A professor of story is embedding narrative specialists into care homes, tech companies, and community businesses to turn storytelling into a teachable, transferable skill. The problem is that while people intuitively know stories matter—for communication, empathy, and collaboration—there is no agreed-upon set of narrative skills that can be formally taught, assessed, or applied across different professions. This programme aims to define that "story skill set" and create a practical model for putting it to work. If successful, it could change how social workers build trust with young people in care, how tech firms design user experiences, or how businesses train staff to communicate more effectively. The immediate impact will be localised: each host organisation gets tailored findings that improve their specific operations. Over time, the programme could establish story as a recognised professional competency, alongside numeracy or digital literacy, with ripple effects across education, public services, and the creative economy.
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Bambo Soyinka is Professor of Story at Bath Spa University with significant expertise in multi-platform storytelling and strategic leadership. As a Programme Director for AHRC, Soyinka will help to shape the future of narrative research in the UK with a vision of story as an essential skill for life, learning and work. Soyinka will bring to this role expertise in the application of story across a range of professional contexts, stemming from her 25-year career in creative co-production in the public and private sectors. The overarching purpose of this programme is to specify a transferable 'story skill set' and to establish a model for embedding this into a range of professional settings so that the value of story is more widely recognised and activated. To achieve this, it is proposed that Soyinka will develop a co-production framework that will place 'Story Associates' into a wide variety of organisations (e.g., care settings, local community interest companies, technological companies, creative enterprises and businesses more generally). Each placement holder will define their own research and impact objectives, resulting in subject-specific findings with localised benefits for each host organisation and for their service users (such as young people in care, businesses, customers and audiences). As the Programme Director, Soyinka's role will be to help AHRC to provide thought leadership on this theme, advocating the importance of story as a key skill in life, learning and work.
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