In today’s turbulent world and a future difficult to anticipate, organizations need to redefine their business logic towards sustainability. Thus, the need for future-making practices is more important than ever. This paper explores speculative storytelling as such a future-making practice and as an instrument for creating an awareness of value proposition for sustainability design. The approach is interdisciplinary building on business model innovation and literary studies. The study uses data provided by short stories composed by non-customer stakeholders to be utilized in the initial stages of designing a value proposition for sustainability. The data was analyzed according to a benefit and sacrifice model capturing the emotional, social and functional values. The data was also studied through a chronotopic lens. The results show that the suggested approach is suitable for the production of narratives to be used as objects for learning and change within the context of value propositions for sustainability. © 2025 The Author(s).

Robinson Crusoe is a novel obsessed with voice. Shipwrecked on his island, Crusoe teaches a parrot to speak and engages in silent conversations with God and himself and, when he finally meets Friday, he communicates in the discourses of master, educator, and companion. In silent reading of the print text, the reader subvocalises and dramatises the grammar, syntax, and pronunciation of Friday’s speech and more or less unconsciously creates a cohesive whole out of the dialogue sections and the passages narrated by Crusoe. In audiobook narration this process is externalised in the actual vocalisation of the text. The performing narrator has to make conscious choices depending on how he construes the Crusoe-Friday relationship and in what genre conventions he places it. Moreover, since Friday does not appear until two thirds into the text, the performing narrator needs to fit the last third into the overall vocal profile to produce a cohesive effect. This article focuses on the vocal configurations of Friday as manifest in six audiobook recordings of the novel. Material voice characteristics, such as quality, rhythm, and diction, as well as contextualising aspects of ethnicity, age, and nationality are taken into account. The rhetorical situation in which the performing narrator intensifies intentionality is also foregrounded. © Cecilia Björkén-Nyberg 2024

This article explores the potential of narratives and creative writing as tools for imagining possible futures within the pedagogical framework of futures literacy. We share our experiences of a transdisciplinary pre-study on future mobility situated at the intersection of business model innovation, narrative theory and pedagogy. The pre-study results show that it is difficult not to repeat present and past patterns when anticipating the future. A great challenge is therefore to decolonize the mind when imagining possible futures scenarios. Based on the insights from the pre-study, we propose a futures literacy (FL) workshop as a structured learning process that combines an open-minded imagining of possible futures with the creation of strategic scenarios. Designed for students and practitioners within a transformative learning environment, the proposed FL workshop is process-oriented and has a focus on anticipation and exploration of limitless futures. Furthermore, it is argued that the workshop has the potential for facilitating agency in the process of business model innovation towards innovative organizational value logics. This paper provides hands-on details for a particular way of improving the capacity of students and practitioners for imagining the future differently and pluralistically. A key argument in the paper is that competence in narrative technique is required in designing, performing and analyzing the workshop activities. © 2023, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

Immersive storytelling is becoming increasingly popular these days. Immersive media is commonly associated with the technologies of VR and AR where sound reinforces a primarily visual effect. However, considering the rapidly growing demand for audiobook storytelling, audio narration alone seems to be highly suitable for facilitating a state of immersion. Listeners often testify that they experience a strong sense of presence in the story world, even imagining that they are not merely observing events but actually participating in them.

According to Marie-Laure Ryan and her poetics of immersion in Narrative as Virtual Reality 2, concrete details such as exact place names contribute to strengthening the reader’s sense of being immersed in a place and to visualise it. Does that also apply to vocal delivery? Is the sense of being immersed reinforced by the use of dialect or sociolect? Or is it possible that it has an alienating effect? This talk will explore the use of dialect in audiobooks as either an immersive-enhancing element or an alienating factor.

Readers’ emotional engagement with fiction is a busy research area situated at the intersection of cognitive, affective and narrative theory. Perspective taking is a feature that cuts across the disciplines since the narrative situation is crucial for communicating experiences of narrators and characters in literary texts. However, what has been explored in less detail is how the vocalisation of print text facilitates an empathetic response due to the expressive impact of the human voice so that narratives may be visualised and experienced in a variety of ways. Within audionarratology, the concept of voice is undergoing a redefinition since it ceases to be textually mediated and can be experienced directly. Audiobook narration is a case in point. In the present study it is argued that empathy is a mediating agency that resides in the vocalisation of text rather than in the text itself. For the purpose of exploring this phenomenon, a pilot study was carried out. Three canonical English texts that had previously been studied in their entirety in print by a group of students were accessed in part in a remediated audio format. The listening experiment showed that the individual voice profile of each of the narrating actors had a significant impact on perspective taking and emotional engagement. © 2020 IJLS; Printed in the USA by Lulu Press Inc.

This article argues that Bakhtin’s concepts of heteroglossia and dialogic imagination are useful for theorising the process of transduction involved in the representation of the printed text in audiobook narration. The fact that new recordings of canonical novels keep being launched is regarded as a means of meeting the listener’s urge to literally hear the past and of reconstructing the network of dialogic relations that is present in the original novels but it is also argued that there are pitfalls associated with this endeavour.

In this article, Carl Czerny’s Letters to a Young Lady on the Art of Playing the Pianoforte (1837) is studied as a machine manual within the cybernetic economy of James Watt’s governor. It is argued that while the young pupil is encouraged to subject herself to a strict discipline of physical deportment at the piano, this activity is in conflict with her own desire to become a self-regulated learner. The key claim made is that although Czerny’s surveillance strategy prevents Miss Cecilia from breaking with the cybernetic ideal and appropriating the pianistic technology for purposes of virtuosic self-expression, she becomes aware of her latent agency and its potentially subversive implications for gendered music making. As such, Czerny’s piano manual addressed to the stereotypical nineteenth-century piano girl anticipates the pianistic discourse associated with the invention of the player piano at the turn of the twentieth century. © The Author(s) 2018.

The purpose of this article is to conceptualise voice as vocalisation. Taking a multidisciplinary approach to the concept of voice, the study is informed by theoretical considerations pertaining to audionarratology, voice semiotics, and cognitive science. It is argued that the physical articulation of voice reinforces metaphorical implications. Through the illustrative example of the audiobook version of the bestselling thriller The girl on the train (2015) by Paula Hawkins, the metaphorical overtones of voice quality are discussed. In addition, the vocal impact on mental imagery, daydreaming, and phenomenal consciousness is analysed. Based on data collected from the Audible website for listener reviews, it is concluded that voice performance has an impact on the way in which both plot and discursive features are perceived. Importantly, the study shows that the gendered theme of motherhood, foregrounded in Hawkins’s novel, takes on new dimensions when the text is vocalised.

Judging from sales figures, the popularity of the audiobook is more than a passing trend. While everyone seems to have an opinion on the topic, either one listens avidly or one refuses to abandon the ingrained habit of print, the aesthetic dimension of the listening experience has long been underexplored. Recently, however, producers and researchers have started to show a growing interest in the actual voicing of a text and its aesthetic effect and, consequently, readers are becoming less categorical. Reading with one’s ears is neither inferior nor superior to reading with one’s eyes; it is quite simply a different experience.

My talk is founded on the assumption that this difference is related to double voicing which can be studied through the theoretical lens of audionarratology. What happens when the metaphorical voice goes physical in the performing act of narration? My focus is on the materiality of voice, what Roland Barthes famously termed its “grain.” A key argument is the recorded voice as a facilitator for an empathetic stance. In my study of the shift to the listening mode with its affective potential, previous research findings on readers’ emotional responses to print texts based on such parameters as story type (descriptive, emotional) and set (sympathetic spectator, identification) will be used as a reference point.