Narrative for Social Justice Initiative (N4SJ)
Narrative for Social Justice Initiative (N4SJ)
In response to the on-going effects of structural inequities in our communities, the Narrative for Social Justice (N4SJ) Initiative was founded by the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee and members of ISSN as part of our efforts to make our own Narrative community more welcoming, diverse, and committed to social justice. We understand social justice as a community-based and self-reflexive set of practices committed to addressing inequities, biases, and oppressive discrimination in order to build more inclusive and empowering futures for all.
The N4SJ Initiative is dedicated to creating a more just and equitable academic community through research, teaching, and dialogue about social justice using digital tools and public scholarship. Situated in a well-regarded field of literary scholarship, the Narrative Society and N4SJ seek to prepare scholars to handle society's challenges by promoting a deeper understanding about the role of narrative in historical and contemporary cultures, addressing inequities within and outside the academic community, and building bridges between rigorous research and community engagement to achieve more equitable futures. Our primary interest in this context lies in exploring how narratives of any kind, be they fictional or non-fictional, can challenge discourses circulating in the public sphere that fuel inequities and social injustice. To these ends, N4SJ is currently comprised of several social media teams working on a podcast, video content, and establishing a web presence on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. We welcome proposals and suggestions for other work that would fit with the N4SJ Initiative, and invite interested ISSN members to get involved!
We hope these efforts will support ISSN membership by bringing attention to issues of social justice and inequity. We also aim to reach out actively to people and communities not yet involved in the narrative world and to increase opportunities for transdisciplinary exchanges with other scholarly organizations and the general public.
Committee Members 2021: Cody Mejeur (Director/Organizer, primary contact), Dorothee Birke, Gretchen Busl, Helen Davis, Angela Du, Joanne (Joanie) Lipson Freed, Carolin Gebauer, Torsa Ghosal, Chiara Giampietro, Kristin Jacobson, Eric Morel, Joelle Moses, Lois Presser.
For more information contact Cody Mejeur at codymeje@buffalo.edu.
N4SJ Short Video Initative
CALL FOR VIDEOS: Submit your work to N4SJ!
Describe in 1-5 minutes how your work uses narrative to advance social justice.
N4SJ Podcast
The Narrative for Social Justice podcast (N4SJ) explores the connections between the study of narratives--and narratives themselves--and many forms of social justice. Episodes will be released monthly and will feature conversations between scholars, activists, writers, and artists. Topics include our/our guests’ understandings of and approaches to “social justice,” the literary canon, feminist/queer/trans approaches, and anti-racist education.
This public scholarship initiative is run through the International Society for the Study of Narrative. The podcast team consists of five academics: Gretchen Busl, Angela Du, Carolin Gebauer, Torsa Ghosal, and Chiara Pellegrini (bios below).
Episode 1: What is Narrative for Social Justice? I
Angela Du, Chiara Pellegrini and Cody Mejeur discuss what the elusive term ‘social justice’ means to them, reflect on the critical hope that comes with doing narrative for social justice, and encourage narrative studies and “narrative” itself to open up to more disciplines, audiences, and students.
Episode 2: What is Narrative for Social Justice? II
Torsa Ghosal, Carolin Gebauer, and Gretchen Busl pick up the conversation from the previous episode. They reflect on ‘social justice’ as concept, framework, adjective, and practice. They discuss how research in narrative studies and pedagogy can engage with questions and topics related to social justice.
Episode 3: Narratives of Asian American and Asian Canadian Representation
Episode 3 of the N4SJ podcast is now available! Tune into "Narratives of Asian American and Asian Canadian Representation" with host Angela Du (she/her) and special guests Prof. Joey S. Kim (she/her) and Prof. Jennifer Ho (she/her).
Episode 4: Narratives of Space from the Iberian Peninsula
Episode 4 of the N4SJ podcast is now available! Host Chiara Pellegrini chats to Nerea Eizagirre about Basque studies, identity, maps, and what narrative studies means for real bodies.
Episode 5: Race, Social Justice Pedagogy, and Reclaiming Narratives of the Past
Co-Director of the NEH-funded “Quakertown Stories” project, Dr. Danielle Phillips-Cunningham, talks with Gretchen Busl about scholar activism and the racial and gender politics of public memory. By small no coincidence, on Labor Day Danielle published an essay in the Washington Post on Nannie Helen Burroughs and the Black women’s labor movement – please check out the episode to hear more about connecting the past and the present by reclaiming black women’s narratives.
Bonus Episode: N4SJ's Hot Take on Netflix's "The Chair"
Welcome to our first “hot take,” a quick bonus episode where we discuss a narrative that’s currently getting attention from the press or the public! Hosts Angela Du, Torsa Ghosal, Chiara Pellegrini, and Gretchen Busl give our take on Netflix’s new six-part series, The Chair.
