Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Oxford Martin School.
My name is Charles Godfrey and the director, and it's my great pleasure to welcome two people who will be talking this evening.
Claire Craig Claire is currently the provost of the Queen's College, but had a very distinguished career at the Royal Society and in government,
and Sarah Dillon, professor of literature and the public humanities at the University of Cambridge.
And they'll be talking about narrative evidence and public reasoning,
and that's also the subject of a book they have written recently, and we'll have flyers outside if anyone is interested in that.
And just before I invite them onto the stage, this talk is also being livestreamed and recorded.
And if you're watching online and I know we've got a big online audience and crowd cost,
you can ask a question and you'll see that, I think at the bottom of your screens.
And what's more, you can also vote on other people's questions,
and that will be very helpful for me when we come to the public discussion and we'll be taking comments from both within the hall and and virtually.
So with no further ado, Claire and Sarah. Thank you very much, Charles.
It's wonderful to be here. So we're going to do a brief double act to introduce the ideas of the book and then very much enjoy discussion with you.
And we start from the presumption that public reasoning requires narrative evidence and that that a pandemic isn't only an epidemiological problem,
that climate change is not just a matter of physics and the need to use all forms of evidence to be able to distinguish news from fake news.
To find new ways to act well in the face of highly uncertain futures is more urgent now than it ever has been.
Of course, all of us know at some level that narratives matter, but particularly in the context of the use of research based evidence.
Policymakers and experts actually rarely ask exactly how or or why or what to do about it.
And that's partly because incorporating narrative evidence robustly is actually not routinely straightforward.
A powerful narrative in full flow, whether it's associated with a computational model or whether a novel is seductive.
It's charismatic, it's unruly, it's dangerous. If you like, people can place too much confidence in them.
Narratives badged as fiction can confusingly hold truths and narratives.
Badged as truthful may in fact be fiction or downright wrong.
There's also a lot of literature and discussion on how to tell narratives, but much less on how to listen to them.
And that's where we want to make things different.
So we argue, therefore, that public reasoning needs to start taking sort stories more seriously,
that there are robust ways to do this that including evidence from stories, will actually broaden the evidence base, which is a good thing in itself.
But it will also then well, strengthen the use and creation of other forms of evidence,
including scientific evidence, even though some may may feel that.
And as you can tell from what I've just done, we're using the terms, story and narrative interchangeably.
And in both cases, take that to mean a an internally consistent causal account of of some system with agents in it.
Stories are more provocative term, partly because it's so often used to convey distrust or to trivialise something.
But whether it's called a narrative or a story,
what's at stake is a thing that is about a form of sense making in the face of complexity and uncertainty.
So we define story listening, which is, we think, a new word as the theory and practise of gathering narrative evidence in the
context of public reasoning and always as part of a pluralistic evidence base.
And what we're trying to do here is to create the conditions under which the
task of critical listening to stories is easier is expected becomes endemic.
And to do that by providing a tool which enables those who study stories and
those who might want to get the evidential value from them to have more of a
common language and get that value without the kind of plunge to a post-truth
free for all or any weakening of the credibility of other forms of evidence.
And that framework rests on the definition of four functions of stories which Sarah will introduce in a moment.
But as we go through, please remember these these things on the on the right here.
This is about listening. A lot about telling. It's about cognitive valuing stories.
It's not about how they make you feel. And it's about collective knowledge and actions.
Not just whether reading one particular story or report changes one individual's mind on on on an issue.
So it's time before functions. Brilliant. Thanks to hello everyone.
How lovely to be doing things in person again. So wonderful.
So I've got the unenviable job of trying to do the bulk of the book in about five minutes.
So here goes. And so, as Clare said, the story listening framework rests on a definition of four functions and stories.
And when we decided to write the book and we wanted to make a case of the cognitive audio stories,
we realised we needed a really rigorous grounding or foundation in the kinds of functions that they serve.
So this is based on a synthesis and a rigorous literature review across humanities
and social science disciplines and their theories of the functions of stories.
So the first one is points of view.
So story listening provides new points of view to inform the framing of the target system and of policy debates.
So this is not about politics or state code of consultation or deliberative democracy, although it links with all of these.
It's saying that the policy and the public framing determines what is taken to be.
The target system was taken to be the part of the world that matters to a particular
issue and that it determines what forms of evidence are expected to be called upon.
It also determines what stories are considered most relevant, and they in a kind of feedback loop that influence the framing.
So to take one example from one of the case studies in the book, which is artificial intelligence.
If we took narrative evidence, for instance, from the many stories that are about alien intelligences,
this could convey something of the breadth of ways in which intelligence might be redefined in light of new technologies,
and it could help reframe debate around the societal benefits and harms of distributed automated systems,
rather than, for instance, focussing on the potential benefits or harms of humanoid entities.
That might be much more charismatic, like the Terminator, but which are possibly much less useful in framing public reasoning about A.I.
The second function is that stories create and consolidate collective identities, so the story listening,
we claim, offers new ways to explore what those collective identities are and what they mean.
And this can be done in a number of ways. So sociologically gathered narrative evidence about story imbibing.
