Climate change is the most serious challenge of the Anthropocene, and so climate change communication needs to be taken suitably seriously, enriched with new ways of conceptualising, understanding and imaging the world and its transformations. The lack of understanding and seeing the gravity of the crisis has been increasingly identified as the ‘crisis of the imagination’. Over the centuries, telling stories was used to confront the unknown, encourage thinking about solutions, illuminate opportunities and give hope. Stories and storytelling allow space for interpretation and agency to think critically and, most importantly, act imaginatively. They encourage inter- and transdisciplinarity and thus novel perspectives, stressing the fact that, ultimately, discussions on climate change are discussions about who we are. In this sense, storytelling has a great potential to motivate individuals, communities and policy-makers to act on climate change.

This chapter examines ways of working as a composer for screen, explaining every step of the process – from reading through a script or treatment to the final recordings and edits – and offers advice on how to approach collaboration and networking in the film industry.

Storytelling is the magic ingredient for ensuring your messages make an impact and are remembered. But, to work well, stories require certain ingredients, including a classic narrative structure, jeopardy, pace and the use of character in telling them.

Mastering the art of compelling communication can be a passport to success, as this introduction explains.

How to remember your new skills, and what to do with them.

This chapter examines the relationship between Black literature and anti-Black medical violence. It argues that, since at least the eighteenth century, Black writers have tapped into the narrative and documentary power of Black writing to chronicle and archive the racialized operations of medical violence and its historical attempts to exploit Black bodies. Using literature to spotlight medicine’s role in the global economies of Black embodied terror, these writers have helped to construct an important site of memory that I call the Black medical archive. In doing so, they demonstrate the importance of medicine to the politics and aesthetics of the Black literary tradition, from its origins to the present. Further, they unfurl how Black literature has long been a crucial site for the transformational practices of storytelling that the field of narrative medicine has proffered as a radical intervention into the histories of violence, exploitation, and discrepant care that have informed the practices and epistemologies of modern medicine.

A core impediment to refugee applicants providing a credible narrative account of their claims to protection is the profound fragmentation and unpredictability of the structure, content and conduct of the oral hearing. This chapter argues that the conduct of the oral hearing severely fragmented applicants’ testimony in three key ways: reverse-order questioning; decision-makers’ abrupt subject switching during the hearing; and questions pertaining to time, sequencing and precise dates of events. This leads to the conclusion that applicants were both expected to present their oral evidence in a form that fulfilled the credibility criteria and the demand for narrative, and actively impeded in their efforts to do so. Further, where applicants displayed an ability to present evidence in a narrative form, in all but a minority of hearings this was done despite, rather than because of, the structure and setting of the hearing.

Since the 1920s, American writers have evinced a fascination with and investment in fictional representations of jazz music and jazz musicians. As this essay demonstrates, part of jazz’s appeal for fiction writers is that it offers the opportunity to explore various kinds of border crossing. This essay surveys several jazz fictions to explicate how these fictions portray jazz as a local event, often focusing on musicians who may not be known beyond their own communities, but who live to play the music. Using Nathaniel Mackey’s concept of artistic othering, this essay investigates how writers portray the jazz musician’s search for a space to belong, where artistic forms of risk-taking are affirmed and the contingencies jazz musicians face, whether it be in the form of substance abuse, underemployment, self-doubt, or social injustice can be managed through instances where self-repair, improvisation, and community constitute the foundations of the musician’s lifeworld. Jazz fiction, in other words, is deeply concerned with the contradictions of American life and how playing jazz music involves the act of containing contradictions.

This chapter is more or less a conclusion of all the foregoing chapters: it shows how we humans are storytellers and convey meaning, values, experiences and insights by storytelling. And that is what constitutions actually are: stories of how we best relate to one another in political societies, and how we should behave (stories about morality, justice and the law). Through constitutions we communicate and establish paths for (optimal) human cooperation, in credible, convincing, even compelling ways - packed together with methods (instruments) for reaffirmation.

QAnon, a conspiracy theory composed of a complex series of interlocking narratives detailing the machinations of malign actors whose seemingly insurmountable powers pose an existential threat to social order, is anchored in a folkloric process. It includes a wide range of characters from bad guys who kidnap, traffic, and cannibalize children, to good guys who rally “patriots” to fight elements of the “deep state.” We consider ~2 million discussion posts to social media forums where community members puzzle out the cryptic messages of the eponymous “Q.” Predicating our work on folklore theory, we apply a computational pipeline of AI methods to reveal the underlying narrative framework of the QAnon discussion forums, and identify the various links between otherwise largely unlinked domains of interaction and events that animate the conspiracy theory. We present a real-time user interface that allows users to monitor the changing topological features of the QAnon narrative framework.

By this last chapter, you should have a clear biological and statistical model, well-designed data collection, and careful interpretation of models fitted to your data. The challenge now is to communicate what may be some complex analyses to a range of audiences. This aspect of data analysis has been relatively neglected, but we now have audiences less tolerant of unclear or unengaging communication, coupled with the challenge of describing complex analyses. We advocate bringing a storytelling approach to presenting results and being very clear how the data support our larger biological story. We also introduce basic ideas about how to report complex analyses and offer suggestions for improving the clarity of supporting graphics. Two important recommendations are that biologists learn more about how to communicate quantitative information and alter our data communication dramatically to match the mode of delivery and the target audience.