The Story Maker: Reflexive Resistance to the Performative University

We propose the term ‘story making’ for capturing what we call reflexive activism for sustainability in the business school. Story making contrasts the performative business school and its capitalization of space, time and matter. Story making is developed from Hannah Arendt’s work in combination with fragments from the works of Benjamin, Butler, Bakhtin and Sandoval. A story maker is grounded in concrete socio-material-natural relations. She cannot be located in fixed positions but moves through both academic, societal and terrestrial landscapes in order to change them. The story maker is a reflexive activist alternative to the performative business school in which we currently live. Reflexive activism has two characteristics. Practices of deep thinking are practices employed by individuals to set people free from the torture and torment of the performative business school and explore and activate the loving, creative, passionate, artful and uncontrollable elements of their activities towards sustainability. Action and refers to the activism that emerges when people mobilize for collective action for grand challenges like sustainability. This kind of story making transcends institutional, organizational and regional boundaries and mobilizes affordances across otherwise fixed time lines and spaces. The story maker is an embodiment of the ‘punctum’ that permits the reflexive and collective ‘bleeding’ that makes other spaces and actions possible.