Research
Ethical Storytelling Research
The storytelling boom has generated countless texts for narratologists to study — from fundraising emails, to social media and political campaign communication — and a “story-critical” approach to the storytelling boom has emerged.
For practitioners, academic research offers a perspective from a longer point of view — narrative study dates back to Aristotle — that can ground debate within communications practice even as media continues to evolve.
Newest to Oldest
2026
2022
2021
2018
2017
2010
2007
2006
Seduced by Story: the Use and Abuse of Narrative
By Peter Brooks, 2022.
Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling
By Sujatha Fernandes, 2017.
Small Stories in Charity Fundraising Letters and the Ethics of Interwoven Individualism
By Andrea Macrae, 2022.
By Maria Mäkelä, Samuli Björninen, Laura Karttunen, Matias Nurminen, Juha Raipola and Tytti Rantanen, 2021.
Critical Approaches to the Storytelling Boom
By Maria Mäkelä and Hanna Meretoja, 2022.
By Hanna Meretoja, 2018.
Personal Storytelling in Professionalized Social Movements
By Francesca Polletta, Tania DoCarmo, Kelly Marie Ward and Jessica Callahan, 2021.
It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics
By Francesca Polletta, 2006.
Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind
By Christian Salmon, 2007.
Other People's Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy
By Amy Shuman, 2010.
About: In this short and contentious book, Brooks exalts what he calls “narrative takeover,” the ways in which, owing to the power of the modern novel, we have been given one and only one means of understanding the world and ourselves: narration. A large claim, it is asserted with considerable force: Narrative seems to have become accepted as the only form of knowledge and speech that regulates human affairs.
Abstract: In the contemporary era we have seen a proliferation of storytelling activities, from the phenomenon of TED talks and Humans of New York to a plethora of story-coaching agencies and consultants. Curated Stories seeks to understand the rise of this storytelling culture alongside a broader shift to neoliberal free market economies. The book is also concerned with how we might reclaim storytelling as a craft that allows for the fullness and complexity of experience to be expressed in pursuit of transformative social change.
Abstract: The explicit imperative to “tell a story” recently dominating UK and US fundraising discourse refers specifically to the central compelling “story” of the representative victim/beneficiary, and yet there are multiple stories at work in charity fundraising letters, with interdependent narrative trajectories. This article draws on small stories research and on scholarship on storytelling and ethics to explore the relative narrativity of the stories within charity fundraising letters and their marked contingence upon lack of resolution.
Abstract: The current storytelling boom across various spheres of life encourages actors from individuals to businesses and institutions to instrumentalize stories of personal experience, but the search for a "compelling story" is often blind to the possible downsides of experientially and emotionally engaging narratives. This article presents key findings of the project Dangers of Narrative that has crowdsourced examples of instrumental storytelling via Facebook and Twitter.
Abstract: The proponents of the contemporary storytelling boom, such as professional business storytellers and self-help coaches, urge individuals, groups, institutions, and corporations alike to find and tell their story. Social media as the predominant narrative environment for contemporary storytellers promotes the instrumentalization and commodification of stories of personal experience… Popular notions of narrative tend to celebrate the cognitive and moral benefits of storytelling while downplaying the limits of narrative understanding and popular story formulas; this article thus identifies the dissemination of tools for a critical narrative analysis among various audiences as an important task for narrative scholars.
About: Against the backdrop of the polarized debate on the ethical significance of storytelling, Hanna Meretoja's The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible develops a nuanced framework for exploring the ethical complexity of the roles narratives play in our lives. Focusing on how narratives enlarge and diminish the spaces of possibilities in which we act, think, and re-imagine the world together with others, this book proposes a theoretical-analytical framework for engaging with both the ethical potential and risks of storytelling.
Abstract: Professionalized movement organizations today rely on outside expertise in fundraising, recruitment, lobbying, management, and public messaging. We argue that the risks that accompany that development have less to do with experts’ mixed loyalties to the movement than with the tendency of expert discourse to remake political problems into technical ones, thereby obscuring the dilemmatic choices movement groups must make. We focus on expert discourse around personal storytelling, a strategy that has become popular for raising funds, advocating for policy, and building public support.
About: Francesca Polletta’s It Was Like a Fever sets out to account for the power of storytelling in mobilizing political and social movements. Drawing on cases ranging from sixteenth-century tax revolts to contemporary debates about the future of the World Trade Center site, Polletta argues that stories are politically effective not when they have clear moral messages, but when they have complex, often ambiguous ones.
About: Politics is no longer the art of the possible, but of the fictive. Its aim is not to change the world as it exists, but to affect the way that it is perceived. In Storytelling Christian Salmon looks at the twenty-first century hijacking of creative imagination, anatomizing the timeless human desire for narrative form, and how this desire is abused by the marketing mechanisms that bolster politicians and their products: luxury brands trade on embellished histories, managers tell stories to motivate employees, soldiers in Iraq train on Hollywood-conceived computer games, and spin doctors construct political lives as if they were a folk epic.
About: In Other People's Stories, Amy Shuman examines the social relations embedded in stories and the complex ethical and social tensions that surround their telling. Drawing on innovative research and contemporary theory, she describes what happens when one person's story becomes another person's source of inspiration, or when entitlement and empathy collide.
Abstract: In this essay, we reflect on the ethical dimensions that arise when a clinician-writer considers publishing a nonfiction account that describes a patient or exposes private aspects of the writer's self. We review the salient published literature and discuss the divergent ethical stances among clinician-writers regarding the choice to publish their writing and issues surrounding consent from patients to publish descriptions of them.
By Ashlan S. Willett, Aaron Levy and Rita Charon, 2026.