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File name: WAA bonus ep 6 v1Audio Length: 0:40:16Date transcribed: 7 February 2020
Veronika: Hello everybody, welcome back to Words & Actions. Today we’re
going to look at storytelling. We’re going to look at storytelling and a
bit of politics and business, but also stories told by climate activists, so
quite a range. Our hosts are the usuals. I’m Veronika Koller, I record
from Lancaster.
Erika: Hi, I’m Erika Darics; I’m calling in from Aston University, Birmingham,
UK.
Bernard: Hello, I’m Bernard, I’m calling in from Ghent University, nice to be here
again.
Veronika: So, Erika and I, we’re both located in the UK and as you may or may
not have noticed there’s this thing going on in the UK called Brexit
(laughter). So for those of us who are politically interested, we listen to
the news a lot, sometimes perhaps too much even, you can’t get too
much of a good thing, can’t you? And the other day I was having some
parliamentary debate on Brexit on in the background. Erika, don’t you
think, I mean when you turn on the news, it’s like acoustic wallpaper,
isn’t it really?
Erika: It’s unbelievable. Parliament TV is now the soap opera for many
families and they would sit down in the evening with a bowl of popcorn
(laughs) to get their daily dose of adrenaline.
Veronika: You would never have thought that really. It’s not just in Britain, it’s
even beyond Britain, I know that from friends in Austria who follow a
particular life ticker, just for watching parliamentary debates in Britain.
Bernard: And in Belgium we have our own problems with our government
formation. So we have two topics, Brexit and Belgium government
formation.
Veronika: That’s more than we have (laughter), we have only one topic.
Bernard: Kudos to us, yay!
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Veronika: So, the other day I was having Parliament TV on in the background
and the usual people were saying the completely predictable usual
things. But then, just after 8:30 in the evening I suddenly gave it my
full attention. I had been sort of looking at my computer, on my phone
or whatever and suddenly one MP, an independent got up and I
suddenly dropped everything else, looked at the telly and listened to
him.
And why was that? Because he was telling a story. He got up and he
said, “I rise in support of a particular motion,” and then he said, “On
the morning of 7th February 2017 I woke up in an isolation room at
Kings College Hospital where I was receiving chemotherapy. My blood
counts were rock bottom and the chances of an infection high. Weak
as a kitten, I got dressed. My friends and parliamentary neighbour, the
Brexit secretary, who was then a government whip, met me at the
entrance to the ward with a hospital porter and a wheelchair. He took
me out to the chief whip’s car and we were driven to Parliament so
that I could vote for the Article 50 bill.”
And then he goes on to say what he did since. So he was telling a
story. He was giving us the setting, when was this. He introduces the
main actor, himself, and then later a friend. And he’s also telling a very
personal story.
On our blog we have a screenshot of him and you can see his facial
expression. You know, this is very personal how he starts. And this
really got my attention all of a sudden.
Erika: Yeah, it’s not surprising that you paid attention and everybody in the
chamber because stories, we connect to stories at a very deep
emotional level. Stories really are important ways of making sense of
our experiences and our reality, right?
Bernard: Absolutely.
Veronika: Yeah.
Erika: There’s an interesting account from a professor of medical sociology,
Catherine Reisman, which I quite like, in which she tells a story again
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about how she realised the power of stories. She was going around
collecting accounts of why people got divorced and she was expecting
them to give her brief answers, several points of reasons or whatever.
But what happened was that when people were asked about reasons
for getting a divorce, they started this long story and it was always the
same pattern.
It started off how they met each other, how they got to know each
other and it went on and on. So, stories are a really powerful way of us
making sense of our experiences, of our personal, social and cultural
reality.
Bernard: Yeah, but in a divorce situation I can imagine that, you know, the other
party wants to talk about his/her side of the story as well. And that’s an
important aspect too, that stories are not just constructed by someone,
but in many cases they’re co-constructed and that is something we will
have to address as well, I think.
Veronika: Or perhaps in divorce cases, constructed against each other, those
two sorts of competing stories really.
Bernard: Yeah, absolutely.
Veronika: But what I found interesting about this research was that the research
had categories. You wanted people to talk to categories, and they
couldn’t do that in categories. They could only do it in terms of relating
their own personal experience and that’s inevitably a story.