That's the word we use to mean the taking in the stories in different mediums.
So reading doesn't work if you're watching films, and viewing doesn't work if you're if you're, you know, engaging with literature.
So story imbibing is the word that we use.
So if we gathered narrative evidence about collective story imbibing and story sharing amongst different groups,
this could enhance our understanding of how those groups are constituted and how they behave or how they might behave.
And that could be the collective characteristics of A.I. researchers, which is something I've done an OR.
Search on all how various publics might behave during a pandemic or when they're engaging other kinds of political activity,
for instance, climate activism and story content matters here as well.
So a novel such as Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver, which some of you Kingsolver, some of you may have read.
It's set in rural Tennessee actually prompts really interesting questions about
the definition and direction of collective agency in the face of climate change
questions that could end the explorations that could complement more Orthodox
notions of how we might incorporate group identities into public reasoning.
And very recently, the British Academy produced a report in May this year,
which takes several disciplinary approaches to defining and exploring collective
identities that link to people's behaviours with response to vaccination and story.
Listening, for instance, could have made a very valuable contribution to that kind of interdisciplinary exercise.
And the third function is models and modelling.
So stories, sorry stories concern the way that public reasoning like life rests on implicit models of target systems.
So all models are fictitious, even scientific ones in the sense that to be useful,
they have to be abstract abstractions of the target system, not direct representations of it.
There's a famous book as short stories.
Some of you may know where they decide to create a model that's a map of the world, and then it becomes so big that it actually covers the world.
So it's a kind of cautionary tale about the fact that the map is not the territory, as Mary Morgan and other philosophers of science explored.
And that story can play stories, play a part in the creation and use of non-narrative models.
There's also we look at the work of Lloyd and Sheppard,
which would put their storyline approaches to computational modelling of extreme weather events and stories act as part of scientific models,
shaping outcomes in areas such as climate change, economics and epidemiology.
But one of the perhaps more radical claims in the book is that stories also function as narrative models in their own right.
So one of the examples we give is Jane Austen. If you look at her novels and you think of them as narrative models,
they can provide information about the target system of middle class social life in the early 19th century.
But of course, they also miss some things out from that target system. For instance, colonialism and in a more contemporary example,
Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Aurora is a really interesting narrative model of plausible social and behavioural conditions for a zero waste world.
Not just how to balance materials cycles, but what kinds of governance and skills we might need in that world.
And since we wrote about Kim's work in the book, it was interesting to see him speaking at Cop 26 in Glasgow.
Stories may be the only way. In fact, we claim of collectively thinking through the potential behaviours of complex systems in some cases.
And as always with us, it's both.
And the story doesn't provide scientific knowledge, but narrative evidence can enable what we call surrogates of reasoning.
That's the reason you are able to perform on the basis of a model about things about which there might be no scientific
knowledge or an alternative approach to and perspective on things that can also be known through scientific means.
And then the final function before I hand back to Claire is the story listening enables new forms of rigorous anticipation.
If you look back at the 1990s, for instance, you can try a whole range of novels, for instance, by Don DeLillo,
which provided narrative evidence that anticipated the financial fragility that only became manifest a decade later.
Or Robert Shiller's recent book includes stories as functional elements of anticipation of market behaviours.
Or we went back to the mid-20th century.
Neville shoots on the beach alongside Herman Kahn's quantitative modelling of death rates could be understood to
be attempting now to future futures models of the consequences of nuclear war that inform policy in the 1960s.
So to wrap up the four functions then cut a thread of the four functions is how the most
charismatic stories can draw attention to themselves and away from the spaces around them.
So this is a kind of cautionary element and stories about human or humanoid robots, for instance,
that I've mentioned instead of stories about distributed systems or stories about climate change as a matter exclusively for the physical sciences.
And we call these narrative deficits a narrative lock ins that can preclude public examination of a full set of possible and systems,
models or futures, and also exclude some collective identities while prioritising others.
So careful story listening can show up the spaces left by absent stories,
and the can help balance the forces that can cause some to dominate a particular time and place.
I'll hand back to Claire to talk about why all this matters.
So as the former practitioner, half of the party, I get the I get the the so what?
And this is the second one. So what? So how can this be used?
Practically a basic story listening exercise would take an existing policy issue and useful
functions as a framework to draw out evidence that's available from existing stories.
And we're discussing a number of options here and would welcome ideas in the in the discussions day.
Basically, however story it is and could be used as part of the existing systems in the same way as any other form of academically rigorous evidence.
So as a scholar of sort of science and technology studies,
Sheila Justin.tv and others point out that actually means that there isn't one way that doing
this kind of evidence gathering and using is very context specific and culturally specific,
and the exact mechanisms depend on the policy issue. The framing, the governance and so on.
But to give some examples, as I do here, National Academies regularly make reports which draw on multiple disciplines during the pandemic.
It was interesting to see the UK government chief scientific adviser not only having the emergency mechanism sage,
but also commissioning the British Academy to do some work from the humanities perspective on on the long, on the long term implications of COVID.
And that's the kind of study that could include story listening.
