Native American worldviews suggest that humans create the world through story; storytelling is central in oral societies. Storytelling was embodied in artworks made at and disseminated from Cahokia, and it was also embodied in the landscape. Cosmological, goddess, and hero stories were told, but heroes depicted in Braden-style artworks found far from Cahokia suggest that the story of a Birdman wearing human-head earrings and braid was a charter myth at Cahokia. As the foundation of ideology and ritual, stories drew people to Cahokia, but the heroic epic was a new type of story critical to the spread of Cahokian ideologies.

This article advances a story-driven, theoretical exploration of how entanglements of agony, exile and Land relations can reconfigure understandings of justice. Opening with autobiographical vignettes of “in-betweenness”, the article illuminates the unfolding of exilic life between Palestine and North America, naming the ruptures of writing about Palestine from afar as an ethical site of dwelling in the middle. Drawing on relational ontology, Indigenous and decolonial scholars, alongside posthumanist and new materialist thinkers, the article highlights convergences and dissonances in conceptualising Land as more than property: as kin, teacher and agentive being. From such relationality, this article argues that Land-bodied rights offer a framework for rethinking justice and education beyond the abstract, hierarchical assumptions of universal human rights, grounding learning in human and more-than-human relations. The final section explores diffractive pedagogies, suggesting that storytelling and more-than-human educational entanglements can foster an ethic of reciprocity and accountability towards the more-than-human justice. In envisioning rights through rupture, environmental education can become a site where ecological and decolonial justice are rethought and enacted through relational, Land-based and story-driven pedagogies.

Stories are important for individual areas of endeavour and for communities. Beyond the purpose of storing and sharing communal and national knowledge, heritage and consciousness, stories can be used as a powerful source of guidance in life. In what one may regard as a journey towards moral truth, the paths we create in that journey are forged with the support of our families and communities as well as with the guidance of those who have forged their journeys in similar ways. For the Onkwehón:we (i.e., the Native peoples of Canada and related territories), the stories of their communities and ancestors provide important points of reference and inspiration represented in cogent paradigmatic structures that can support their respective journeys. The following will explore how storytelling supports the retention, sharing and celebration of Onkwehón:we knowledge, heritage and consciousness with a focus upon archetypes, struggles, achievements and territory. Using Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey Framework and with a focus on the Journey of the Peacemaker, the following will explore how the various components of such a story may be related to and inform the journey through life of Onkwehón:we and their communities.

This article presents the first sustained narratological analysis of the embedded stories in Nikephoros Bryennios’ Material for History. It argues that pleasure in storytelling was a valued feature of Byzantine historiography and that Bryennios’ anecdotes derive their appeal from four interrelated features: eventfulness, tellability, narrativity, and immersion. The article further contends that, by mimicking oral storytelling through rhetorical questions, direct speech, and vivid sensory detail, Bryennios crafts narratives suited to performative settings while preserving a sense of authenticity. It concludes by proposing narratological criteria for identifying and analysing anecdotes across Byzantine historiography and reassessing the role of pleasure in historical writing.

Rotterdam, a city in the Netherlands, experienced significant bombing in its city centre during the Second World War. Despite the trauma associated with this event, in 1948, the city adopted a new motto: ‘Sterker Door Strijd’, translating as ‘Stronger Through Struggle’. This motto remains visible today under the city’s coat of arms, symbolising the resilience and strength of its inhabitants as they rebuilt their city. ‘Sterker Door Strijd’ has become a central aspect of Rotterdam’s development, particularly in its architecture and urban planning. It showcases a shift in the city’s memory from pain to pride and hope for the future. The motto beautifully embodies Rigney’s ‘memory–activism nexus’ from a spatial perspective, reconstructing the city’s traumatic memory of destruction into a narrative of resistance. The motto is widely known and felt by every Rotterdammer, including foreigners who live and work in the city, like me. The visual essay ‘From Struggle to Strength’ poetically focuses on the city of Rotterdam and its motto. It intimately follows my personal artistic journey and my embodiment in the city. The story unfolds as I walk and draw around the city. Additionally, I interviewed inhabitants focusing on the challenges of social housing issues in the city, such as displacement and demolition and considering how the residents are actively resisting these issues. Through these interactions, the visual essay reflects on the transformative power of memory and activism in shaping the city’s past, present and future.

