Stories matter. They matter to us as individuals. As the poet and literary scholar Barbara Hardy once wrote, “we dream, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate, and love by narrative. In order to really live, we make up stories about ourselves and others, about the personal as well as the social past and future.” They also matter socially and politically, because stories are not only acts of the mind. They also work to shape cognition and generate the mindsets that inform different kinds of public policies, social actions and interventions.
Stories told about migrants, asylum seekers and refugees by academic researchers, as well as policymakers, politicians, filmmakers, campaigners and journalists, are a case in point. Narratives that stereotype migrants and refugees as tricksters and criminals have serious, sometimes lethal, consequences. Actors seeking to defend the rights of migrants and/or to reform or abolish state controls over human mobility therefore contest them by telling very different stories. These alternative versions often portray ‘the migrant’ as a victim to be pitied rather than as a villain to be punished, or as a heroic subaltern with much to teach about human solidarity, resistance and resilience.
But even researchers wishing to avoid these simple inversions and substitutions do not necessarily tell the stories that their research subjects would want to tell about their own lives. And in the struggle over which narrative takes precedence, the stories that individuals themselves tell are often eclipsed or ignored.