The UK government, like many others, has all sorts of ecosystems of advisers and councils and committees.
Any of these could use it. One of the discussions we've had recently was about perhaps this has been the kind of policy wonks coming back after me.
But the UK government has a Acquah book and a magenta book,
and one determines the quality of the analysis that is considered to be
essential for government and the other the quality of the evaluation of policy.
Both of those set out the kind of standards of rigour that are needed and you could imagine,
including different forms of evidence in those and then other things like the European Commission's Joint Research Centre,
which has done some very nice work recently. And global structures through to the IPCC and the International Science Council.
So that's almost like a kind of whistle stop tour of various specific mechanisms.
More generally, the Peter Gluckman,
who is a former government chief scientific adviser in New Zealand and now the president of the International Science Council,
divides does does generalise in terms of evidence gathering in public reasoning and to form an insult to underlying strands, synthesis and brokerage.
So on the synthesis, this is part of the move away from considering the evidence in public reasoning should be provided by single reports.
However, eminent single pieces of research or by single researchers, so will as what reasoning really needs,
which is overviews, synthesis of the evidence within a discipline and across disciplines.
And indeed, one of the most significant developments in UK provision of synthesis was the Oxford Martin School's
own restatements that included studies on things like the evidence on budget and radiation,
and the story listening itself is a form of synthesis and could therefore be incorporated in such work.
And then this brokerage. So all of the mechanisms on the left are partly delivered or informed by the kind of relationships and conversations that
regularly go on between decision makers and experts and people who work on the boundaries of academia and of government.
And they do that from within the private sector, within NGOs or within the public sector.
And they're involved in in an ecosystem, in brokerage.
That means that the quality of the questions that are being asked on both sides policy and evidence
and research creation get better over time that people share an understanding of what matters,
what kinds of questions might matter in the future, and also better able to communicate with each other because they've spent time
learning a little bit about each other's worlds and in these sorts of areas.
It's still the case that by and large, the the mechanisms and the brokerage practises are stronger in terms of relationship with government,
in the sciences and in the social sciences than they are in the humanities.
So we're back there to talk about that. Yes, so Claire has done the.
So what from the kind of practitioner perspective as a scholar of literature and someone very committed and interested in the public humanities.
And so what I'm doing is why this matters for the humanities.
So for story listening to put into practise is Clare's talked about existing advisory ecosystems and practises.
Don't, we think, need to fundamentally change the need to expand and become more capacious to include
different forms of evidence and knowledge and experts from a wider range of disciplines?
And actually, what we've encountered is this is not an original claim.
People know this needs to happen, and we're hoping the story listening offers a rigorous framework to start helping it happen.
What's needed, then, is perhaps less a change of systems than in some instances, a change of minds.
And the same might also be said for the adaptations needed in the mindsets of individual humanities, academics and scientists and decision makers.
And I'm going to take those each and turn to wrap up.
So humanities academics, I think more generally need to think about what narrative evidence might mean and their disciplines.
So we've developed ours primarily because of my disciplinary expertise out of a kind of literary studies context.
But we're very curious to hear how narrative evidence might that other humanities disciplines,
whether under a different name and whether a different framework is needed to explain
and foreground the types of evidence that different humanities disciplines produce.
We also think that we need to expand on the notion of the kind of lone public intellectual which
has historically dominated humanities sort of self conceptions of think about a more persuasive,
pervasive and understanding of the role of the public humanities.
And on the previous slide, you may have seen Roger Cokie's book on the honest broker.
And we think there's very much a case for mapping his different categories with the
way in which a scientist can invent games with government onto humanities scholars.
So rather than just being pure humanists or as many are issue advocates, what would it mean to have humanities arbiters?
What would it mean to have humanities, honest brokers and a stumbling block here might be quite entrenched.
So self-conception of the humanities as resides its value residing on an in
its oppositional and critique situation in relation to structures of power,
be they state or corporate or even universities. And one of the arguments we make again both and is that, yes, the humanities.
In fact, scholarship in general has value as an independent site of opposition and critique.
But it also can be a valuable site of knowledge production of use to existing structures and institutions of public reasoning and decision making,
and to start to think that to collaborate doesn't necessarily mean to relinquish the capacity to critique.
As far as scientists are concerned for story listening to be effectively integrated also,
we think, requires an expansion of what is considered to constitute expertise.
So scientists frequently appeal to the notion of the scientific method as the basis for the rigour and the distinctive character of their advice,
and as the basis on which expert advice can be distinguished from statements based simply on the personal wealth is the expert.
Now, there may be no such simply established thing as the humanities method that might be
considered equivalent to the scientific methods or the randomised controlled trial,
but the guarantees of rigour in the humanities. I don't think we don't think actually that much different as those from the sciences,
and they're also based in the trustworthiness of systems rather than individuals.
So things like robust literature reviews detailed close attention to the object of study
using the tools and methods appropriate to that object and discovery of new objects of study,
evidence based conclusions, peer review, disciplinary interrogation and cumulative knowledge.
These are all things that constitute the scientific method. They're all things that constitute part of the humanities method.
