climate change in the global cities of New York City, Mumbai, and Sydney.

THE SAME OLD STORY: REFLECTIONS ON THE IDENTITY OF NARRATIVES

It has been argued that there are just seven basic plots in story-telling (Booker 2004) and other numbers have been proposed (Polti 1921; Reagan, et al 2016). But how do we count narrative types? In virtue of what is this story the same as that? Do we need criteria for narrative identity? In literary criticism narrative typology has had mixed results but it has proved useful in comparative studies, in judgments of originality and literary value, and even in uncovering deeper psychological and cultural principles. The paper will argue, following similar suggestions in the context of character identity (Lamarque 2003) and content identity (Lamarque 2009), that there is no absolute answer to the question whether this narrative is the same as that. Rather, the answer is always relative to the interests of the questioner and the context of the enquiry.  The topic will be broadened to include narrative identity in other (non-literary) spheres: for example, concerning climate change, foreign aid, economic policy, prison reform, etc where it is not uncommon to find narratives at the centre of arguments. But in such cases, it is not always clear that the narratives on opposing sides are in fact distinct. And do supposedly different narratives in fact just repeat or give versions of “the same old story”?

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Peter Lamarque is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York and was formerly Editor of the British Journal of Aesthetics. He works principally in aesthetics and the philosophy of literature. His books include Truth, Fiction, and Literature (with Stein Haugom Olsen) (Clarendon Press, 1994); Fictional Points of View (Cornell UP, 1996); The Philosophy of Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); Work and Object: Explorations in the Metaphysics of Art (Oxford UP, 2010); The Opacity of Narrative (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014); The Uselessness of Art: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Literature (Sussex Academic Press, 2019). He co-edited (with Stein Haugom Olsen) Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition: An Anthology, Second Edition (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018).

INTERSECTIONALITY AND HAUNTOLOGY IN EVERYDAY NARRATIVES OF DISJUNCTION

The beginning of the 2020s made it clear that everyday narratives can suddenly shift in response to major events. It has become commonplace to view Covid-19 as an unexpected period of disjunction, with intensifying inequalities and short and long-term transformations. In addition, the murder of George Floyd and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter, broader acceptance that climate change is already happening and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have all shifted people’s understanding of the world, themselves in it and, consequently, their narratives. This talk will consider some of these changes, considering the disjunctions, continuities, and contradictions in the ways in which people account for themselves and others. It draws on a variety of sources to explore the ways in which we have to recognise narratives as intersectional and as haunted by histories that can erupt at times of disruption, producing contradictions and possibilities for social change.

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Ann Phoenix is Professor of Psychosocial studies at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, Social Research Institute, UCL Institute of Education. Her research focuses on the ways in which psychological experiences and social processes are linked and intersectional. It includes racialised and gendered identities, mixed-parentage, masculinities, consumption, motherhood, families, migration and transnational families. Recent books include Environment in the Lives of Children and Families: Perspectives from India and the UK. Policy Press, 2017 (with Janet Boddy, Catherine Walker and Uma Vennan), Researching Family Narratives, (co-edited with Julia Brannen and Corinne Squire), London: Sage and Nuancing Young Masculinities: Helsinki boys’ intersectional relationships in new times (with Marja Peltola), Helsinki University Press, 2022.

Jens Brockmeier is a professor at The American University of Paris. He received his degrees in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics/literary theory from the Free University Berlin where he took on his first appointment as assistant professor of epistemology and philosophy of science. His main interest is in the function of narrative for autobiographical memory, identity, and the understanding of time, issues he has explored both empirically and philosophically – empirically, in various languages and sociocultural contexts, as developmental phenomena, and under conditions of health and illness; philosophically, in terms of a narrative hermeneutics.

Alex Georgakopoulou is Professor of Discourse Analysis & Sociolinguistics & Co-Director of the Centre for Language, Discourse & Communication, King’s College London. She studies everyday life storytelling, with a current focus on its connections with social media affordances, using small stories research and a technographic methodology. Her (very) latest publication is: ‘Small stories research: Tales, tellings and tellers across contexts’ (2023, co-ed. with Korina Giaxoglou & Sylvie Patron) https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003253563/small-stories-research-alex-georgakopoulou-korina-giaxoglou-sylvie-patron. She is the co-editor (with Anna De Fina & Ruth Page) of the Routledge Research in Narrative, Interaction & Discourse Series.

Stefan Iversen is Associate Professor at Aarhus University, where he is director of the PhD programme for Art, Literature and Cultural Studies. He has published on narrative rhetoric, unnatural narratives, early modernism, autofiction, digital rhetoric and fictionality in journals such as Narrative, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Style, Poetics Today and EJES. Recent co-edited and co-written works are Quantified Storytelling (2020), a special issue of Poetics Today “Unnatural and Cognitive Perspectives on Narrative: A Theory Crossover” (2018), and the anthology Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited (2022). Iversen leads “Summer Course in Narrative Studies” (SINS), held annually since 2013.

Ann Phoenix is Professor of Psychosocial studies at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, Social Research Institute, UCL Institute of Education. Her research focuses on the ways in which psychological experiences and social processes are linked and intersectional. It includes racialised and gendered identities, mixed-parentage, masculinities, consumption, motherhood, families, migration and transnational families. Recent books include Environment in the Lives of Children and Families: Perspectives from India and the UK. Policy Press, 2017 (with Janet Boddy, Catherine Walker and Uma Vennan), Researching Family Narratives, (co-edited with Julia Brannen and Corinne Squire), London: Sage and Nuancing Young Masculinities: Helsinki boys’ intersectional relationships in new times (with Marja Peltola), Helsinki University Press, 2022.