Islands have a disproportionate role – as strategic locations, as imaginative or symbolic locales, as extractive zones and as ecological bellwethers – in oceanic imperial histories. They were and are places of ‘great practical use and metaphorical power’. And yet Newfoundland was seen (and continues to be seen) as marginal and peripheral, even if the biomass that was pulled out of its ocean fed – quite literally – a global network of exploitation. This article uses four overlapping maps to tell four overlapping stories: James Cook’s circumnavigation of the island in 1763–8; Lt David Buchan’s trek into the interior to contact the Beothuk in 1811 and 1820; William Eppes Cormack and Joseph Sylvester’s trek across the island in 1822; and finally, a series of story-maps created by Shanawdithit, who is apocryphally known as ‘the last of the Beothuk’. In doing so, it draws in Indigenous ‘storywork’ and cartographic histories and makes a case for storytelling as powerful methodology for examining overlooked colonial histories. These maps and stories highlight the complexity of encounter with a place rather than a coherence of colonial ideologies. Through the stories these maps help me tell, I hope to show how the peripheries of some people’s empires were the centres of other people’s worlds.

We offer a novel analysis of conspiracy theorizing, according to which conspiracy theory communities are engaged in collective projects of storytelling. Other recent accounts start by analyzing individual conspiracy theorists’ psychologies. We argue that a more explanatorily unifying account emerges when we start by analyzing conspiracy theorizing as a social practice. This helps us better account for conspiracy theorists’ psychological heterogeneity. Some individual theorists care about uncovering the truth, while others incorporate truth into their theorizing in subtler ways; viewed as a social phenomenon, though, the function of conspiracy theorizing is not to discover the truth, but to tell good stories.

Suicide remains a global public health crisis, claiming over 800,000 lives each year and leaving millions more to struggle with attempts, ideation, or the ripple effect of loss. Traditional prevention strategies often focus on crisis intervention and identifying “warning signs,” but these approaches overlook the many who suffer in silence. Drawing on personal experience of suicide loss and a decade-long journey toward suicide literacy, the author argues for a reframing of suicide prevention. She challenges stigma-driven assumptions, underscores the power of honest storytelling, and introduces the concept of “preemptive, protective conversations” as a vital upstream prevention tool. By empowering ordinary people to become suicide prevention advocates equipped with knowledge, compassion, and a willingness to talk openly, we can build stronger connections, dismantle stigma, and create a broader societal safety net. Suicide is preventable, and each of us has a role to play in saving lives.

As social media continues to grow, understanding the impact of storytelling on stakeholder engagement becomes increasingly important for policymakers and organizations who wish to influence policymaking. While prior research has explored narrative strategies in advertising and branding, researchers have paid scant attention to the specific influence of stories on social media stakeholder engagement. This study addresses this gap by employing Narrative Transportation Theory (NTT) and leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze the intricate textual data generated by social media platforms. The analysis of 85,075 Facebook publications from leading Canadian manufacturing companies, using Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient, underscores that individual storytelling components—character, sequence of events, and setting—along with the composite narrative structure significantly enhance stakeholder engagement. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of storytelling dynamics in social media, emphasizing the importance of crafting compelling stories to drive meaningful stakeholder engagement in the digital realm. The results of our research can prove useful for those who wish to influence policymakers or for policymakers who want to promote new policies.

This article shares a unique form of public humanities created with an ethical community partnership between a university team, a community nonprofit organization, and a museum. Our podcast focuses on the stories of the staff of an organization that is affiliated with the International Rescue Committee and that resettles refugees, asylees, and immigrants. Most of the staff were immigrants themselves and shared their experiences as both outsiders and insiders in the communities that they serve. Given this historical moment of intense anti-immigrant sentiment, we aim for this podcast to serve for conversation and education about immigration not only in our local area but also in similar small cities and towns. Our podcast takes place in an upstate region of New York, approximately 200 miles outside of the city. We share our experience of putting into practice the methods and concepts drawn from public humanities, critical community engagement, ethnic studies, digital humanities, and podcast studies.