If we were to call it that. So explaining this might not be as straightforward in the sciences,
but we need to explain it more as humanities scholars and to make the case that
therefore there's there's a there's it's not irrational to include humanities
evidence within pluralistic evidence spaces and to make the case very strongly
that methods need to be appropriate to what one is trying to understand.
So one would know more uses since I knew I was going to be.
I'd say this a synchrotron to study a novel than one would use narrative logic to study an atom.
To conclude, then we're already up to begin to include narrative evidence.
Emphatically, as an import, an important first step for decision makers is to develop what we call narrative literacy,
a level of narrative literacy that precludes false certainty about stories and understands the need for and value of narrative expertise.
So just as a generalist handles a bank account or carries an umbrella but wouldn't
attempt to model future interest rates or global average surface temperatures
so experts needed who can provide narrative evidence about how stories are functioning
and with what effect and widespread narrative literacy in decision makers,
but also in citizens. More broadly, in academics and scientists and advisors, means being respectful of stories, but not over respectful.
So knowing that, as Claire said, alongside that potentially seductive, persuasive, delightful or harmful emotional effects,
it's really important to ask what cognitive and collective values stories might have.
And if the public good at state warrants it,
that it's worth seeking and building capacity for narrative evidence in whatever ways you have opened to you wherever you are situated.
Because more often than not, a story about a robot is not only always about the robot.
Thank you. Come and sit down.
That was brilliant, absolutely fascinating. And it is just wonderful to see both in your talk and in the book as well,
just the genuine dialogue between the humanities and the natural sciences and things which we all talk about is important,
but it's genuinely hard to do. So I get the privilege of asking a couple of questions to begin with.
I'm Claire. I was asking if you could, so I can ask you if you could sort of give a worked example of why you think that narrative?
The listing story listening could really be useful in the in in decision making and feel free to make it up.
But just to give us an example of how you might see it working in practise.
So there are there are several.
I think one would be the one that Sarah mentioned alluded to to.
If you look at I'm on the government, on a council,
you look at all of the massive discussions going on about the governance of A.I. must be distributed
across sectors and really quite hard to even begin to conceptualise what's happening now.
Then a story listening exercise about the ways in the stories about distributed decision making in, say,
the area of impacts on employment would actually bring out potentially new ways of organising labour in particular areas.
Or it was. It would bring out ways in which people are already beginning to think about new
forms of corporate body because those sorts of stories are already out there,
some of them bunch of science fiction.
Some of them are, in fact, the kind of stories that people are telling in a very anthropological sense that they're just being spoken yesterday.
Some rather interesting work generating stories amongst people whose jobs were at threat.
So if you pull those out, then what you would get would be some questions and some ideas that you could then look at and they might.
We're thinking about the next the next stage of governance,
of the use of AI systems in decision making in the public sector, in crime scene, predictive crime or in welfare.
What kinds of ways? What kind of questions do we need to ask about what those new models might be?
You have some pictures from the from the stories that you could that you could set alongside of them.
So at the moment, we look at theory with look at our gut instinct and then make policy based on that.
But if we actually went out and listened to the narratives some people were telling about each other, we would make better decisions.
Yes, it's really interesting that you start with that question, though,
because the book was published in November last year and we thought that we were going
to have to spend a year or more sort of convincing people that the of the arguments.
And very quickly, actually, the question that we've got repeatedly is how would this work in practise?
So we feel like we've been fast forwarded pleasantly into thinking about what it actually looks like in practise.
And that's why we're trying to do some projects,
which will be kind of proof of concept to show that and also why we want to make it happen for real rather than just doing these things.
The other area where there's been a lot of discussion of this topic is economics,
and you mentioned Robert Schiller's book and John K. and Mervyn King have recently written about it.
John King actually spoke about it here quite recently.
Now, when I read the economics and narrative economics that strikes me as storytelling rather than story listening,
and I have a problem to see how it will be operationalised in economics now.
I know you're not talking about economics,
but do you do you have any further feeling about how what you're writing and how it engages with narrative economics?
And so the shoulders poking in parties, in our terminology as narratives, as data or stories, as data?
And in a sense, he's talking about using stories as data for models.
I think the potentially more interesting or more distinct area would be in some work as a again comes from science fiction.
We don't only talk about science fiction, but it's often the easiest to appeal to immediately by Wet By,
edited by William Davis, which is how do you create new,
basically new new models of organisations of businesses in that can deal with some of the changes that are happening in markets.
So it's about disruptive structures as opposed to the stories of data, which is something slightly different.
But it does do some story in a single. They wouldn't use that word in the sense that my memory is.
As part of the book,
where he's talking about the way in which a kind of a narco international narrative has created a collective identity around bitcoin.
And so if you think about the functions he's thinking about the way in which we what we call non textual narratives.
So we differentiate between textual stories, which kind of embedded and curated,
which might align with things like films and novels and non textual stories,
which might be oral stories that circulate either between human beings in the same room or on social media.
And I think so does does story. Listen to non textual narratives in that book, particularly, I think, around collective identities.
But there's more there's more that could be done, and you could incorporate textual stories as well.
So I'm going to ask a final question, then go to the audience and online.
