Ethical Storytelling
Practical Guides | Events | Organizations + Projects | Academic Journal Articles | Research Reports
What does ethical storytelling mean?
To narratologists: it discusses the ethical questions that are brought up in stoytelling — and it spans storytelling in many areas.
For communications — it' specifically means the practices that determine if tellign a story is ethical.
Practical Guides
Systems Storytelling
Collective Change Lab
Practical guides, facilitation tools and activities, shared lessons, and experiential stories for applying systems storytelling.
Narrative Change: Starting Strategically
Frameworks
Designed for philanthropic and backbone organizations who are conceptualizing, planning for, participating in, and/or funding narrative change efforts.
Narrative change: how do we know if it’s working?
Frameworks UK
Evaluation options outline.
Organizations + Projects
International Resource for Impact and Storytelling (IRIS)
IRIS’ story-centered initiatives build networks and gathering spaces internationally to exchange knowledge, share strategy and build skills in storytelling and narrative shift to benefit communities.
Academic Journal Articles
Macrae, Andrea. Small Stories in Charity Fundraising Letters and the Ethics of Interwoven Individualism, Poetics Today, Volume 43, Issue 2, June 2022.
Mäkelä, Maria, Samuli Björninen, Laura Karttunen, Matias Nurminen, Juha Raipola and Tytti Rantanen. Dangers of Narrative: A Critical Approach to Narratives of Personal Experience in Contemporary Story Economy, Narrative, Volume 29, Issue 2, May 2021.
Mäkelä, Maria and Hanna Meretoja. Critical Approaches to the Storytelling Boom, Poetics Today, Volume 43, Issue 2, June 2022.
Polletta, Francesca, Tania DoCarmo, Kelly Marie Ward and Jessica Callahan, Personal Storytelling in Professionalized Social Movements, Mobilization: An International Quarterly, Volume 26, Issue 1, 2021.
Santos, Pablo Victor Fontes, Victoria Motta de Lamare França, Cristina Rego Monteiro da Luz, Mônica Leite Lessa, Humanization, Dehumanization, and Spectacularization: The Semiotics of UNICEF’s Unfairy Tales, International Political Sociology, Volume 19, Issue 1, March 2025.
Willett, Ashlan S., Aaron Levy and Rita Charon. For Clinicians Who Write Essays About Patients: Conceptual Review of Consent and Ethical Considerations, Journal of General Internal Medicine, Volume 41, 2026.
Narratology Books
Brooks, Peter. Seduced by Story: the Use and Abuse of Narrative, 2022.
Fernandes, Sujatha, Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling, 2017.
Polletta, Francesca. It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics, 2006.
Meretoja, Hanna. The Ethics of Storytelling, 2018.
Meretoja, Hanna and Mark Freeman (Eds). The Use and Abuse of Stories, 2023.
Salmon, Christian. Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind, 2007.
Squire, Corinne (Ed), Stories Changing Lives: Narratives and Paths toward Social Change, 2021.
Shuman, Amy, Other People's Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy, 2010.
Research Reports
A critical analysis of charity advertising in the UK, Charity Advertising 2021-26.
Better Conversations About Ethical Storytelling, M&C Saatchi World Services, August 2023.
Research Reports
Better Conversations About Ethical Storytelling, M+C Saatchi Group, August 2023.
A critical analysis of charity advertising in the UK, Charity Advertising 2021-26.