Introduction

From the margins, we find ourselves well positioned to tell other stories -- life histories, traditions, and cultural myths which typically go unheard in dominant society.[2] As illustrated in the lead article, A Pattern of Possibility: Maxine Hong Kingston\u27s Woman Warrior, by Thelma J. Shinn, such stories are meronymic -- mero from the Greek meaning part -- because our unique social location allows us to see beyond the dominant mythos and tell other parts of the story. Telling these stories is not only empowering to those whom we name, but it also changes and transforms the official storyline itself. Life stories of marginalized peoples demonstrate time and again that there is no one story, no one way of seeing, thinking, or feeling. Moreover, the core of these stories and identities reveal multiple parts of a more inclusive story, a more inclusive way of thinking. Further, meronymic stories unveil the complex operations of power and domination which have denied and suppressed other voices. This special issue of Explorations in Ethnic Studies on race, class, and gender is devoted to telling the other parts of the story

An Introduction to Narrative Therapy

Counseling in a narrative way is a way of seeing, hearing, and thinking about clients’ problems as shaped and given meaning by stories or narratives. Problems are not hard realities that permanently define people; rather, they are problem stories by which people know themselves and are known by. This separating of the problem from the person opens up space for seeing the problem and thinking about it in new ways, and opens up the possibility of authoring a better story—a better way of being and doing, and is based on what has become a narrative mantra: “The problem is the problem. The person is not the problem” (Winslade & Monk, 1999, p. 2

DeepStory: Video Story QA by Deep Embedded Memory Networks

Question-answering (QA) on video contents is a significant challenge for achieving human-level intelligence as it involves both vision and language in real-world settings. Here we demonstrate the possibility of an AI agent performing video story QA by learning from a large amount of cartoon videos. We develop a video-story learning model, i.e. Deep Embedded Memory Networks (DEMN), to reconstruct stories from a joint scene-dialogue video stream using a latent embedding space of observed data. The video stories are stored in a long-term memory component. For a given question, an LSTM-based attention model uses the long-term memory to recall the best question-story-answer triplet by focusing on specific words containing key information. We trained the DEMN on a novel QA dataset of children's cartoon video series, Pororo. The dataset contains 16,066 scene-dialogue pairs of 20.5-hour videos, 27,328 fine-grained sentences for scene description, and 8,913 story-related QA pairs. Our experimental results show that the DEMN outperforms other QA models. This is mainly due to 1) the reconstruction of video stories in a scene-dialogue combined form that utilize the latent embedding and 2) attention. DEMN also achieved state-of-the-art results on the MovieQA benchmark.Comment: 7 pages, accepted for IJCAI 201

Anti-dialogic positioning in change stories: bank robbers, saviours and peons

Stories people tell of going through change incorporate and react to others around them. Positions can be taken in stories that tend towards the monological, having a singular perspective and being somewhat sealed off from others. Alternatively, stories can tend towards the dialogical, a multiple, less certain and more interactive mode. We explore multiple stories of an organizational change and analyse a paradoxical situation that emerges. We argue that although the stories may have the appearance of being dialogical, they can be seen as co-existing but self-sealing, or anti-dialogic. We introduce an interruption to the story and discuss a possibility for challenging anti-dialogic positioning in change stories

Respect for Grizzly Bears: An Aboriginal Approach for Co-existence and Resilience

Aboriginal peoples’ respect for grizzly bear (Ursus arctos) is widely acknowledged, but rarely explored, in wildlife management discourse in northern Canada. Practices of respect expressed toward bears were observed and grouped into four categories: terminology, stories, reciprocity, and ritual. In the southwest Yukon, practices in all four categories form a coherent qualitative resource management system that may enhance the resilience of the bear-human system as a whole. This system also demonstrates the possibility of a previously unrecognized human role in maintaining productive riparian ecosystems and salmon runs, potentially providing a range of valued social-ecological outcomes. Practices of respect hold promise for new strategies to manage bear-human interactions, but such successful systems may be irreducibly small scale and place based

The Blind Arhat and the Old Baby: Liberation by Wisdom, the Dry-Insight Practitioner, and the Pairing of Calm and Insight

The distinction between “calm” (Pāli: samatha; Sanskrit: śamatha) and “insight” (P: vipassanā; Skt: vipaśyanā) is one of several ostensibly related dichotomies that have exerted a significant influence on classical and contemporary understandings of Buddhist practices, institutions, and history, as well as of the Buddhist path(s) to and conception(s) of awakening. However, scholars continue to debate whether Buddhists ever conceptualized two (or more) different paths or conceptions of this goal. Much of the debate has been based on the interpretation of doctrinal and theoretical materials. This essay takes as its starting point the concept of “liberation by wisdom” (P: paññāvimutti; Skt: prajñāvimukti) and the figure of the “dry-insight practitioner” (P: sukkhavipassaka), and asks how Buddhist narratives, in particular, characterize these key ideas, as well as the relationship between calm and insight. It focuses primarily on two narratives: the story of Cakkhupāla, the first story of the Pāli Dhammapada commentary, and the story of Sthavira in the Sanskrit Avadānaśataka. It argues that these stories do not support a clear opposition between calm and insight as competing forms of life, but rather point to their combination on the path to awakening, or to the possibility that insight meditation can sometimes stand for the notion of intense practice. Both stories reflect an overarching “ascetic” ethos or lifestyle, but as stories they also project narrative worlds and invite us, the audience, to consider what it would mean to take such worlds seriously as our real world of lived human experience. In this way, the essay tries to bridge a divide that has often been maintained between doctrine and narrative, and thereby offers a fresh look at an influential distinction (or set of distinctions) in the history and theory of Buddhist practice

Pedagogical possibilities for unruly bodies

Project Re•Vision uses disability arts to disrupt stereotypical understandings of disability and difference that create barriers to healthcare. In this paper, we examine how digital stories produced through Re•Vision disrupt biopedagogies by working as body-becoming pedagogies to create nondidactic possibilities for living in/with difference. We engage in meaning making about eight stories made by women and trans people living with disabilities and differences, with our interpretations guided by the following considerations: what these stories ‘teach’ about new ways of living with disability; how these stories resist neoliberalism through their production of new possibilities for living; how digital stories wrestle with representing disability in a culture in which disabled bodies are on display or hidden away; how vulnerability and receptivity become ‘conditions of possibility’ for the embodiments represented in digital stories; and how curatorial practice allows disability-identified artists to explore possibilities of ‘looking back’ at ableist gazes

Constraints, creativity and challenges: educators and students writing together

Australia's national curriculum calls for the prioritisation of teaching and learning in literacies. From 2013 there is also a requirement for schools to familiarise students with a broad range of literature, and teachers are required to engage children in creating plays, stories and poems in traditional and multimodal forms. Similarly, universities must prepare future teachers with a deep understanding of the creative processes involved in thinking about, writing and editing such works, with a consideration of audience and genre. Drawing upon the experiences of pre-service teachers in their co-writing with young students, the author considers how writing within literary genres may support possibility thinking, relational and dialogic pedagogies and learner agency, as well as what challenges and constraining factors may operate upon the teacher writer partnership

A film of flesh envelops us

This collection includes three stories (and an excerpt from a novel) that inhabit the space between the realistic and the fantastic. The characters in these stories are afflicted with those peculiarly human illnesses: boredom, grief, madness, and solipsism. In searching for respite they discover only dead-ends and the fleeting possibility of a world outside the body, outside the self, outside the limits of imagination