Storytelling and Community Well-being: Healing Our Communities Through Communal Narrative Change
Storytelling is the mechanism we use to understand the world around us and to define our place in it. The importance of storytelling in culture becomes clear when one realizes that the vast majority of books, newspapers, magazines, videos, plays, news broadcasts, social media discussions, and so on consist of someone telling a tale in some form. Storytelling brings people together to entertain each other, to learn from each other, and often to teach young people about life and their world. Storytelling shapes the reality of the world in their minds. Storytelling has been important in all cultures since the dawn of history to bring people together. The ability to tell a story is one of the defining characteristics of our species.
Our communities are in crisis. The suicide rate among the young, especially among Black communities, has doubled since 2014 (California Department of Public Health). Marginalized communities are also more at risk of depression, anxiety and stress. Studies suggest an epidemic of loneliness, with negative impact on community well-being, social cohesion, individual and public health and contributions to an overall feeling of social and moral decline in America. In 2022, over three quarters of college students suffer from psychological distress, anxiety, depression and isolation. The issue is, to what extent can the Humanities/Humanity offer ways to not only understand what is happening to us, but also make interventions to address the systemic causes of our collective distress. In literature, are there ideas or expressions that can bring us more than comfort? In religion, is there some salve for our collective anomie? Is there something in our art, media, films or music that can save us?
Storytelling and Community Well-being is a colloquium that will examine the role of communal narratives in contextualizing our individual and collective relationships to modern social, cultural, and political systems. Scholars and practitioners, using a multidisciplinary approach, will explore the use of storytelling and narrative change in addressing the social determinants of community well-being. Their goal is to identify concrete actions that can be taken—individually and collectively—to heal societal, cultural, national, and global challenges.