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.
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.
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.
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.”
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’.
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: