Storying Indigenous (Life)Worlds

Dear Colleagues,

Focus:

The aim of this Genealogy Special Issue is to critically reflect on storytelling from, with, and for alternative (life)worlds and to create a space in which these stories can gather. We are looking for critically engaged scholarship and research from Indigenous peoples, with Indigenous communities, and/or for liberated Indigenous ecologies/worlds that theoretically or empirically contribute to the theme of Storytelling Indigenous (Life)Worlds. More specifically, we invite scholarship that engages with storytelling related to Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing in critically reflexive and productive ways that serve to disrupt or unsettle settler/colonial narratives and worlding practices and provide stories that compose more livable worlds.  

Scope:

As a basic definition, we take the term “Indigenous” to refer to groups “with ancestral and often spiritual ties to a particular land, and whose ancestors held that land prior to colonization by outside powers, and whose nations remain submerged within the states created by those powers” (Shaw, Herman and Dobbs, 2006: 268). This definition is taken as fluid and non-essentializing in that we encourage stories from, with, and for an inclusive conceptualization of Indigenous peoples that recognizes the varied names and labels ascribed to those oppressed by colonization and the structural continuity of coloniality (including: Natives, Indigenous, autochthonous, tribal peoples, peasants, forest dwellers, or ethnic minorities). Thus, for this Special Issue, we seek contributions from settler society contexts, as well as from beyond this situated geolocation to include life and earth stories from, with and for Indigenous and more-than-human worlds.

Purpose and Literature Supplement:

The scope of the Special Issue will focus on three central themes: (1) storying worlds otherwise, (2) storytelling as political intervention, and (3) decolonial and ethical approaches for storying Indigenous worlds. It will seek to address the following interrelated questions to expand the literature on storytelling, indigeneity, and their related epistemologies:

1. When and for what ends is storytelling needed as opposed to knowledge practices of “actual representation”?
2. How does storytelling allow for an alternative knowledge practice that is perhaps a less oppressive or more open regime of truth?
3. How might storytelling Indigenous lifeways enable a practice of “writing against culture”?
4. How can storytelling avoid colonial knowledge practices (i.e., a “western gaze”) and in what ways might it reproduce them? 
5. What are the ethics of storytelling in research and how does authority, positionality, intersubjectivity, risk, extractive, patriarchal, (re)presentation, and reciprocity play into this ethics? 
6. What is the relationship between Indigenous methodologies and storying of Indigenous lifeways?
7. We are particularly interested in submissions that provide examples of “Rupture Storying”, i.e., auto- or experimental–ethnographic accounts that illuminate ways of knowing and being otherwise to that of colonial-modernist and settler-colonial onto-epistemologies.
8. How do stories produce domination and how do they work as resistance to forms of domination?
9. How does storytelling engage the political? What interventions do stories make?
10.  How can storytelling allow for alternative possibilities, or alternative co-emergences (realities) to that of the “authorized” reality?

Dr. Darren J. Ranco
Dr. Jamie Haverkamp
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Genealogy is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• indigeneity
• storytelling
• Indigenous knowledge and epistemologies
• more-than-human environments
• environmental justice
• traditional ecological knowledge