And you made a very interesting point about the different traditional traditions within the social science and humanities,
about engagement and critique. And that's an issue that we face in the in the modern school where we are quite often policy focussed.
And some of our colleagues in the humanities and social sciences feel very uncomfortable about actually getting
it and getting involved in policy on the grounds that it might undermine their independence as a critique.
And so could you elaborate a bit on a bit more on how you see those two different?
And I should say equally valid approaches within the social science and humanities working together is that they remain separate and complementary?
Or is there a role for them to come together? Do you think it might work if we take that, it's about plurality.
So there's no sense in which the argument of the book is that humanities scholars can't be pure humanist and that they can't
be issue advocates and and Pilkey very rightly says that issue advocacy is a really important role for academics to play.
It's again of both, and it's like, but we're limiting ourselves if we only stay in those two roles as a collective.
So it may be that different individuals are comfortable playing different roles.
It may be that the same individual is happy to do different roles at different points in their career,
but that as a kind of collective ecosystem of the humanities, we can expand and we could expand and.
And I don't think it compliments it, compromises academic independence.
I think it does question some of the narratives that were embedded in the humanities about our value, and maybe that's no bad thing, actually.
And it can it can really enhance your scholarly work because I know from having done this kind of collaboration.
So it's not to undermine what is already being done, but to say, can we also do more?
And in a kind of honest brokerage role, the idea is to just provide the evidence to provide the the best possible synthesis of the available evidence.
It's not about saying and therefore this is the decision that you should make.
And actually, I think if more humans were forced to take that normative element away from that work,
it might produce some quite interesting, different scholarship as well. Thank you.
Who would like to ask the first question we have? Do we have a microphone, clara in the front here?
We'll take two questions. Forgive me for pointing at you rudely like this.
OK, thank you so much, sir and Claire, that's really fascinating. My question relates to the marketing of narratives.
I think everybody who's tried to publish a book knows you're more likely to get published of
something along the lines of this has already been put out into the market and been successful.
So, for instance, I narratives, there are quite a few texts about that.
Therefore, new texts about that issue become prioritised looking at that initial dataset.
How were you able to account for the commercialisation of narratives and therefore that bias?
I'm not quite sure I get the question, sorry, I got the bit up until the actual question at the end.
I mean, do you account for the fact that there's a bias in the kind of narratives that get to text stage?
OK. As films? As novels? Yeah, yeah.
The makers of The Matrix trilogy, for instance,
talk really interestingly in an interview about film as a high finance art that therefore is dependent on kind of thing things having already worked,
which is why actually so many films are adaptations of novels or short stories of sold because you kind of know your narrative is going to work and.
I think that works that maps onto sort of popular literary publishing.
I think there is still space in publishing for the radically new how that links
to story listening would be linking in terms of ideas about narrative deficits.
So, you know, where where do you you can't only say that the dominant or mainstream stories.
And this is why we need experts whose job it is to know other stories.
So yes, I could talk about Terminator, but I can also talk about the amazing film called Conceiving, aided by Alan Neeson is an experimental artist.
So fantastic film about A.I., but that is not something that a non-expert would have would read.
So. So that would be where it fits.
Is that the scholar, the expert can bridge that gap between what makes it onto the dominant market and the stories that are also still out there.
And that is essentially really valuable in several ways.
One is that the dominant stories tend to be the ones that in an unexamined ways, even the decision makers think of the dominant ones.
So again, I mean, to use the example, and I think things have moved on, but sort of two or three years ago,
quite a lot of people were worried about the worries about humanoid robots.
Yeah, and it was just it was a distracting conversation.
And if in fact, there been some more considered look at stories around AI, including in particular stories in other languages,
all of a sudden you're getting a whole different set of information about possible models of social, human being and software systems, for example.
So it's, as you say, looking for the weird stories or the gaps in stories would be part of this process, not just the dominant ones.
OK, I got to ask one from online, and then the next one will be here.
This is from Jacinta Jackson.
Why does the framework exclude the effective nature of stories we know from behavioural economics that people aren't always rational?
The feelings evoke. My stories have sometimes been shown to be more powerful than the pure facts within the story.
So this is another.
Both stories have well, so Sarah could soon speak to the literature on the empathetic and the on empathy, but stories have emotional impacts.
We're simply saying that that may happen.
There is also this cognitive value, so we're not. Whatever the question was interested in.
Absolutely fine, of course. But that's often the place the conversation stopper.
You know, this story is causing outrage or this story is, you know, having this effect in this kind of emotional sense.
What we're interested in is the quiet voice underneath it that saying not just the passion,
but what is it about the worldview that's underlying that passion? So what is the framing?
But, but yeah, and also really interesting stories cognitively are not always actually very good affectively.
So I think as a scholar, you have to make that distinction. There's the amazing short story from the mid-20th century called Deadline,
which ended up with his the author the house arrest because anticipated the Manhattan project before it had become public.
And it's an awful story in many, many ways, but really interesting that from an interesting from a cognitive point of view,
so so does that point to make this all say, I was laughing about empathy because I wrote a kind of polemic against empathy,
which then got revised, moderated and turned into the first chapter,
which is that so often the the argument for the value of stories is that it it helps us empathy, empathise and identify.
