Narrative Transformation: storytelling for peace

In this episode, Alice interviews Solon Simmons and Audrey Williams who respectively direct and manage The Narrative Transformation Lab. Based at the Carter School, their mission is ‘to reflect on and experiment with the kinds of stories that define our lives and empower our imaginations’. Their work has been particularly focused on the ways in which storytelling can help drive conflict transformation and enhance our futures thinking – so it goes to the heart of what the Visualising War and Peace project is interested in: the feedback loop between narrative and reality, which can sometimes drive conflict but can also be harnessed for positive social and political change. As they put it on their website: ‘At TNT Lab, we believe that the only way to change the world is to understand its most abusive stories in order to reshape them and to understand its most hopeful stories in order to harness their transformative power.’

Solon Simmons is a Professor of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at the Carter School at George Mason University, in Virginia in the US. He is the author of Root Narrative Theory and Conflict Resolution (Routledge, 2020) and the newly published Narrating Peace: How to Tell a Conflict Story (available from Aug 2024), among many other publications. At the Carter School, he teaches classes on conflict theory, narrative, media, discourse and conflict, human rights, quantitative and qualitative methodology, global conflict, and critical theory.

Audrey Williams earned a Master of Science degree in Conflict Analysis and Resolution from the Carter School and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and French from the University of Iowa. She was a 2015–16 Fulbright Research Fellow in Ankara, Turkey, and a Fall 2013 Scoville Peace Fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington, DC. She is now a PhD candidate in Conflict Analysis and Resolution at the Carter School, and her dissertation focuses on the role of narrative and musical craft in conflict transformation.

During the podcast, Solon and Audrey discuss their mixed methods approach, which blends Social Science and Humanities methodologies. They reflect on 'the narrative turn' in peace and conflict studies, the importance of attending to the craft side of storytelling, and their hope that TNT Lab's research and resources will help both academics and storytelling practitioners (in many different media) to de-code the rhetorical structures and subtexts of other people's stories and curate their own to forge positive change.

We hope you find the discussion interesting. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website.

Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin