Cape Town, the city that almost ran out of water in 2018, is usually presented in picture-postcard perfection to the global tourist market: Africa’s piece of Europe. Like a screenshot from Minecraft, in Google Earth Street View the landscape of the False Bay coast on the periphery of Cape Town is flat, unpopulated and blurred for lack of details that would be available from a ground-level photograph. The southern face of the city’s famous UNESCO world heritage landmark, Table Mountain, lies to the north-west in the earlier image. To the right are the hills that ring Table Bay in the Atlantic Ocean. Underfoot is sand that, not too long ago, was under the Indian Ocean, when carbon levels were as high as they are now.

In a city managed for much of the past decade by the centre-right Democratic Alliance, this is a side of the mountain unfamiliar, and off-limits, to the average tourist. This is the side in which the city’s many forms of slow violence multiply, not only in the sprawling settlements of the Cape Flats, an impoverished gangland that earns the city its reputation as one of the world’s most dangerous, but also in a number of sites of a failing hygiene and sanitation system. This includes a major water treatment works built by the Apartheid state in 1956 in which unlined settlement ponds on sandy soils leach sewage directly into the Cape Flats aquifer. Since the drought of 2018, these are now being lined. In March 2020, when the national government announced a strict policy of home-based quarantine and a ban on travel, the well-heeled tourists who feed the city’s public image and coffers disappeared from the northern seaboard. Also banned, in an effort to keep people out of the emergency rooms of hospitals, was alcohol; and so, in the south, mired in daily precarity, rates of street violence plummeted. With the spectacularity of its usual assaults temporarily slowed, the city’s attritional but also exponential slow violence came sharply into focus. Experienced by 40 per cent of the city’s inhabitants before the pandemic, hunger rose even more sharply as millions, crammed cheaply and dangerously into filthy informal shanty settlements and backyard shacks – barely affordable to those who hustle for a daily wage – tried to ‘stay home’ and ‘socially distance’.

In narrative research, various disciplines use the same terms to describe different things, and different terms to describe the same things. Yet, a common commitment to particular critical questions cuts across boundaries. As with this collection – which draws scholars from sociology, oral history, criminology, development studies, cultural studies, creative writing, social work and social policy – issues of story ownership, ethics, representation, authenticity and authority sit at the core of such discussions. As we noted in our introductory chapter, this book was inspired by years of such conversations within the Narrative Network, as we heard members grappling with shared questions about what our analysis of narrative in new times demands. The chapters in this book showcase some of narrative’s diverse forms and scales – the authors analyse oral histories and interview data, lyrics and visual displays, and the contested stories that unfurl in policy debates, families, classrooms and community spaces. While the authors have employed different methodologies and frameworks, they come together to ask crucial questions about the politics of storytelling in a social world.

At the outset of this book, we located the collection within critical concerns about the instrumentalisation of narrative and the enlisting of lived experience into polemic political debates and dubious corporate strategy (Patterson, 2002; Salmon, 2010; Mӓkelӓ et al, 2021; Brooks, 2022). In this context, the volume extends vital conversations about how narrative can be approached in critical and ethical ways from a range of disciplinary perspectives. The book is structured into three themes which emerged as important topics for narrative research now – ‘Institutional Authority and Counter-stories’; ‘Tellable and Untellable Stories’; and ‘The Ethics of Representation’. In this concluding chapter, we summarise the contributions to draw out their connections and foreground the insights that are collectively built across the volume. We then reflect on how this collection opens critical paths forward for narrative research.

Institutional authority and counter-stories

The three chapters in the first section of the book all explored how narratives are part of driving social change. First, Dave McDonald showed how experiences of institutional abuse were commemorated via the colourful ribbons that became known as Loud Fence, and how these ribbons – and the stories they evoked – came to play a key role in persistent calls for justice. In Chapter 3, Martin Bortz took a comparative, narrative approach to analysing policy change.

Narrative research gathered momentum in the 1980s and 1990s and has been a popular approach across a range of disciplines ever since. As scholars became increasingly interested in the stories people tell about themselves and how they make sense of their place in the world, narrative provided a means for exploring these questions, putting such stories at the centre of inquiry. With this rise in interest, literature on narrative also flourished. Alongside a number of how-to textbooks that introduce narrative methods (Riessman, 2008; Elliot, 2005; Andrews et al, 2013), distinct journals dedicated to the narrative approach are now well-established. While the understanding of what exactly a narrative is may differ across disciplines (an issue we return to later in this chapter), scholars share a common interest in narrative’s use for individual and collective meaning-making and the power of storytelling for understanding social change. However, with this enthusiasm for narrative comes challenges that may lead some to perceive narrative approaches as naive and no longer up to the task.