And then we will become better people that we get that we behave better in the world.
There's no evidence that that's the case, either from psychology or for all, or I'm not persuaded by the rhetorical cases for this.
So there was a real drive for me at the beginning to go, OK, we put empathy aside, which I link with the affective.
What other value do stories have that we can build our case on?
So that's why the end of the affective is not considered. But we do acknowledge in the book, of course, that often the cognitive value of stories.
Is implicated with that form, which is implicated with the affect so that they can't always be separated.
Thank you. I should have said that questions from the audience, you might introduce yourself first before asking them, Hey, so I my name is Diana.
I'm doing my Ph.D. at the Oxford Internet Institute.
And that was very interesting, especially because my Ph.D. is about storytelling so very relevant.
And despite that, I have a question that's going to seem really basic, which is what actually is a story.
And I, you know, you use the word stories a lot, obviously.
But what makes you use that instead of the word fiction? How do we kind of, you know, what is a story in your definition of the impact of stories?
Is it, you know, the stories that we tell each other about our days?
Or is it published fiction? What is the what's the kind of impact and what's the kind of story that you hope will have an impact?
Claire, from the very early on in the book, insisted that we have a glossary,
which was entirely an unknown concept to me, and I kind of left Claire in the dark getting on with it.
And I was so grateful.
But when we got to the end that Claire had insisted, we have a glossary because one of the things we did is precisely go through,
define those terms and then literally go through the manuscript and check. We were using things consistently,
not least because we discovered when you work across sectors or across disciplines that the same word can be very different things in very different,
all those different words for the same thing. So the glossary is how we're defining things.
Not a kind of definitive definition. So in in the glossary, the definition story is as Claire introduced it, which is a very capacious definition.
And now I can't remember because I haven't memorised it, but it's a causal series of events that has actors in it with agency.
And the reason we wanted to keep it that broad was because we wanted to incorporate a scale from the institutional
narrative that somebody or corporation might print in their public relations material through to a film.
And this has been one of my frustrations as a literature scholar is that the school,
the skills and the tools of literary studies are so often confined to what we consider a proper object to be.
And I think that's a really a waste of the skills that we have so to put.
Fiction, as you might call it, on the same continuum as a public narrative was a really important move.
We don't use fiction in the book. We purposely avoided using fact and fiction for reasons we may get a question about.
So stories and textual and non textual stories was our lexicon differentiating, right?
I'm going to stop question from the floor and then ask one from so lady towards the back there.
And while the microphone goes there, I'd like to ask a question from Trish Greenhouse.
I'm concerned that the framework it seems to depict narratives as out there ready to be collected, heard, imbibed,
etc. But surely a narrative scholarship in recent years encouraged us to move on from narratives as nouns and narrative as a verb,
i.e. Pike Place greater focus on the process of storytelling, its contents,
the audience and tell a listener dialogue and storytelling, as in that moment, is your framework to static.
So I think the the because part of part of the drive was was a practitioner role,
which was to say not, you know, not what could be created and in the wonderful, perfect settings.
But if you've got a problem, know like aspects of climate change or if you've got a pandemic happening,
what is already out there that might actually give you rapidly or relatively rapidly some new insights into the framing,
the models, etc. So there was a sense of urgency that meant that some of the I think some
of our own framing was about existing stories and also that there's a waste.
If you don't look at what's already out there, you know you got millennia of human storytelling that you're not that you're not looking at.
So that was. Having said that, the in some of the areas,
we're also beginning to think about story listening in the context of public dialogue, deliberative democracy,
which is some of the interesting areas where thinking about how rigorous evidence
gets in the public decision making is some really interesting thinking there.
And in that space, you're quite often both.
Well, in a perfect world, you'd have your story listening exercise on everything that existed until the moment that you started.
And then you'd also be looking at the ways in which people were creating stories as they were engaging between the evidence,
including stories on science and the public policy matter at hand.
Thank you. I've just been told off. I keep my pen, so I apologised to the audience online.
The question with Thank you. I'd like to see some.
So I'm proud of the university's policy engagement team and my job is to help humanities researchers engage with policymakers.
So I have a question, I suppose, about definitions of how you see story being relating to qualitative evidence and whether you think that story
listening as a concept can feed into or shape discussions about the use of qualitative evidence in policymaking.
And also, if I may, a question about practise and whether you think that is an issue of time scales and if
you're asking policymakers to imbibe stories as part of this sort of policymaking process,
whether it might be quite difficult to condense stories into a sort of bullet points or and
whether there might be some resistance to to sitting with those stories or hearing them.
And take the second one first. I'm not sure how close the mike was to your mouth,
so people online that was the second part of the question was about individual story imbibing by policymakers.
That's exactly what we're not arguing for. So Claire's side, where she was talking about ecosystems and structures,
this is about recognising that you have experts who can produce synthesised evidence that can inform decision making.
It's not about and this links to the empathy thing a little bit, you know,
getting the prime minister to read Jane Austen before he goes into a committee meeting.