So, one person who has researched that for a long time is
sociolinguist, William Labov. And he has talked about oral narratives of
personal experience. He started in the, I think it was the late 60s even
really, and he came up with this model of how these personal
experience stories, like divorce stories or stories where somebody
was in great danger etc. How they seemed to have a sort of
prototypical structure, you know, where you first lay out the whole
scenery, the time and the place and yourself and what happened, one
thing after the other.
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And then why am I telling the story anyway, what is the point of the
story and often people finish with a coda or some sort of evaluation.
He really described stories as a product very well. But more recently
there’s also been a bit of a different approach by Alexandra
Georgakopoulou and colleagues and they’ve been talking about
storytelling. So not so much the story as a product but more the
storytelling as a process, so what happens when people get together
and tell stories? How do they co-construct it?
Is it people taking turns in conversation to tell a story or just one
person hold the floor, right I’m doing right now, (laughter) and talk
about something. And why do they do it too? What’s going on there?
Erika: And the why is a very important question because stories have many,
many functions from giving a good example to mobilising people or
more persuading, telling cautionary tales, how things should be.
Bernard: Absolutely and since we’re talking about business in our podcast, I
think we can also related storytelling to corporate identity, corporate
stories, the grand narratives that corporations tell us on their websites.
And when you have a closer look at these websites, you can see how
much attention is actually being paid to the story they have to tell. One
of the interesting ones I came across the other day is Ben & Jerry’s
and I thought maybe that would be a nice idea -
Veronika: Oh, you mean the ice-cream people?
Bernard: The ice cream people, absolutely. Ben & Jerry’s is an interesting case
of stories because when you look at it, you have stories within stories.
And there are kinds of stories that people like. So you have the anti-
hero, the underdog, you also have the humble beginnings aspect
there, and you have a bit of David versus Goliath. Do you know the
background of Ben & Jerry’s?
Erika: No, I don’t.
Veronika: Not much, I know that I like it and I’m not getting paid to say that, I like
the ice-cream a lot (laughter), I don’t actually know when and how it
started, no.
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Bernard: Well, that’s a good thing Veronika because I’m not sure whether the
ice-cream itself is the only thing why people like Ben & Jerry’s. I think
it’s the story itself as well. So, in a nutshell, before we move onto our
interviewee, I’d like to tell you the story. So here we have two guys,
Ben and Jerry and they have two things in common. They hate sports
and they love food.
Veronika: I can relate to that (laughter), sorry, go on.
Bernard: And then they thought, you know, we have to do something with this
shared passion and they wanted to open up a bagel company, but that
was too expensive. So they took this $5 ice-cream course and they
started making ice-cream.
Veronika: When was that?
Bernard: That was in 1978, so it’s quite a long time ago. And the funny thing is
that Ben, he actually had a condition. He couldn’t smell anything. So
he thought, you know, I want to have chunks in my ice-cream for a
better mouth feel. So instead of the smell, I want to have chunks and
that is now one of the USPs of Ben & Jerry.
So you have this story of two nerdy types, that is how they call
themselves, the hippy types, you know, just making fun and
developing ice-cream flavours. And then in the 1980s, and this is the
David versus Goliath story, we have Häagen-Dazs. So that was the
top premium ice-cream manufacturer and they saw these Ben & Jerry
guys, these hippies and they thought, no, no, no, they’re not going to
steal away our ice-cream, or part of the market that we have.
So they started boycotting them via the distribution centres. It didn’t
work at all. So the people supported Ben & Jerry’s because of that
underdog position that they were in.
Veronika: Yeah, because people like an underdog.
Bernard: Oh, they sure do and especially in the States. Now, they were very
clever and they used that underdog position as part of their brand
identity that they still have nowadays. So they still have the free cone
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day on a yearly basis. They still are very left in terms of political
convictions. For instance, they had the ‘Hubby Hubby’ flavour in
support of gay marriage, for instance, in the 90s.
Veronika: That’s pretty early.
Bernard: Yeah, absolutely and they very cleverly used that image. You know,
still very local, still making fun, it’s all about love, peace and ice-
cream, as you can actually see it in the slogan. So that’s part of their
story and I think that is also one of the reasons why their ice-cream is
so successful. It is the story that they tell and that they actually exploit,
in a way, in their business model.
Erika: And if I just may add that the part of the success may also be that
people became part of that story. So this story now was co-written and
in the age of social media, these kinds of shared stories that Ruth
Page calls them, shared stories or people co-construct, add to stories,
make these stories their own. And then, of course, adding all those
stories, individual and corporate stories together, those become really
powerful for businesses and for individuals.
