Echoes and Horizons: Future Story-Making in Diverse Contexts
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54741/SSJAR/6.2.2026.337Keywords:
storytelling, indigenous narratives, digital storytelling, futurism, epistemic justice, narrative sovereigntyAbstract
This paper explores the evolving landscape of story-making across Indigenous and non-Indigenous contexts, emphasising narrative as a powerful medium for identity formation, resistance, healing, and future-making. Storytelling is examined as both a cultural and political practice—one that reflects worldviews, sustains collective memory, and opens possibilities for transformation. The paper investigates how diverse communities navigate historical trauma, epistemic marginalisation, and digital disruption to reclaim and reimagine storytelling traditions. Drawing on Indigenous oral narratives, decolonial theory, postcolonial literature, and emergent media technologies such as AI, VR, and blockchain, it analyses how stories are being retold, remixed, and reasserted in contemporary contexts. Through case studies involving transmedia activism, speculative fiction, ecological storytelling, and narrative sovereignty, the study reveals how future story-making must be grounded in pluralism, relational ethics, and epistemic justice. The paper ultimately proposes a planetary narrative ethic—one that honours multiple knowledge systems, fosters solidarity across differences, and reclaims storytelling as a sacred and transformative practice.
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