Storytelling is an interesting concept that is used in a wide variety of disciplines to analyse and understand how people communicate and with which outcomes. The concept can also be used to reflect upon the work of researchers. They too can be studied as people who construct and share a multitude of stories. The researcher as storyteller was the subject of a recent WASS seminar organised by the Communication Science group.
The seminar was introduced by Yiannis Gabriel who told about his experiences with the use of stories in research. A number of other presentations and an interesting discussion followed. It became clear that the concept of storytelling offers not only a very useful approach for scientific reflections upon a wide variety of practices, but also to scrutinize the work that scientists themselves are doing. Issues that were discussed varied from journals as platform for the exchange of stories, rhetoric, adaption to the expected audience, stories as way through which conflict is build up, and the use of the concept of autopoiesis to better understand the construction, exchange and re- construction of stories. Enough issues for further debates and research.