Narratives and Social Change Social Reality in Contemporary Society

This book is an important contribution to narrative research and highlights how narratives can produce social change. The author demonstrates this through an analysis of concepts like future, uncertainty and risk, both in terms of individual impact and as collective forms of social life. The book reconstructs the relationships between future, uncertainty and risk through everyday how narratives exert power over individual and social life by influencing individual or collective decisions and choices. Narratives also change future prospects, thus producing social change. Some of the examples the author draws out for discussion are - in specific - the narration of the migration flows in the Mediterranean Sea, and the narration of the pandemic emergency from COVID-19. The result of different narratives has been the emergence of new ideologies and of a complex series of dynamics in which the local ends up becoming global and vice versa. 

Highly topical and interdisciplinary in its approach, this book is of interest to researchers and students of the sociology of culture and communication, media and communication studies, social and cultural psychology and cultural anthropology. 

Emiliana Mangone is Associate Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication at the Department of Political and Communication Sciences, University of Salerno, Italy. She is a Director of the Narratives and Social Changes-International Research Group (2020-2026) and she was a Director of the International Centre for Studies and Research on “Mediterranean Knowledge” (2015-2020). Her main investigative interests are in the field of cultural and institutional systems, with particular attention to the social representations, relational processes, and knowledge as key elements to the human. She recently published: Beyond the Dichotomy Between Altruism and Egoism. Society, Relationship, and Responsibility (Information Age Publishing, 2020); Social and Cultural Dynamics. Revisiting the Work of Pitirim A. Sorokin (Springer, 2018); Gender and Sexuality in the Migration Trajectories. Studies Between the Northern and Southern Mediterranean Shores (Information Age Publishing, 2018, with G. Masullo & M. Gallego, eds).