Veronika: Oh yeah, I had an example of that just this weekend. I was buying my
son an ice-cream after swimming, not an ice-cream, I’m thinking too
much about ice-cream, a chocolate bar (laughs). And he opened that,
unwrapped it and imprinted on the chocolate itself, on the one side it
said the brand name and on the other side, imprinted on the chocolate
you had ‘#mybreak.’
Bernard: Oh really?
Veronika: You know, so you really had a hashtag on the product itself. Of course
the idea was that you would take pictures of it and post them on
Instagram and say, “Oh, I love my chocolate bar #mybreak,” and
thereby build a sort of story and a community around that chocolate
bar really. So I was pretty fascinated by that really.
Bernard: And that’s how the stories get interconnected, fantastic.
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Erika: Let’s hear from our guest too about his views on new versions and
new ways of shared stories.
Our guest for today is Professor David Boje and oh my god, his CV
and list of achievements is so long that I don’t even know where to
start. He’s a professor emeritus at New Mexico State University, that’s
where he lives, I believe. But he also teaches at Aalborg in Denmark
and Cabrini University in Philadelphia.
He has over 120 journal articles behind his name, 24 books and
countless other publications. But the reason why we have invited
David here is for his passion in research for stories and storytelling.
Welcome on the podcast David.
David Boje: Thank you, I’m really happy to be here.
Erika: We are really looking forward to your story now (laughs)
David Boje: Okay, I’ll have to come up with one.
Erika: Okay, and I guess we can start with that. You work with stories and
you researched storytelling for a long time, so can you perhaps finish
this sentence for us? Stories are important because…
David Boje: Most people don’t know their own living story. They’re able to recite a
career narrative of when they were born, where they went to school,
who they married, their children, etc. But in terms of their living story
pathway on the planet, not so much.
Bernard: Tell us about that living story pathway.
David Boje: Well, I met Kaylynn TwoTrees in the mid-90s, Lakota tribe. And she is
also a scholar, an organisation scholar. She taught me that living
stories are alive. They have a place where they can be told or not told.
They have a time. There’s the time of your life on this earth, your
connection to your earth and community. And then they have a mind.
That really befuddled me. I didn’t understand how stories could have a
mind, (laughs), you know? They’re just basically language, right? The
way we study discourse.
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But I came to understand that to be a living story; you’re part of a
whole community of other living stories, kind of a web of living stories.
So when people start telling about their life, let’s say, in a conversation
with others, people will interrupt and say, “Oh yeah I understand that
part. Here’s what happened to me that was similar,” and then you’ll
interrupt your own living story and say, “Oh yeah, that was at a
conference I met Kaylynn TwoTrees, you know? It just keeps
mushrooming like that.
Bernard: So now you’re talking about the individual, so on a micro level, we are
having this podcast on, you know, language and business and
business communication. So I would like to take it to the next level, to
stories within companies and corporations. I would also like to take
you back to the 90s.
David Boje: Oh my goodness! (Laughs)
Bernard: To one of your articles where you talk about Disney, a living story in
itself as well. And one of the quotes that you have there, if I may
actually quote you now, is, ‘Organisations cannot be registered as one
story but instead they are a multiplicity, a plurality of stories,’ and here
comes the important bit, ‘Story interpretations in struggle with one
another.’ Can you tell us what this Disney struggle was actually all
about back in the 90s, and it’s still very much alive today, I assume?
David Boje: Sure. Yeah, I went to a play called Tamara, and it’s Los Angeles’
longest running play. It takes place in a mansion, so you don’t have
any seats like in a theatre. You walk in the mansion, they give you a
passport, and they say, “Okay, now you’re back in the 1920s and
Mussolini is in power, and you’re confined to this mansion and you’re
going to meet some characters and they’re going to stroll into the
room here, in the lobby, and then you have to decide which characters
you’re going to follow, you as an audience.”
So I was with a finance professor and he went up the stairs with his
wife to the bedroom, so the aristocrats. Me, being the lower class
(laughter), first college student in my family tree, I went down and
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followed the maid into the basement, you know? And the butler.
(Laughs) I wanted to see how the lower class lived.
So in each room, there’s simultaneous storytelling. So something is
happening in an aristocrat bedroom and I’m not there. I can’t see it.
