Interview with Dr. Nishant Shah
In an interview with the project lead, Dr. Nishant Shah, he explains the ethical responsibilities associated with storytelling and why we can’t ignore them.
In the past year, you have worked on multiple projects that explore the politics of storytelling and narrative practices. What draws you to this subject?
I think there are intellectual as well as political stakes in the work that we’re doing. My commitment has been to thinking through narrative change practices. Not particularly storytelling, but narrative change. As a scholar of digital and new media cultures, I’ve tracked the proliferation of devices, platforms, bodies, and communities. We were always told that if only enough people told enough stories, a lot of the social justice questions would be resolved. But if you look at the state of the internet right now, the more diverse, resistant, and non-dominant voices appear on the internet, the more we seem to find backlash, anger, violence, intimidation and so on. So, the idea of narrative change, and particularly for Once Upon a Tomorrow, is that diversity and inclusion are not going to be addressed merely by producing more diverse and inclusive content — it is going to require conditions within which these stories are being told and really re-thinking what are the kinds of tropes that often get replayed, even with the best of intentions in many of these projects. So, it’s really re-thinking the habits of storytelling and how so many of the everyday acts of aggression are coded in our habits — becoming aware of it and re-engineering it in some ways. This is the more political stake, particularly the new media stake. As someone who organises communities, it was also very clear to me that while there are indeed a lot of stories, so many of them are what I call a ‘rehearsal of doom, gloom and despair.’ These actually lead to apathy instead of action. We don’t want stories about exclusion and discrimination to offer a paranoid reading of the world where we show everybody how broken the world is — because that’s not new. We need to tell these stories in ways that are oriented towards hope, which leads to collective action as opposed to polarised action.
You mentioned that certain tropes get repeated in narrative practices. What would you say they are?
Well, one of them is what I mentioned: the rehearsal of the brokenness of the world, for example. The idea that the content is more important than the context of circulation — what this does is that you bring in more and more people and tell them that ‘Your voice is important.’ But when those voices are brought into the online spaces of storytelling, we find that there are no protections or safeguards are thought through. Who will protect them? How will we keep them safe? How will we ensure that they are not being targeted, bullied or attacked? Or the fact that we think that just because a story has been told now, enough has been done. We don’t think about the afterlife of a story, or what are the new materialities or infrastructure that need to be produced for that story. So, it’s really those kinds of tropes which are about the condition of what happens to stories, which is what narrative practice is. The narrative is not just about content — it is about the intention, the arc, the circulation of stories — and till we don’t change that, no matter how many stories we produce, all the stories are only going to reinforce the narrative intention and power.
Lastly, you came up with the name Once Upon a Tomorrow. Why did you choose it?
We need to think of stories not as reflecting worlds but as creating worlds. There has always been ‘Once upon a time…’ which always gives that sense that stories are about things that have already happened. I really think, irrespective of genre, stories create worlds. So, when we want to begin a story, let’s think about the world that we’re creating for the future rather than narrating what has already happened. The moment we do that, what we are saying now is building the world we want to live in; with that intentionality, storytelling becomes an ethical responsibility. Once Upon a Tomorrow was hoping to gesture towards this question of ethics, about what do we do with stories and how do we make them create impact around questions of social justice.
I think there are intellectual as well as political stakes in the work that we’re doing. My commitment has been to thinking through narrative change practices. Not particularly storytelling, but narrative change. As a scholar of digital and new media cultures, I’ve tracked the proliferation of devices, platforms, bodies, and communities. We were always told that if only enough people told enough stories, a lot of the social justice questions would be resolved. But if you look at the state of the internet right now, the more diverse, resistant, and non-dominant voices appear on the internet, the more we seem to find backlash, anger, violence, intimidation and so on. So, the idea of narrative change, and particularly for Once Upon a Tomorrow, is that diversity and inclusion are not going to be addressed merely by producing more diverse and inclusive content — it is going to require conditions within which these stories are being told and really re-thinking what are the kinds of tropes that often get replayed, even with the best of intentions in many of these projects. So, it’s really re-thinking the habits of storytelling and how so many of the everyday acts of aggression are coded in our habits — becoming aware of it and re-engineering it in some ways. This is the more political stake, particularly the new media stake. As someone who organises communities, it was also very clear to me that while there are indeed a lot of stories, so many of them are what I call a ‘rehearsal of doom, gloom and despair.’ These actually lead to apathy instead of action. We don’t want stories about exclusion and discrimination to offer a paranoid reading of the world where we show everybody how broken the world is — because that’s not new. We need to tell these stories in ways that are oriented towards hope, which leads to collective action as opposed to polarised action.
You mentioned that certain tropes get repeated in narrative practices. What would you say they are?
Well, one of them is what I mentioned: the rehearsal of the brokenness of the world, for example. The idea that the content is more important than the context of circulation — what this does is that you bring in more and more people and tell them that ‘Your voice is important.’ But when those voices are brought into the online spaces of storytelling, we find that there are no protections or safeguards are thought through. Who will protect them? How will we keep them safe? How will we ensure that they are not being targeted, bullied or attacked? Or the fact that we think that just because a story has been told now, enough has been done. We don’t think about the afterlife of a story, or what are the new materialities or infrastructure that need to be produced for that story. So, it’s really those kinds of tropes which are about the condition of what happens to stories, which is what narrative practice is. The narrative is not just about content — it is about the intention, the arc, the circulation of stories — and till we don’t change that, no matter how many stories we produce, all the stories are only going to reinforce the narrative intention and power.
Lastly, you came up with the name Once Upon a Tomorrow. Why did you choose it?
We need to think of stories not as reflecting worlds but as creating worlds. There has always been ‘Once upon a time…’ which always gives that sense that stories are about things that have already happened. I really think, irrespective of genre, stories create worlds. So, when we want to begin a story, let’s think about the world that we’re creating for the future rather than narrating what has already happened. The moment we do that, what we are saying now is building the world we want to live in; with that intentionality, storytelling becomes an ethical responsibility. Once Upon a Tomorrow was hoping to gesture towards this question of ethics, about what do we do with stories and how do we make them create impact around questions of social justice.