These challenges include well-known points of critique about the trouble of ‘giving voice’ and an increasing awareness of the politics of representation (for example, Moreton-Robinson, 2000; Shuman, 2005; Bjӧrninen et al, 2020). But they also reflect more recent developments, where the site of narrative inquiry extends well beyond the academy. First, narrative is now a hot topic across a broad range of spheres. From therapy (Morgan, 2000; White, 2007) to sport (Kelly, 2020), narrative has been popularised and, in some cases, instrumentalised. Similarly, narrative has emerged as a buzzword in the corporate sphere, with businesses encouraged to develop a ‘brand narrative’ or reach staff and clients via ‘strategic stories’ (Patterson, 2002; Damodaran, 2017; Dolan, 2017), and with new job titles such as ‘Chief Storyteller’ finding their way into organisational language; a turn that Brooks (2022) has termed a ‘narrative takeover of reality’ (p 7). This has led to calls for reflection on the wider uses of storytelling, including from within narrative research as a field. Second, the potential misuses of narrative in what has been termed the ‘post-truth era’, where dubious accounts multiply and circulate unregulated online, has reignited critical stances towards narrative and posed questions about truth and authenticity (Salmon, 2010; Mӓkelӓ et al, 2021; Brooks, 2022). These recent developments, as well as ongoing questions about representation and ethics, drive the inquiries of this book.

Dimitris and Maria: We would like to thank you again, Sam, for contributing your text ‘Land in Our Names: Building an Anti-racist Food Movement’ to this book and accepting to follow up with an interview. We reached out to you for an intervention because we felt your voice and the work of LION are absolutely necessary for this book. We are immensely grateful for your time as we know how precious and precarious activist time is. To start maybe we would like to ask a bit more about LION about the organization, how you work, and about your plans.

Sam: So Land in Our Names is a collective of BPOC. We are an antiracist, land justice collective using a reparative justice framework to achieve land reparations, and increased access and support for BPOC to land and farming and nature more generally. An example of what we have been doing recently is a micro-grant programme (up to £1000) providing support to BPOC who want to get into growing or already do it as a hobby, or who want to follow related courses or have projects, who want to set up projects and so on. We also organize events about gardening or growing, skill sharing or just healing spaces where BPOC come together, connect with each other to learn in London, the city where most of us are based. We have also done a lot of research around access to food growing as a livelihood. Our eventual goal is to get some land to set up a BPOC land cooperative, a land cooperative, where we’re growing food, creating a space for people to rest and heal, that’s in the works. We’re quite young, we’ve only been around for two years and we’re doing quite a lot of stuff all the time, and have changed formations a lot, but, yeah, it’s great.

Dimitris and Maria: We have been following LION’s work and different interventions about your vision and have felt inspired and challenged to think and act. We strongly felt we couldn’t speak about ecological reparation in Britain today without including the voices, ideas and struggles you stand for. So maybe right away we’d like to ask if, and how, the notion of “ecological reparation” that we are trying to explore in this project resonates with you and your work.

Restoring 200 sq km of kelp forest off the Sussex coast, creating new habitat for heat-sensitive butterflies and connecting fractured wetlands for the reintroduction of beavers – these are some of the 12 UK Wildlife Trusts schemes funded last month to recreate wetlands, restore peatlands and reintroduce beavers, all of which aim to help the UK tackle climate change. They are just some of the thousands of projects that are being deployed throughout the world to address the devastating effects of climate change, extinction, biodiversity reduction, systemic pollution, sea level rise and global warming. These interrelated processes are rapidly changing the physical and affective conditions of the planet, increasing inequality, mass migration and resource colonialism, among other social crises. Therefore, social and ecological relations require radical improvements. The protection, conservation and remediation of existing ecologies is at the forefront of the strategies to compensate for, delay or adapt to these challenges.