Like, that's just not what we're claiming or advocating for and what we are advocating for
individual narrative literacy that does this not the same as advocating for individual story,
imbibing of specific stories. So that would take the the second point first.
And in answering that, I've forgotten what the first question was. Oh, it's a really good question,
and it's one that I touched on when I said that we're really interested to hear humanities
scholars and social scientists from different disciplines think about what we have,
what we're calling narrative evidence links to that kind of evidence. And Alex, he's here with us today.
We spoke about as I asked that question of us as well. And I don't think we have an answer so much as.
It's something that we it's something that links to the bigger question of rigour
and what guarantees rigour about the kinds of evidence that we're presenting.
And so the claims that we'd be making for the rigour of narrative evidence may or may not not contain claims for the rigour of positive evidence.
More generally, if you got something and you know, I think quality of evidence is such a broad category,
I'm not really sure what more to say about that because there's qualitative evidence coming out of the sciences in many ways as well.
So, yeah, I think I did get distracted.
There are thinking which character in Jane Austen, the prime minister would most identify with.
He was given the book, We Could We a question in the Frontier, and in the meantime, I'm going to go again to Jacinta Jackson.
This is not favouritism. Her question has been vetted.
How does this story listening approach stroke framework deal with the problem of whose stories get told and who stand?
This is very similar to the question, I think that was asked.
So the the answer is it should be a deliberate attempt to listen out for the ones that are not frequently told,
and that would be part of the skill of running a specific story listening exercise.
And I mean, in the sense, it's part of the value. That's yeah.
Yeah. Thank you. The question from the. Hello, my name's Matilda.
I'm an undergrad who does pay so I don't absorb any particular religion that trip to the topic at hand.
I wanted to ask if you'd had the opportunity to apply your concept to reflexively so sort of to the domain of public reasoning of collecting evidence,
what might be the narrative deficits of your approach?
And you were saying you were expecting that you'd have to convince people of sort of your approach.
But that's actually gone very quickly. What might the particular elements of your approach be that has made it so narratively seductive?
I would say it's not actively seductive. It's it's rigorous. Do you have a thought?
I think if I understood the coming correctly, I think it's partly that there's a real need and hunger.
So it's so clear that there is knowledge that we need new forms of rigorous evidence in addition to the ones we've got.
I mean, I would come to climate change as an example. I mean, you know,
having been involved in climate modelling and all the effort that goes into the physical and natural sciences around aspects of climate change,
you know, it's superb. But I think the sense that that the next sort of degree of exactitude of certain
types of climate model matters less than having some really better rigorous
ways of thinking about the kind of social and cultural connexions and
interconnections between the physical and the social and cultural know the great.
The need is around that kind of hybridisation, if you like.
So I think the book is partly tapping into that sense of urgency.
And if you lie alongside that of the because of discussion about fake news and
and concerns about debates around things like the vaccine hesitancy and so on,
the sense that there are really powerful stories, if you like that are operating in ways that people who believe themselves in quotes to be rational.
You know that there's a kind of mismatch between the way we think about other people's stories and what we think.
So we try not to use we in the book, we use it when it's literally just us.
Yeah. So the sense of urgency around being able to face up to how stories operating
and to think critically and reflect to be about that rather than just saying,
I hate your story, you know, your values are not mine and I'm not going to listen to them.
We're the self-referential because we do talk briefly and in in the book about and I'm particularly interested in this about
textual stories that themselves imagine and model different forms of governance and evidence that informs decision making.
So you get into a real, recursive sort of loop there, but something like a book.
We're both hugely fond of the three body problem by decision day and is a fascinating narrative
model of the limits of scientific evidence to make decisions in the face of uncertainty.
So we talk about that book a little bit. And I mean, as a kind of this is this is a book about a society facing repeated catastrophes
and having to work out what it can predict about them and how to survive.
And those kind of different models that are trying out in a game within the story.
So, so I'm a little academic project. That's me, probably, which would be a kind of to gather those kinds of narratives together and to look at how,
in my case, particularly fiction, imagines different forms of governance and evidence.
Come here, if you are going to do one from the Web and forgive me, I'm against mangle the pronunciation of lame.
Sharona Tarasov, who asks ASDs, which I think is science and technology studies, and most specifically feminist tests,
highlight the relational nature of stories i.e. how they then pre-existed come forth in the act of telling and how they change,
according to who is telling. But also listening i.e. a problem is taught differently to a friend or adopted to a researcher.
What is the role of the listener in your framework? Classic and thoughtful, so I'll take it.
So we don't use the word listener, so story listening is the institutional act of gathering narrative evidence which
could be commissioned by a single person or could be a you requested by a committee.
And we talk about the story and Biber, which would be the individual who's engaging with a story and.
Listener would confuse in our lexicon those two categories.
So if the question is about the relation ality of the imbibe to a story, then that absolutely matters.
For instance, when one is thinking about collective identities,
the the subjective relationship of the Bible to the story matters less in story listening
because what you're trying to do is is gather a synthesis of evidence from a range of stories.
So it's not about the individual's specific relationship to it.
