Read and Respond

Featured Category: Indigenous/Indigenist Storywork
Resources by Indigenous authors written for sharing broadly with writers, teachers, and researchers interested in learning more and perhaps applying these methods in their own activities.
Featured Facilitator: April Conway

Bale displays categories of sources—all contributed by Bale members—on a wide range of topics. Each category has its own page and Bale's tools allow you to respond to individual sources and to contribute citations for additional sources. Click on a category below to view the category and its sources and responses.

A Note on Citations: Citations will vary depending on the documentation system you are using. The following models conform to MLA style. Please adapt the information as appropriate. Please note that comments on categories sources do not have distinct URLs while comments on individual sources are found on the source page.

Small, Nancy R., and April Conway (Eds.). "Category: Storytelling and Research." Bale: An Annotated Bibliography of Narrative and Storywork, April 14, 2024. https://bale.colostate.edu/bib/category.cfm?categoryid=14.

Leschak, Peter. "Comment: Storytelling is far from well understood. In fact ...." Storytelling and Research, edited by Nancy R. Small and April Conway, Bale: An Annotated Bibliography of Narrative and Storywork, April 29, 2024. https://bale.colostate.edu/bib/category.cfm?categoryid=14.

Brown, Jill. "Comment on 'Growing Up on the Mesabi Iron Range' by Peter Leschak." Stories from the Mesabi Range, edited by Nancy R. Small and April Conway, Bale: An Annotated Bibliography of Narrative and Storywork, April 30, 2024. https://bale.colostate.edu/bib/comment-source.cfm?sourceid=13.

View Sources (Unsure/Category Not Yet Included)
Description: If you are contributing a source and don't see a best-fit category for it yet, then place it here. The editorial and facilitator teams will make sure it lands in a good home. Feel free to suggest a (new) category at the top of your annotation. If you're interested in being more involved as a category proposer/facilitator, please fill out the "Propose a New Category" form linked on the homepage.
View Sources Appalachian Storytelling
Description: This category includes texts interested and invested in rhetorical and narrative practices, methodologies, and theories that live in relation to cultures, communities, and spaces constructed as and/or identified with Appalachia.
View Sources Autotheory
Description: Autotheory employs storytelling to enact the embodied nature and literary transcription of lived theory. Drawing from feminist, queer, decolonial, anti-racist, and critical theory, autotheory crosses and explodes genres.
View Sources Caribbean Rhetoric
Description: This collection of sources features Caribbean rhetoric. Caribbean rhetoric is interdisciplinary, multi-dimensional, and eclectic. It comprises (but is not limited to) approaches, genres, methodologies, pedagogy, popular culture, autobiographies, memoirs, performances, rants, vernacular, and storytelling that are Caribbean-influenced.
View Sources Community Literacies
Description: Johnson et al. carry the torch of scholars who use storytelling to research, theorize, and teach community literacies, noting that this type of research is especially important in "communities where storytelling is a literacy practice that reflects people’s theory of reality, cultural knowledge, and values" (471).
View Sources Feminist Storytelling
Description: Patricia A. Sullivan calls for feminist scholars to continue “seeking to create the conditions and circumstances whereby voices, stories, and discourses too long silent in the academy can be heard” (58). In and beyond the academy, storytelling is a critical feminist practice that allows for meaning-making, reflection, amplification, community building, and more.
View Sources Indigenous/Indigenist Storywork
Description: Resources and scholarship by Indigenous authors written for sharing broadly with writers, teachers, and researchers interested in learning more and perhaps applying these methods in their own activities. Sources found here can be used by people of many different cultures and backgrounds, but always must be considered deeply, with respect, reciprocity, and relational accountability.
View Sources Storying in Technical Communication
Description: The "social justice turn" in technical communication has ushered in exciting new possibilities in blending story as method and tradition and the genres of professional communication. This category explores the ways in which story serves not as one method, but as THE method to reconnect to the humanity within professional and technical communication.
View Sources Western Narrative Theory and Methods
Description: Sources listed here grow out of the Western/EuroAmerican approaches to knowledge-making via story and narrative as applied in the humanities and social sciences. Entries grounded in first-hand storytelling (e.g. memoirs, autoethnography) are situated in a Western perspective.