16 December 2025: UofG researchers recently hosted a two-day workshop looking at how narratives shape policymaking. In this blog, they share reflections on the discussions – who and what evidence is heard, methods for how narratives can be incorporated, and working examples, from NHS patient feedback to the Scottish Parliament’s use of lived experience in policymaking. 

Blog by Maia Almeida-Amir, Dr Clementine Hill O’Connor, and Professor Ariadne Vromen 

In early October 2025, a group of researchers working in the intersections of social policy, storytelling, politics, media and communications, and citizens’ lived experience met for a two-day workshop at the University of Glasgow. 

The workshop arose from a growing recognition that statistics alone cannot capture the complex range of impacts a policy decision can have, nor are statistics always sufficient for understanding the nature of an issue that needs to be addressed in policy. In increasingly popular participatory policy agendas, narratives are being called upon to address this gap and to democratise policymaking. Narratives also feature in media and politics, influencing and shaping the nature of debates and determining what policy solutions are deemedpossible.  

Bringing together scholars from across the University and beyond, the workshop was a fast-paced examination of how narratives shape policymaking, asking questions about who and what is heard or ignored, and what happens to stories when they become policymaking evidence. As participant Dr Cara Broadley put it, our discussions were exploring “how to take what is and transform it into what could be.” 

The workshop underlined the importance of methodological diversity for both policymakers and academics to fulfil the ethical and political promise of narratives as a source of policymaking knowledge. Across the two days, there was a through-line highlighting the constrained conditions under which policymakers and decisionmakers have the capacity to listen and respond to these accounts. 

When set up with the needs of policymakers in mind, there are significant structural power imbalances between scholars, citizens, and decision-makers. Often narratives are framed as simply another form of 'evidence', using legalistic logic to prop up the same rules and power structures they are intended to unsettle.  

So, beyond eliciting stories to contribute to policymaking decisions, the workshop also highlighted the need to draw out and represent stories in ways that support hearing difficult, disruptive, or challenging perspectives, shifting the focus from bureaucratic box-ticking towards building relationships between policymakers and the public based in care, mutual respect, and collaboration.. By insisting on such alternatives, the many creative methods shared throughout the workshop offer a promising starting point in this pursuit.  

These methods included using zines to support low-income citizens' participation, working with public sector institutions using participatory design to facilitate community engagement, crafting composite stories to develop solutions to complex policy problems like poverty, and using photovoice to engage participants in sensitive policy issues like health. Taken together, these methods promise ways to deepen participatory policy processes and widen the interpretive space within which policymakers can make sense of public experience. 

In our discussions, we also recognised that these methodological interventions do not exist in a vacuum and that integrating these creative approaches into public policy research and practice will require both institutional support and a willingness to embrace discomfort, risk, and plural perspectives. This goes for academic institutions as much as institutions of government.  

Indeed, such institutional and cultural work is already underway. Contributions included investigations into how lived experience is deployed as evidence in Commons committees and in the Scottish Parliament, reflections drawn from a secondment to the DWP’s in-house research team, analyses of how participatory design can build community engagement into public sector institutions, and studies of how patient feedback is incorporated into NHS policy-making.  

In projects like these, creative methods complemented interaction between policymakers, academics, and the public. Going forwards, integrating such approaches into mainstream policy research and practice will be crucial to creating more equitable, responsive, and imaginative policy processes needed to respond to todays’ policy challenges.  

By the end of the workshop, it was clear to us just how wide-ranging and diverse scholarship in this area had become and it was equally clear that, despite our overlapping interests and areas of expertise, many of us had been working in isolation from one another. 

Taken together, the conversations across the workshop brought into relief an emerging field of study that ought to be in dialogue, not dispersed. Our intention is that this workshop and its participants will lay the groundwork for a sustained community of scholars and policy practitioners who are committed to understanding (and reshaping) how narratives and stories influence policymaking.

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Preview photo by Patrick Perkins on Unsplash

First published: 16 December 2025

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