And then I can tell what’s happening with the maid and the butler,
because he follows her into a bedroom and they’re laying in bed and
I’m a little nervous. I’m going like, “Wow, this is closer to the stage
than I want to be.” (Laughs)
Interviewer: Is that getting a bit raunchy? (Laughs) Let’s keep it family friendly.
David Boje: Okay, yeah. No, it was nice. They had covers on, you know? I’m right
in the middle of the scene with these actors, and the scene ends and
some of the audience goes out one door and some goes up a hall,
and some goes up the stairs. I have to make a decision, like where am
I going to go? And I go into another room and I learn another part of
the story that the butler is in reality not a butler, but he’s an aristocrat
pretending to be something else or a chauffeur that’s actually a spy,
etc.
So all of the characters are transforming from room to room, and
unless you follow each character from room to room, which is
impossible because you can’t follow everybody at once, right?
Bernard: So depending on what you do, the story keeps on transforming etc.
How does that tie in with Disney then?
David Boje: Well Disney, like any organisation has many locations, right, many
places. They have many buildings. They’re in many countries. And
there’s simultaneous storytelling going on in all the rooms of all the
buildings and all the lands. So you, as an employee, a worker or a
CEO, or a creative director, you have to figure out what’s going on.
I mean, you’re always trying to figure out what’s going on, and you’re
chasing down what you know happened in the rooms you’re in, and
you’re in contact I guess by email or digital or phone or something with
other people in other countries. And you’re trying to figure out, well,
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what’s happening to Disney today? (Laughs) Where are the fires I’ve
got to put out?
Bernard: So that whole mansion is a bit like an analogy for, you know, this
multinational company that has different locations and stories and
those stories may connect to each other or relate to each other, or
indeed they may completely be unrelated or they may struggle with
each other. Did you find evidence of that?
David Boje: Oh, absolutely. (laughs) Yeah, you know, I’m kind of a critical
discourse, critical language person. I don’t know what you would call
me. But I’m interested in, for example, how Walt never talked about
his wife by name. He talked about the characters and the cartoons by
name, and how he would kind of re-historicise events of history at
Disney in his own way.
And the Disney organisation would put a spin on Walt as a very
positive character, and yeah, he was a genius and he was innovative
etc. but he was also a very tough taskmaster. Very much a
perfectionist, which can be a good thing, but he did not forgive his
employees, the women employees, the men employees that went on
strike to get better conditions.
He actually jumped out of his car at the studio gates and started
fistfights with them. That’s why you have those nature films that
Disney has, because Roy, his brother, sent him down to South
America to film nature (laughs), get him off the studio lot until he come
calm down, you know? So I mean, there’s another side to the story.
Bernard: Yeah, so there’s one story about this rather combative guy and the
story he told about himself, but also, no doubt, stories that employees
told at the time. The question is, so many decades later, what stories
have been handed down? Whose version of the story passed the test
of time?
And for our listeners, what can they learn for their own businesses, for
their own work environments about this vision of there’s a different
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story in every room and you can’t follow all the stories at once? What
does that mean for business leaders?
David Boje: Well, I’m trying to develop something called ‘true storytelling’ with my
colleague, Jens Larsen, and Lena Bruun in Denmark. And we’re trying
to look at how you can isolate out the fake storytelling and the fake
history, the fake news, and there’s a lot of it now in Trumpland here
where I live. We want to get at more true stories. But we know we
can’t. We know that there’s no absolute truth, because we live in
Tamara, in the play Tamara. We’re in Tamara-land.
So the best we can do is use critical linguistic, critical discourse,
critical storytelling analysis, and try to sort out the truth and the
untruth.
Bernard: Right, maybe this is a nice link to your book, Storytelling in the Global
Age: There is No Planet B.
David Boje: Uh-oh! (Laughs)
Bernard: And there you’re referring to, that we need a new globalisation
practice by indeed focusing on true storytelling. Now, how can true
storytelling save the planet? Just to ask a simple question! (Laughter)
David Boje: Well, it’s darn sure that fake storytelling is not going to save the planet,
(laughs) you know?
Veronika: No, not in itself, how can it contribute to, what does it mean, the era of
climate emergency that we’re living in?
David Boje: Well, climate emergency is a necessary condition. The Extinction
Rebellion group, the youngsters, they want to have politicians declare
a climate emergency. However, the politicians in the US, the UK,
Australia, around the world, they’re beholden to the people that are
paying for their elections. So these are large corporations often that
are responsible for pollution, like 100 companies in the world are
responsible for 70-some per cent of the CO2 emissions in the world.
