New geographies of story and storytelling

Abstract

The concept of story draws attention to the relationship between personal experience and expression, and the broader contexts within which such experiences are ordered, performed, interpreted, and disciplined. In the past, particularly through the ‘cultural turn’, geographers were predominantly concerned with the ways in which story and storytelling were implicated in the production of cultural, economic, political, and social power. Today, this approach to story is being re-examined and new approaches to story are being explored. Geographers have been re-imagining the concept of story as part of a relational and material turn within the discipline, as part of a renewed focus on the political possibilities afforded by storytelling, and as a mode of expressing non-representational, (post)phenomenological geographies. This paper contextualizes recent work within broader disciplinary trends and critically evaluates the intellectual and political stakes of these new geographies of story and storytelling. It questions whether a shift away from understanding stories and storytelling in terms of power, knowledge, and difference (as was emphasized through the cultural turn) has opened new understandings of political, social, and cultural life, or risks abandoning crucial insights into the role of stories in geographical formations.