Narrative Traditions in Children’s Everyday Lives: A Case Study from the UK

Children grow up within diverse narratives rooted in their geographies, cultures and social contexts. Stories and grand narratives help them navigate various aspects of life, particularly its challenges, and learn the ways of everyday living in their respective cultures. This paper focuses on the Sufi storytelling tradition as a critical site for children and young people’s negotiation of Islamic values. Specifically, it investigates the role of Sufi storytelling in constructing and reconstructing environmental ethics within Sufi family life. Sufism offers a wealthy heritage of various genres of written and oral culture, including Quranic parables, tales and hymns. The UK context is particularly intriguing, as it hosts Sufis from diverse ethnic, cultural and social backgrounds.

The paper will share findings on how children and parents engage with stories as storytellers themselves, based on interviews with them, as well as storytelling workshops conducted with children from Sufi families in the UK. It aims to contribute to broader practices and scholarship in the social studies of childhood, youth and family through artful and decolonial approaches.