Decolonial storytelling reports
In 2022, we received funding to recruit eight student interns who could carry out a series of research tasks, including a research report on decolonial storytelling in higher education.
In their simplest form, stories ‘allow shifts across time and context, while facilitating contextualised, multilayered understanding of personal identities, social relationships, and cultural landscapes’ (Mulvey et al., 2000:885 cited in Sonn et al., 2013). In Indigenous epistemologies, stories can be archives of thought, history, trauma and resilience, and this is emphasised by the long oral tradition of storytelling in Indigenous cultures. Black narrative traditions also present stories as a way of encouraging the remembrance of homelands and communities and fostering intergenerational connections (Toliver, 2021). We are also drawn to feminist practices of storytelling and ethnography that centre and problematise the implications of our positionalities and contexts to our work (Manning, 2016; de Nooijer and Sol Cueva, 2022).
These reports will be useful for anyone looking to find out more about storytelling and explore a different approach in their teaching and learning practice.
We’d like to thank each of our interns who took part in this research and more, including Désiré Stéphane Bai, Pierre Bartin, Melissa Charifo, Coco, Kelsea Costin, Lalita Gurung, Huanyu Huang, Zamara Khan, Lauren Nader, Chinaemerem Obiegbu, Bhaskar Pant and Aminul Schuster.
Decolonial storytelling in International Development
Report by Désiré Stéphane Bai, MA in Media and Development
Decolonial storytelling in Law
Report by Melissa Charifo, Westminster Law School
Decolonial storytelling in Business Management and Marketing
Report by Lauren Nader, BA in Business Management and Marketing
Decolonial Storytelling in Sociology
Report by Lalita Gurung, BA Sociology
Decolonial storytelling in Media and Communication
Report by Huanyu Huang, PhD researcher
Decolonial storytelling in English Teaching
Report by Coco, Exchange student from Beijing Foreign Studies University
Decolonial storytelling in Human Resources
Report by Chinaemerem Obiegbu, MA Human Resource Management
Decolonial storytelling in Media Studies
Report by Bhaskar Pant, MA in Data, Culture and Society
References:
de Nooijer, R., & Sol Cueva, L. (2022). Feminist storytellers imagining new stories to tell. In Feminist methodologies: Experiments, collaborations and reflections (pp. 237-255). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Manning, J. (2016). Constructing a postcolonial feminist ethnography. Journal of Organizational Ethnography, 5(2), 90-105.
Sonn, C. C., Stevens, G., & Duncan, N. (2013). Decolonisation, critical methodologies and why stories matter. In Race, memory and the apartheid archive: Towards a transformative psychosocial praxis (pp. 295-314). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Toliver, S. R. (2021). Recovering Black storytelling in qualitative research: Endarkened storywork. Routledge.