Projects like the ones funded by the UK Wildlife Trust are relevant contributions, and the diversity of approaches reflect the complexity of doing so. However, terms like restoration and repair are becoming exchangeable and often unquestionable buzzwords that give little information about the aims of the intervention or what exactly will be done. In addition, at least from my experience as an architecture studio design professor, concepts like repair and remediation seem to justify any intervention because they are ‘solutions’ to ‘global challenges’. They are approached as seamless and easy processes: ‘we put this here, change this there, these others will transform each other’ and ‘voila’. Repaired. Ecologies are repaired as if they were buildings, with the same techno-scientific mindset: trees substitute bricks and animals substitute mortar. But are concepts like reparation and restoration best suited to address the complex ecological reality we are living in?

Reparation (and repair, remediation, restoration …)

In common language, words like reparation, remediation and restoration have different meanings. Reparation speaks about making an entity function again, or stopping it being broken. Remediation comes from remedy, to cure a body (human or not). Meanwhile, restoration implies a transformation to achieve a similarity with the past: to make something look or function as it did before. The type of intervention also varies depending on the object of reparation, whether it is violence against Indigenous peoples, a pond, a house façade or a 13th-century painting.

Introduction

On a chilly morning in November, one of the authors (Morita) was listening to a roundtable talk at an international conference on sustainability transition and economic localization held at a university conference hall on the outskirts of Yokohama, Japan. While the participants discussed various issues in their effort to localize production and consumption and restore the environment, one of the participants, a renowned Japanese permaculture designer, directed the conversation to a rather unexpected topic: the flush toilet and sewer.

Referring to his early career experience in soil analysis, he noted the serious degradation of Japanese soils. He pointed out toilets and sewers as the major causes of this degradation, because they are literally flushing human and other organic waste, which, before the introduction of these infrastructures, circulated thorough the local environment, and out to sea. As a potential solution to this problem, he then suggested a return to the compost toilet that would turn human waste into manure.

The permaculture designer’s talk seemed to have successfully impressed on the audience a rather unexpected relationship between aspects of everyday life and environmental impoverishment through the workings of mundane infrastructures. If such uneventful infrastructures can be so detrimental, the relationship between our current civilization and environment seems to be fundamentally broken. He continued speaking on his take on circulation at another session Morita attended in that same afternoon. In this session he started his talk with a simple and impressive statement: ‘microbes make soil just by the way they live’. He continued:

Narrative and public policy

The importance of narrative in public policy is now widely recognised by academics and practitioners. Organisations like the Frameworks Institute, the Center for Story-based Strategy and the Narrative Initiative have been established primarily to pursue policy outcomes through narrative. Likewise, publications like The Atlantic, New York Times and Stanford Social Innovation Review have featured stories on the role and function of narratives in public policy. In academia, frameworks like the discourse coalition framework (Hajer, 1997; Hajer and Laws, 2006) or the narrative policy framework (NPF) (McBeth et al, 2007; Jones and McBeth, 2010) have, at their core, a concern with narrative.

At the same time, a question remains regarding the specific contribution of narrative to changes in public policy. Indeed, the concept of narrative is missing from several of the dominant theories of policy change, including the advocacy coalition framework (Sabatier, 1988; Weible and Sabatier, 2007), the ‘three streams’ approach (Kingdon, 1984) or Baumgartner and Jones’ (2010) punctuated equilibrium. The most notable attempt to address this gap is the NPF (McBeth et al, 2007; Jones and McBeth, 2010; Jones and Radaelli, 2015). As part of the NPF, advocacy coalitions are seen to ‘embed stable policy core beliefs in their narratives, and then use those narratives to further dynamic political strategies’ (McBeth et al, 2007, p 102). At the same time, the NPF has been heavily criticised for the incompatibility of its positivist ontology and epistemology with the constructivist underpinnings of narrative approaches (see, for instance, Dodge, 2015). In particular, the NPF’s reliance on the hypothetico-deductive method has caused significant reproachment from interpretivist-constructivist policy scholars.

While these criticisms may be valid, they do not necessarily advance our understanding – from a constructivist perspective at least – of how narratives and policy change might relate to one another. Considering this, the purpose of this chapter is to tease out these dynamics in more depth. Unlike the NPF, the chapter does not seek to develop a comprehensive theory of change. Instead, and somewhat more modestly, the aim is to consider in more detail the dynamics between narratives and change as a way of further developing constructivist policy scholarship in this area. To do this, the chapter advances its argument through three main ‘moves’.

