Narrative Imagination: Dismantling Old Age Through The Literary Foodscape In Lore Segal’s “The Arbus Factor”

Being able to take another person's perspective and understanding the Other is a crucial element of reading, understanding, and processing literature. Especially in the context of old age, many literary texts play into the culturally constructed (cf. Gullette 2004) and biased understanding of old age as decline narrative, rather than reading an old person's story as a narrative of possibility. In her short story "The Arbus Factor" which was first published in The New Yorker in 2007, Lore Segal offers a different perspective on aging. Through creating a space, coming into existence through foodways and food practices, which in my dissertation I will refer to as 'literary foodscape,' she offers a setting and backdrop for the characters to construct a discourse of possibility, creation, and new opportunities at a later stage in life. Segal wittily dismantles age-related stereotypes and opens up a discourse that goes beyond an easy categorization. This paper is going to analyze the ways in which a literary text, through the 'literary foodscape' is able to rewrite a culturally engrained perspective, and offers a different and more accurate understanding of what it means to be old. Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. Aged By Culture. The University of Chicago Press. 2004.

Developing political compassion through narrative imagination in human rights education

This paper argues that political compassion is a necessary disposition for engaging with human rights principles and combatting social injustices such as racial discrimination. Drawing from Martha Nussbaum’s theory of political emotions, the paper concentrates on the need to understand compassion as connected to cognition and practical reasoning. Moreover, the paper offers suggestions of how to educate towards political compassion in human rights education (HRE) through Nussbaum’s notion of narrative imagination. To capture the multiperspectival and partial dimensions of HRE, the paper further employs the work of critical HRE scholars and emphasises the importance of counter-narratives and reflective interpretation of narratives. Refined by critical considerations, Nussbaum’s work on compassion and narrative imagination provides a new and important perspective for understanding the relation between human rights, emotions and social justice in the context of contemporary HRE theory and practice.

Narrative Imagination and Social Change: Instructors in Agricultural Colleges in Ethiopia Address Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

Ethiopia has one of the highest rates of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in the world, making female students particularly vulnerable in its post-secondary institutions. Although there is extensive literature that describes the problem, mainly from the students' perspectives, what remains understudied is the role of instructors, their perception of the current issues, and what they imagine they can do to address campus-based SGBV, particularly in rural settings. In this study, we used the concept of narrative imagination to work with instructors in four Ethiopian agricultural colleges to explore how they understand the SGBV issues at their colleges and what they imagine their own role could include in efforts to combat these problems. Using qualitative narrative-based methods such as interviews and an interactive storyline development workshop, as well as cellphilming (cellphone + film) as a participatory visual method, the data were collected across several fieldwork phases. We consider how we might broaden this framework of narrative imagination to include the notion of art for social change.

Preadolescent Advanced Readers: Exploring Attitudes, Beliefs, and Behaviors

Despite dedication of tremendous resources to developing literary proficiencies, advanced readers may remain an underserved and understudied population. This qualitative study included nine preadolescent participants aged 10–12 years who demonstrated reading comprehension abilities within the top 10% on a national normed achievement battery. The researchers gathered interview data from participants with corroborating evidence from their parents and their book club teacher. The grounded theory analyses found advanced readers to demonstrate superior reading comprehension and the ability to read entire books quickly. Participants reported positive attitudes toward reading in general and preferred out of school reading over the limiting structures of school reading. Some evidence supported a connection between reading and identity exploration through narrative imagination and empathetic relations to characters and narratives. Advanced readers may present cognitive characteristics, as well as behaviors and motivations that require differentiated learning designs.

Teaching European Studies in Australia: Fostering Cultural and Historical Literacy through the Narrative Imagination

One of the main problems we face in teaching European Studies in the Australian university context is the lack of cultural and historical literacy about Europe among the current cohort of students. Drawing on Martha Nussbaum’s concept of the ‘narrative imagination’, this paper suggests that novels, films and other literary material can help our students penetrate unfamiliar cultural and historical environments. This is because narrative provides the context to help students understand complex dynamics at play in unfamiliar situations, and makes this context meaningful by putting it into humanistic, not scientific terms. It is above all an epistemology based on the use of ‘empathy’ as a device to deepen historical and cultural understanding. While there are certainly caveats to using literary texts in an academic environment of historical or social inquiry, as long we are cognizant of the truth-value of the literary epistemological framework, that is, we understand that they do not aim to establish veritable fact, but instead provoke an emotional response from us, such texts remain useful pedagogical tools for fostering cultural and historical literacy amongst our students.