Storytelling and Storylistening Towards Collective Learning and Relational Becoming

Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities have long drawn upon storywork - the interrelated processes of storytelling and storylistening - as central strategies of wellness and thriving despite histories of dispossession and domination. This collection of papers theorizes with storywork and provides five contexts of storywork-in-praxis, where acts of creating, telling, and listening to stories feature centrally in critically re-designing spaces towards Black life, Indigenous futures, and the mutual flourishing of communities and lands. Through a syncretic approach, we bring together learning sciences research and perspectives from Black and Indigenous studies to further theorize the role that storywork plays within (1) sense-making activities, (2) the lives of communities that we have been a part of, and (3) our own lives as researchers-storylisteners. We consider the multiple roles of stories in research and design, the political/ethical nature of stories, and how storywork can re-organize power relations in ways that support individual and collective life.