Episode 6: Forms of Global Capitalism, Unfree Labor, and Contemporary Indian Ocean Studies
Host Torsa Ghosal talks to Neelofer Qadir about how literary scholars shaping the interdisciplinary field of Indian Ocean Studies today can address the insidiousness of colonialism, capitalism, slavery and oppressive structures of power in postcolonial nation-states.
Episode 7: Rewriting Narratives with author Betsy Cornwell
Host Gretchen Busl talks with best-selling author Betsy Cornwell about using storytelling to make material change in the world. Betsy is currently working to establish a childcare inclusive arts retreat for single mothers at the Old Knitting Factory in Connemara, Ireland, aiming to answer the question "Can telling a story create the story?"
Episode 8: Neuroqueer Narratives
Host Chiara Pellegrini talks with Sean Yeager about autistic narratives and resisting the narratives of “autism”, neuroqueer social justice, physics, pedagogies, disability studies, and the editing of this episode.
Episode 9: ADHD and the Academy
As a follow-up to episode 8, join host Angela Du and guests Rebecca Shapiro, Catherine Trotman, and Lee Skallerup Bessette as they talk about ADHD and the academy, clinical psychology, and educational development. We delve into creating community during the pandemic, what counts as academic “scholarship,” and the privilege associated with diagnosis and disclosure, and more.
N4SJ Podcast Team
Gretchen Busl
is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Coordinator for the MA in English and PhD in Rhetoric at Texas Woman’s University. Her research combines studies in narrative theory, rhetoric, world literature, and gender studies. She is the co-editor of the volume Antiheroines of Contemporary Media: Saints, Sinners, and Survivors and has published her work in Modern Language Review, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, and English Studies. She is also a member of ISSN’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee and, as a passionate advocate for the public humanities, is thrilled to serve as one of the co-hosts of the new Narrative for Social Justice podcast.
Angela Du
is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. Her current work examines how Victorian novelists imagined futures not-yet-here for female protagonists. Her interests include the novel, feminist narrative theory, temporality, character, genre, and periodical studies. She also trains graduate teaching assistants at the university, and her pedagogical interests include online learning and accessibility. Tweets @ang_y_du
Carolin Gebauer
Carolin Gebauer is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Wuppertal. She is part of OPPORTUNITIES, a Horizon 2020 project funded by the European Commission which explores narratives on migration in the public sphere. She is currently working on a book on the cultural history of the representation of mobility in verbal and audiovisual narrative.
Carolin is the author of the monograph Making Time: World Construction in the Present-Tense Novel (De Gruyter, 2021) and a member of the executive team of DIEGESIS, a bilingual interdisciplinary e-journal dedicated to narrative research. She has been a member of the International Society for the Study of Narrative since 2015. Tweets @caro_gebauer.
Torsa Ghosal
is assistant professor of English at California State University, Sacramento, and author of the monograph Out of Mind: Mode, Mediation, and Cognition in Twenty-First Century Narrative (Ohio State University Press, Fall ’21). Her areas of research include narrative theory, cognitive cultural studies, global Anglophone literature, digital media, and multimodality. Her critical essays have appeared in Studies in the Novel, Poetics Today, Storyworlds, and Media-N. She has published on films and comics in Comics Studies Here and Now (Routledge) and The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies (OUP).
She is also the author of an experimental novella, Open Couplets (New Delhi: Yoda Press). Tweets @TorsaG
Chiara Pellegrini
is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at Newcastle University. Her project focuses on contemporary novels and autobiographies with narrators whose gender is other than binary or fixed. Her background is in queer theory, trans studies, narrative studies and continental philosophy. She has recently published two articles: ‘Posttranssexual Temporalities: Negotiating Canonical Memoir Narratives in Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw and Juliet Jacques’ Trans’ (a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 2019) and ‘Adaptation as Queer Touching:
Transgressing the Boundaries of Bodies and Texts in The Safety of Objects’ (Queer/Adaptation, ed. by Pamela Demory, Palgrave 2019). Her interview with author Juliet Jacques has been published in Transgender Studies Quarterly (2020) and she is the organizer of ‘Trans/Queer Gender and Narrative Form’ (April 2021), an international symposium on gender and narrative. Tweets @chiarapg4
N4SJ Contact
Email: narrative4sj@gmail.com
Facebook group: Narrative for Social Justice
Twitter: @narrative4sj
YouTube: Narrative for Social Justice
For feedback, comments, and suggestions contact the podcast team at n4sjpodcast@gmail.com.