Storytelling is a meaning-making process with catalytic capacity.
Brave Space-Making: The Poetics & Politics of Storytelling
explores the generative potential of storytelling by focusing on its centrality in
brave space-making
. Brave spaces are spheres of possibility where participants undo in order to become, question and disrupt dominant narratives, and imagine otherwise. By extension, brave space-making is a vulnerable, risky, and often tension-riddled process of perspective-sharing, capacity-building, and creative invention.
This book features voices of scholars, teachers, artists, and poets who use narrative theory, methods, and practices to foster individual and social healing and transformation through brave space-making. Contributors offer story-based understandings of brave space-making in contexts such as prisons, farmers markets, continuing care facilities, and mobile health clinics. Through first-person narratives, ethnographic portraits, short-form stories, poetic interpretations, and even visually rendered accounts authors reveal the shapeshifting and script-flipping that occurs among dominant and counter-narratives. The book also comes with ancillary digital materials including feature-length documentaries and podcasts as well as other public and creative analytic scholarship relevant for use in organizations and classrooms alike.
The stories in
Brave Space-Making
follow real people reckoning with the myriad challenges and inequities that confront them in the fostering brave spaces. They invite readers to feel the embodied heartbeat of each tale, as life courses are disrupted and courageously reimagined. An aesthetic mindset allows contemplators to consider what storytelling
does
within and for participants. Collectively the chapters explore how storytelling can foster resilience as individuals refashion selves and reidentify priorities in the face of expectations gone awry, and the difficulties in doing so. They reveal the capacity of storytelling to foster enriching potentials through human connection. Storytelling connects past events with present states and imagined futures and as such is well suited to revealing character transformations. Taken together, chapters position brave spaces as vital for people to compose lives in ways that counter restrictive narratives and refigure people's relationships with one another. In this way, brave space-making holds particular significance for individuals living in vulnerable circumstances.