Narrative Practices, Stories, Storytelling, Clinical and Community Work: An Intersectional Analysis

Dear Colleagues,

We have been invited to launch a new Special Issue on the above-mentioned topic for Social Sciences (ISSN 2076-0760), a peer-reviewed and open-access journal managed by MDPI.

Given your notable interest in this field, we would like to invite you to submit an article to be included in a Special Issue on this topic. We invite you to consider your work, practice, and research in narrative practices. Tell us about ways in which you have engaged in narrative practices, story and storytelling in your work. We hope that you can present your work to raise public awareness on issues of interest to explore the role of stories and storytelling using an intersectional analysis. You are also welcome to invite another co-author or several co-authors to work on a selected topic of interest.

Many stories exist. Some are privileged, some are not. There are also many ways of telling any story.  Narrative practices seek to debunk the culturally dominant normative worldview. We believe in the exciting effectiveness of working from a narrative perspective. Dominant ways tend to marginalize non-dominant views, both in clinical and community work.

We invite articles that will showcase voices that are often marginalized in the stories that we tell or in the telling of those stories. Such stories speak of enormous challenges, often marked by abuse, neglect, hunger, labeling, violence, poverty, resilience, aspirations, capabilities, skills, politics, ethics, and identity. While verbal storytelling is a linguistic art, there are other methods, such as art, music, performance, and sculpture, that can be used to tell an individual’s or a community’s stories. In the same way, such stories may speak of survival, resilience, hope, courage, connections, and innovations.

This Special Issue will engage authors with innovative ideas of using narrative practices and storytelling. We invite personal and collective stories. We encourage a discussion about positionality, intersectionality, decoloniality, and indigenous knowledge. We support the discussion of narrative practices that engage in the process of decolonization as one of liberation, through which each step decreases the malignancy of the oppressive external and internalized power structures and dynamics facilitating the expansion of shared power across marginalized persons and groups, all of which contribute to the liberation of wider society and the world. Every person/community has a story (or stories) to tell.

We invite you to reflect on how traditional approaches inflict and perpetuate harm on marginalized communities and their stories. What do decolonizing traditional approaches mean for communities?  How can stories and storytelling contribute to these efforts?  How do personal stories contribute to community and collective stories?

This Special Issue will explore these questions and others related to the theme of narrative practices and clinical/community interventions. We invite you to ask questions and to question answers to these questions.

Submissions are requested from scholars, researchers, students, educators, practitioners, and others, including non-professional people, that consider  the following:

• Stories that expand the individual, family, group, organizational, and community stories;
• Deconstructing dominant narratives and conceptualizing alternatives;
• Elevating indigenous stories;
• Re-envisioning indigenization;
• Confronting social injustices and historical and contemporary power imbalances;
• Colonizing knowledge;
• Decolonizing methodologies;
• Democratization of knowledge;
• Developing culturally relevant practices;
• Particular issues affecting marginalized populations/stories from the margins;
• Skills required to enhance the use of stories and storytelling in narrative practices.

Prof. Dr. Hugo A. Kamya
Guest Editor

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 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

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. Social Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly 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 1800 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.

• narrative practices
• story and storytelling
• indigenous voices
• decolonization
• democratization of knowledge
• marginalized communities
• intersectionality
• social (in)justice