Veronika: Yeah, that’s a mindboggling figure.
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David Boje: Yet we’re not really going after those 100 companies. We’re trying to
encourage politicians to make new policies, to implement new
programmes. Meanwhile, if you read the climate science, the
storytelling that they’re giving us is completely different. It’s saying,
whoa, we have passed certain thresholds of oil availability, of clean
water availability.
And as we pass those thresholds, including the temperature threshold,
if it gets beyond 1.5 degrees centigrade average global temperature
since the Industrial Revolution, if we don’t contain that by 2030, by
2050, if it rolls up to four or six degrees centigrade increase by 2100,
you’re talking about four to five billion people exiting the planet, not in
a good way.
Bernard: No, that’s true, but what I also read on your website, so apart from
true storytelling, you also refer to the fact that people can no longer tell
stories. So what I read here is for instance, storytelling has become
displaced by beginning, middle, end so way too simplistic, grand
narratives told by the media, by the politicians and the economists.
And now at the same time you’re emphasising the importance of
storytelling.
So, how can we help people save the planet by becoming better
storytellers? Because that’s basically one of the main tasks that we
seem to have?
David Boje: I think there’s a marvellous book they could all read –
Veronika: What’s that?
Bernard: All right, bring it on.
David Boje: By Erika and Veronika, on language and business and language at
work. We could get beyond, when I read the book, it’s about going
beyond the simplistic understanding of language, you know? Going
beyond the training we get in having a beginning, middle, end for
example, in my terms. But in language studies, it’s about, okay, we put
a brand on everything and then that brand is going to be indicative of
what the organisation is about.
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Well, no, the organisation is a Tamara of many, many stories in many
rooms. We have to sort that out more critically. There’s a lot of
pressures that politicians are under to hide the truth about climate
change, to be in climate denial, to not fund professors in universities
that are coming out with statements about water and air quality and
temperature, etc. because it’s a threat to the capitalist economy.
Erika: Indeed, the media trying to quieten, or mute people who speak up, like
Greta Thunberg, whose talk we’re going to be analysing in our final
part of our podcast.
Bernard: And I also like the fact that you mentioned that we have to be more
critical, or train people to be more critical. And that’s basically one of
the aims that we have with our podcast. We want to raise people’s
awareness about language and how it works and what people do with
language and what people do with stories and how the language and
stories shape different versions of the actual truth. Because there’s not
one true, there are many different truths, depending on who is
reporting on it.
So that is a nice way, I think, to round off perhaps and to start a critical
analysis of these snippets of data that we have on the Greta Thunberg
TED Talk. What do you think?
Veronika: Let’s hear a different version of the climate story then.
Bernard: Yes, okay, the more positive approach. David, it’s been an honour and
a pleasure, so thank you very much from my side.
Erika: Yeah, thanks for being here David, it was wonderful to talk to you.
David Boje: Thank you, Bernard, and thank you, Erika, and thank you Veronika. I
hope that we can find common ground with storytelling and language
at work.
Veronika: I have to admit that at first I was a bit baffled because I know David’s
work from the 90s really, so all the stuff about organisational
storytelling, but I don’t know his recent work that well and I was, at
first, I thought where is the link here, really? I could see that was a
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metaphor that he started out with, the Tamara land thing where he
went into that mention. But I couldn’t make out what it was a metaphor
for, at first. How did you deal with that?
Erika: Well, I liked it because I think it’s a really good way of trying to capture
the parallel worlds and the interpretation of these parallel worlds that
are happening, whether it’s an organisation, whether it’s a business,
whether it’s politics or whether it’s our personal lives. And this play
where you could choose to follow characters, you get to know different
snippets from a bigger story, different versions of the same story.
So your choice in choosing where you go and where you look and
what you listen to, will affect the kind of sense you make of what’s
happening.
Veronika: I mean it’s like these books you get where they say, ‘If you want this to
happen go to page 97,’ and you get like 10 stories within one book. Or
you have it in video games as well, which rely on storylines.
Bernard: That’s exactly it, absolutely. So you choose which level you want to go
to and actually when you talk about companies or think about
companies, it’s the same thing. You get to choose which story of the
company you want to read. So in that respect, his Tamara land
metaphor, it does make sense, especially in view of present day
stories that we have, online or via website or via the traditional media.
