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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!

1www.transcriptioncentre.co.uk

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


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.


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.


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


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.


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.


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


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,


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


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.


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.


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


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.


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).


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


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.


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


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 -


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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