Cultural storytelling, felt accountability and the microfoundations of activist commitment

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Purpose This paper examines how storytelling practices operate as microfoundational mechanisms that shape and sustain felt accountability. Focusing on the Repeal the 8th campaign in Ireland, the study explores how narrative practices organise moral, emotional and political commitments, and how these are formed, internalised and made durable through culturally embedded storytelling practices that constitute the microfoundations of felt accountability. Design/methodology/approach Conversational interviews with Repeal activists are drawn on and analysed through a feminist narrative approach oriented towards understanding how felt accountability is narrated and experienced in practice. The analysis is informed by using Declan Kiberd's (1995, 2017) postcolonial literary work on radical traditionalism enabling a culturally situated reading of activist narratives within longer Irish storytelling traditions. Findings The cultural storytelling tropes of confession, silence, absence and spectral presence, domestic intimacy, subversive wit and unresolved loss are identified to have acted as microfoundational mechanisms of accountability that bound activists to Repeal, one-another and the cause of reproductive justice. Through intimate conversations, shared confessions and bearing witness to personal narratives of reproductive experiences and injustices, the reactivation of these storytelling tropes constituted the moral and political bonds that sustained and reaffirmed activists' sense of felt accountability to Repeal under emotionally taxing and abusive conditions. Originality/value The paper contributes to the accountability literature by examining how felt accountability is culturally mediated and sustained through microfoundational narrative practices and inherited storytelling traditions. In this sense, the paper highlights how microfoundational mechanisms of storytelling, drawing on culturally resonant storytelling tropes, actively constitute activist accountability, offering – more broadly – a novel account of how felt accountability is shaped, internalised and maintained. In doing so, the paper illustrates how storytelling acts as a cultural infrastructure and a moral and political practice through which accountability is enacted, felt and made durable.

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