Veronika: Yeah, one point for me that was really important that didn’t quite come
out was you know, he told these stories about Walt Disney, how he
was this entrepreneurial genius, but also a very combative and difficult
person, by the sound of it. And I said, but what stories passed the test
of time, and I think that’s a power issue as well.
This short story that an employee back in the 1950s told another
employee at their coffee break saying, “God, yesterday he was
insufferable again, because he did this and that.” That is not a story
that we’re likely to hear 60 years later. But it’s a story of powerful
people and powerful corporate figures that get passed down, not the
voice of the little employee somewhere.
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Erika: Right, but had there been social media or Facebook, where they could
vent and tell these stories about the other side, the dark side of the
management guru, the leadership god, or the leader god, then we
would have heard, as we now hear these stories about current
leaders. People who are often treated as the biggest leader
personalities of our era, but at the same time we hear about their other
side, their dark side as well.
Bernard: Oh yes, and there’s a nice anecdote I could tell you about leading into
our analysis of Greta Thunberg, for instance. We have a similar girl in
Belgium, her name is Anuna De Wever and she was very popular at
some stage. And all of a sudden people tweeted or posted a picture of
her bedroom, which was very messy. It was full of clothes and things
like that -
Veronika: That’s your average teenagers’ bedroom really!
Bernard: Yeah, but they were kind of bashing her, look at her, trying to save the
planet and her bedroom is as dirty as hell. Because of that she lost
credibility. Now, this is something that would never have happened,
say 30-40 years ago because those are the hidden stories and then
they explode in your face.
Erika: And I guess the biggest lesson here for anyone who listens to this, for
practical reasons, that wants to learn from these insights is that if you
want to listen into your own company’s stories, one version is not
enough, it’s far from enough. There are different versions of the same
story and even more importantly, perhaps, if you want to help people
make sense of how things are or how things should be, you should
provide them with the right versions of a story, or the versions which
cater for all the audiences, right?
Bernard: Absolutely, yeah.
Veronika: Yeah, so different stories for different audiences really.
Bernard: True and that applies to all companies, even including Ben & Jerry’s
ice-cream company I would say (laughter).
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Erika: Okay, so analysis. We have a very interesting text for today. This is
from the TED Talk of Greta Thunberg, that she gave in November
2018. We will supply the video link to her TED Talk on the blog and we
are going to be analysing the first two minutes of this TED Talk, but,
we will be also sharing insights about the rest of her talk on our
website. So if you’re interested in our analysis, please come and visit
the website and also share your thoughts on this talk or other stories
on Twitter and on our blog.
Veronika: Right, so this, as we heard, about neoliberal narratives, of the climate
emergency, in the interview a bit. But we close this episode with a
story of the climate emergency and also a personal story from a very
different perspective. From climate activist, Greta Thunberg, who is,
as we’re recording this, is 16. And started what was known as the
‘climate strike for the future’, ‘the school strike for the future’ where
she one Friday decided not to go to school but just sit in front of, I
think the Parliament in Stockholm and protest and ask for action,
which has since become a global movement really, of young people
and teenagers.
And she got famous and her action got famous and spread around
pretty fast. And in November 2018 she was invited in Stockholm to
give a TED Talk and it’s a short one, but it has been very, very
influential. She talks to an audience in the room, but she also has a
global, very, very diffuse audience. As of last week, 2.9 million people
had viewed her TED Talk, so she reaches lots and lots of people.
And it’s very interesting what she does in this talk because she starts
with a personal story. She starts telling us a story about her eight year
old self, from her perspective now as a 16 year old. How she first
heard about climate change and climate emergency and that CO2
emissions were causing a lot of damage to the plant and potentially
endangering humanity itself.
And she gives us reported conversations with her parents and with
teachers etc. and also lets us into the thinking of her eight year old
self. So we have a bit of a story in the past there, how what the adults
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said and what then happened, or didn’t happen as a result, didn’t
make a lot of sense to her, back to her eight year old and that
hypothetical story. Not hypothetical, but in this past story space of her
younger self.
Bernard: Absolutely and people who listen to the fragments, what you might
have noticed is that you have this kind of nice frame setting which we
can relate to Labov’s methodology and framework again. For instance
the orientation, that would be the first bit and that is the introduction,
the setting of the story. And her very first sentence is, “When I was
about eight years old I first heard about something called climate
change.”
So here we have the micro level story of an eight year old girl and that
attracts the attention. Just like the MP drew your attention Veronika -
Veronika: Yeah.
