@conference{b9c87011c1274dc9aac06f37197fbeb1,
title = "Storytelling through Materials: Listening to Nostalgia through recounting through past to present, and back again",
abstract = "What is it that makes us come alive when we touch our garments? What is the connection between fabric and soul, the pathway that re-connects experiencing selves with remembering selves (Kahneman, 2011)? This research explores the connection between materials and storytelling, through a series of case-study interviews that shares and reflects on individuals explaining their clothing to an audience. The range of individuals includes a fashion activist reminiscing about the meaning of her wardrobe, a Gen Z fashion communication student explaining her jacket which is typographically printed with Gen Z values, and a 95-year-old Grandma showing her granddaughter her wedding veil. Using narrative inquiry to share {\textquoteleft}stories as lived and told{\textquoteright} (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000), it looks at the simple case of character + object, and the vehicle of storytelling. It uses as a framework Jerome Bruner{\textquoteright}s (2002) list of universal story components, which importantly includes the coda of {\textquoteleft}retrospective evaluation of what it all might mean, a feature that also returns the hearer or reader from the there and then of the narrative, to the here and now of the telling.{\textquoteright} In this, nostalgia can be found in the retrospective {\textquoteleft}throwback{\textquoteright}, and recorded in the storytelling of the present, as materialised in fashion fabrics and garments, and memorialised in action. This research suggests that rather than nostalgia being {\textquoteleft}pigeon-holed as an ossifying emotion that entrenches the individual in the past{\textquoteright} (Sedikides et al, 2016) or that its etymology of nosos and algos [Greek] is singularly apposite, that instead – when communicating the social life of materials through storytelling – nostalgia can represent catharsis in the present, and an experiencing of self through space. It is history as incandescent story, enacted through embodied storytelling.",
keywords = "story, storytelling, fashion, nostalgia, material, history, activism",
author = "Catherine Glover",
year = "2021",
month = aug,
language = "English",
note = "Nostalgia : 2nd Global Interdisciplinary Conference ; Conference date: 31-07-2021 Through 01-08-2021",
url = "https://www.progressiveconnexions.net/interdisciplinary-projects/narratives-persons-communities/nostalgia/conferences/",
}