Storytelling as Power – Identity, Equity, iNclusion, Sustainability (SAPIENS)

Storytelling is one of humanity's most basic instincts, most enduring pleasures, and most powerful gifts, with a daunting potential for being both beneficial and dangerous.

Humans are, thus, storytelling creatures. While this is not an original insight, it is crucial in this age of the global circulation of diverse and often conflicting narratives to focus on how stories – incessantly created, told, materialized, (re)enacted, and revised – exert power through the definition, exploration, or challenging of human identities; through raising questions of equality, fairness, inclusion and exclusion; and through the facilitation or jeopardizing of healthy and sustainable individual and social lives.

SAPIENS scholars analyse in theoretical, empirical, and applied ways, using literary, linguistic, historical, and other critical perspectives, how storytelling – through fictional and non-fictional narratives embodied in prose, poetry, drama, and also other cultural products (such as music, film, visual art, monuments, buildings, or the human environment) – has marked histories of human crisis as well as flourishing, sustains and challenges humanity in the present, and connects with issues of power, identity, fairness, in- and exclusion as well as mental, physical, and social wellbeing.

The theme group was endorsed by the ICOG Board in June 2024 and will start its activities from September 2024. Updates will follow then.

Participating researchers

Last modified:

08 July 2024 12.59 p.m.