Bernard: When you were listening, or actually not listening at the time, but then
you started listening perhaps.
Veronika: That’s right.
Bernard: And this is what she does here.
Veronika: And she introduces the main character, so a story about climate
emergency, but it’s also a story about herself really, and her
reflections. Then she also builds credibility for herself, right? She says,
“This didn’t make sense to me really because if emissions are so bad,
then we should stop all emissions, right, that makes sense? But the
grown-ups weren’t doing that.” And she says, “Well, that really started
getting to me and later I was then diagnosed with Asperger’s
Syndrome and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.”
And in a way that is something that could limit her credibility or her
legitimacy to talk about this, but she turns it around. She tells us more
about herself. She tells us another story from her past, about her
diagnosis and how that story actually made her see what’s happening
around the climate emergency in a different way.
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Bernard: Because of that she actually has a vision. It’s still the vision of an eight
year old, when we go back to the questions that she asks and that is
something I like very much about that approach in this particular
speech as well. So we get a succession of questions. If burning fossil
fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we
just continue like before? Why were there no restrictions?
Veronika: That’s rhetorical questions, of course.
Bernard: And those are the typical questions that a child might ask to their
parents. Why didn’t you tell me this? Why is this this way? Why is it
that way? So we have this nice frame that clashes with the adult world
and the people who should know better, but they don't know better.
Erika: Yes, and I guess if you look at the story from a story as a process
perspective, what you may find or see is that there is this story world
that she creates, her eight year old self. So we have the ‘there and
then’ of the story world, but, and this is very important that we think
about stories, there is also the ‘here and now’ of the story world,
talking to the audience.
Talking to YouTube viewers or TED Talk viewers, and these questions
and these conditionals and hypothetical claims about the past are a
very beautiful way of linking her there and then story world of the past,
but also making an impact on the here and now and on the audience.
Because even though these questions are asked by her eight year old
self, they are still relevant, they are still valid; they are still making us
think about the answers. It’s a beautiful way of linking.
Veronika: And we may say, like I said, oh, these are rhetorical questions, but I
guess to her eight year old self, they weren’t rhetorical questions.
Bernard: No, absolutely.
Veronika: And she’s taking us back to that former self, saying these are not
rhetorical questions, these are actual questions that we should all be
asking ourselves, even if we’re not eight years old anymore. So, that’s
a good link. I mean we don’t have time to go into the whole speech, or
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the whole talk she gives, but she later on in the talk then actually also
tells a hypothetical story about the future.
Bernard: Yes, she does.
Veronika: When she will be 75 and maybe sitting with her children and any
grandchildren and what will the world look like then if we don’t take
action now. There’s more to say about that in the companion blog, but
she really, it’s a very complex thing that she’s doing, about the three
story worlds in the past, in the present and in the future, really.
Of course the whole function, ultimately is to mobilise. Is to mobilise
people to make them see these questions again, it’s genuine
questions, not rhetorical questions. And to raise awareness and get
people to mobilise people and also to get people to lobby
governments to take actions around climate emergency.
Bernard: And what I think what she also does with these different stories, so
talking about her past and talking about her future, she’s confronting
people with the fact that her story still continues while the audiences
story is somewhat shorter. She refers to 2050 and that is what most
people have in mind in the audience when they talk about the future
and the end of their story.
And then she says, “But my story continues and I want my story to be
heard.” I thought that’s actually very, very clever.
Erika: Yes, so maybe that’s a good point to ask our listeners to think about
stories they encountered recently and whether they can see these
stories as how they work in terms of the story world and the here and
now and what are their functions and think about stories as processes.
And maybe you can share these insights with us on our blog. We
would be happy to read your thoughts on stories and storytelling.
Bernard: If people want to share the Häagen-Dazs story, feel free. No, it doesn’t
have to be Ben & Jerry’s (laughter).
Veronika: There’s always two sides to a story -
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Erika: Or send us ice-cream, or send us ice-cream (laughter), we won’t
object.
Veronika: Okay, we’ll be back next time, but for today it’s bye-bye from us.
Erika: Yes, thank you for listening, bye.
Bernard: Thank you for listening, bye-bye.
Thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed the podcast which was
brought to you with the support of the Centre of Critical Inquiries into
Society and Culture at Aston University in the UK, and the Department
of Translation, Interpreting and Communication at the University of
Ghent, Belgium.
END OF AUDIO
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