Introduction

We work at Instituto Alexander von Humboldt, a Colombian research institute in charge of biodiversity studies. Colombia is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, and sadly, it is also one of the countries where the loss of biodiversity is recorded in real-time. Urgency and relevance are familiar feelings pushed by working in this context. For that reason, science, and the authority it confides, is essential in the kind of responsibilities that the institute needs to cover: to inform policy with the best scientific information possible within the framework of funding cuts and a turbulent national political climate, which does not always prioritize environmental issues.

We are both anthropologists, working in a small social scientists’ team amidst many natural scientists. Our role is to analyse the multiple relationships between people and biodiversity in Colombia, integrating our results with the natural sciences on biodiversity. Multidisciplinary work is not always easy, and our position can be described as uncomfortable. In thematic terms, our academic work is related to páramo, defined by natural sciences as a tropical high mountain ecosystem. This chapter articulates diverse stories, experiences and conversations around páramo and the natural and social sciences. We are particularly interested in overcoming the aspiration of integration in interdisciplinary work and look for ways to relate diverse epistemologies, methods and practices, which are only partially coherent, what Jensen and Morita call sophisticated conjunctions (Jensen and Morita, 2020). This chapter is a step further in experimenting with what form these sophisticated conjunctions can take in the context of our quotidian job, especially when this conjunction needs to take the form of a relationship between methods, their materials and the affections that methods and materials convey. Our intuition is that the conservation and restoration of Colombian páramos also require repairing relationships beyond the páramo as ‘nature’ or ‘páramo without people’. In order to participate in this task, the biodiversity sciences would benefit from these sophisticated conjunctions, which we imagine as ecologies of affections that feed sciences that risk novel articulations.

Introduction

This chapter, drawing on the authors’ respective qualitative research, will discuss mothers’ experiences of pregnancy and new motherhood in prison. In this chapter we specifically explore issues around access to basic needs, explicitly antenatal support, appropriate nutrition, experiences of external appointments in local hospitals, and birth as an imprisoned mother. It will detail in the mothers’ voices what it feels like to be a pregnant or new mother in prison. It also explores the significance of the reactions of prison staff and the mothers’ relationships with one another. The chapter will centre the women’s voices and experiences as described to us. Mothers in our respective research focused their responses on several key areas – stress and safety; shame; antenatal care and experiences of external appointments; food; miscarriage and cell births; and living on an MBU – and these inform the structure of this chapter.

Early days in prison

Several mothers in our research described the shock and horror they felt at being sentenced to prison, and for some the prison sentence was unexpected. As Baldwin (2021a) highlights, these early days are a risky time for mothers and mothers-to-be. The risk of suicide and self-harm in those first few hours and days is heightened. Sometimes the prison is aware of this and will account for this in their care and observations, as described by Jane:

The care put in place for pregnant women and new mothers was generally in the form of security protocols or procedures, such as opening ACCT documents to keep women from self-harm.

Introduction

This chapter explores a historical perspective of pregnancy and new motherhood in prison and makes comparisons of the treatment and conditions from the past 100 years to the present day. We draw upon the similarities of the environment, care needs and experiences of women from the 1900s to the 21st century and describe the findings from campaigners’ reviews and research. We discuss how these campaigns and reviews of prison conditions from 100 years ago mirror the findings of our own research and that of modern-day activists and campaigners for reform.

It is perhaps accepted wisdom that modern society has long favoured the male gender, a status quo that has contributed to the positionality of women and their experiences in society. Zedner (1991) rightly argues that gendered notions of how women, especially mothers, should and, importantly, should not behave are heavily influenced by traditional feminine (and masculine) ideology. Johnstone (2019) highlights how this translated to firmly established and gendered roles becoming established, particularly with the advancement of industrialisation and capitalism. Women’s role as homemaker and nurturer became an established norm, and parenting and child-raising were (and to some extent are still) deemed to be the woman’s role. To understand the connection between criminalised motherhood, imprisonment, patriarchy, religion, culture and the CJS, it is essential to acknowledge the intersectionality that shapes women’s experiences. Throughout history and to this day, these factors contribute significantly to the disadvantages and discrimination faced by women in the CJS. Building upon a brief historical overview, the authors will utilise their research to present a contemporary perspective. As in the rest of the book, the focus remains on amplifying women’s voices as they share their lived experiences.