The reason why feminist is hugely relevant is that it's historically made a very
strong case for needing to value and understand different forms of knowledge.
So a kind of history of epistemology and story. This thing would fit in an academic sense with with that work.
And this is also why we took the various stages throughout. The book about indigenous knowledge is, for instance,
and needing to recognise those and in addition to the kinds of knowledge and evidence that we value out of science.
There are other forms of rigorous knowledge and evidence that have hitherto perhaps been sidelined and need,
and we really need actually, and this isn't a kind of ethical case.
It's it's a practical case that we are faced in the 21st century, as we all know with many urgent, complex wicked problems as the terminology is,
and we need just as much and as many different types of evidence to help us make decisions in the face of those.
Quentin Tarantino. I think it also brings out the point which hasn't come up here that is often below the surface, which is scientists anxiety.
Some scientists sorry anxiety about broadening types of evidence in some of the situations that I was showing there.
So the fear that I say by including it was the mention of indigenous knowledge that
are some really interesting reflections and working in New Zealand and Canada,
for example.
Sometimes, I think wrongly, physical sciences and natural sciences lack the confidence in their own, not owning their own sort of science knowledge,
but in the position that they have in some senses fought for and only achieved in the last few decades
to be in the room with decision makers or to be listened to in an authoritative public setting.
And sometimes I think there's an underlying concern that if you broaden your kind of openness to other forms of knowledge,
that will make it possible for you to be on the cards. So the IPCC and with its climate change modelling,
has we looked at one report specifically something like two hundred and seventy authors of whom a couple,
a few of social scientists, but there weren't any humanities scholars and certainly from some discussions with people involved.
It seems that that's partly because of a fear that by loosening the framework and inviting in other forms of knowledge,
it would reduce the attributed authority of the science in that case in climate change.
And that would be so devastating and so frightening that therefore these other forms of knowledge are excluded.
And we're trying to say here is, you know, if it's done right, you get both.
And indeed, to not include wider forms of evidence means that the scientific evidence may in the end,
also be listened to less because it is incomplete.
I've seen this very much in the biodiversity world where indigenous knowledge has a lot to offer, and it did strike me as you were talking,
that this might be a way to bring into the in a way that everyone can find easier to to assimilate.
Question that Miriam Mendez, I am a research facilitator in the Catholic School of Government.
My question is related to what you once said before. If you are peaceful and you use story listening as a methodology in your research, you would.
I suppose you would have to a lot your repertoire of sources.
So is not only literature reviews and all these sorts of stuff.
You have to use all the things. And as you said, there are challenges on that.
But there are also many beauties in the sense of creating more of an environment for
transdisciplinary and real transdisciplinary at the level of methodology you have.
How do you think about it? I'll go, yes.
So it's a it's a question about the need for, and I love that real transdisciplinary to you into this clarity.
There's, I think,
become a suspicion of interdisciplinarity because it's been sometimes perceived to be to be pushed by funders and it to be this kind of buzz
word and that it's sort of not possible or not real and absolute fundamental advocate for interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary approaches.
I have a paper coming out of that shortly which models different forms of interdisciplinarity,
which can either be a single scholar needing to scale themselves up in different approaches.
Or and this is where we talk in the book about more collaboration needed within the humanities and across disciplines.
So a single scholar doesn't have to give up, but you have a range of scholars with existing skills who bring them together.
And actually, I include in that in the paper that's coming out into sexuality,
which very ugly word actually is a form of interdisciplinarity as a form of
collaborating with researchers and decision makers who have their own methodologies,
known skill sets that academia needs to respect to be developed in relation to their objects of study and the pressures on the needs of their sector.
So, yes, absolutely. The story of this thing is implicated.
That was what I kept using the academic indicated in the need for the kind of advocacy for more real into this clarity.
And you think it's OK to add? Look, I'm really sorry, it's past 6:00, so we have to come to an end.
I know there are more questions, both from the audience and from on online just before a couple of things.
Let me point out that this time next week, we're going to be joined by the John Oliver, although many of you will know his book,
but that to the world how Britain became the servants of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals.
It's a really fascinating book, and it's going to be a great discussion. So please do come along.
You mentioned several times that Roger Pielke, this is looking way ahead, but in November,
Roger will be spending a week here and there will be a bench round with him.
Sarah, I hope we can bring you down from Cambridge. Young, thoughtful. This plenty to do.
We clearly missed a trick on our Typekit as well, listening to the title of the book next week,
which sounds much more exciting than the for the people in the audience here.
Please do join us next door for a glass of wine.
I should also say there will be other flyers around and that gives you a 20 percent discount on the book.
I don't know if that applies to a virtual audience as well, or how we can get that to.
People, while there is a code online, so you can get the discount as well.
Let me thank the audience for real and virtual for some really interesting questions.
But most of all, it's a really complex topic you've been discussing.
You've done it with wonderful clarity. I think this is a groundbreaking book.
It is making us think about evidence in a totally new way.
And as I said, it's genuine. Speaking of cross-disciplinary, a divide.
So it it really is fascinating. Please join me in thanking clown Sarah.