Marta-Laura Cenedese and Silvia Pierosara present a new interdisciplinary project on the restorative capacity of narratives and reflect on its contribution to the field in the Italian context.
In June 2024, under the aegis of the Costellazioni Collaborative di Ricerca [Collaborative Research Constellations], the University of Macerata (Italy) funded a two-year project on “Restorative Narratives” (STORIES), led by Associate Professor of Moral Philosophy Silvia Pierosara. The project comprises a multidisciplinary team from Macerata itself, as well as from other institutions in Italy and abroad. The launch of this project makes a significant contribution to the development of research in the medical humanities in Italy, or in the “Italosphere,” as Marta Arnaldi (2023) called it. For STORIES, in fact, follows the blueprint of what she described as a “polycentric” field, “diffused […] within, and across, communities of Italian scholars spread throughout the world” (Arnaldi 2023).
While Italian and the Italian cultural context are the project’s core language and initial frame of reference, by virtue of its international partners, STORIES also seeks to reflect on the shifting meanings and understandings of “restorative narratives” across languages and cultures. This is precisely one of the aspects that make STORIES innovative within the Italian panorama. The project is simultaneously rooted within the boundaries set by its predecessors, while also embodying that spirit of bold and courageous transformation, of active reception and translation, of conceptualising and practising through diasporic zones. In this sense, the project seeks to “(un)hom[e] [the discipline] in ways that are as profound as they are innovative” (Arnaldi 2023).
Exploring the restorative capacity of narratives
The aim of the project is to explore the restorative capacity of narratives in contexts of personal, social, and community fragility. In particular, the project aims to identify criteria to discern, and the characteristics to model, a “restorative” narrative. By this, we mean a narrative that is capable of enhancing the well-being of individuals and communities, strengthening social ties, and “mending” personal and relational fabrics in ways that are socially acceptable and democratically sustainable.
Building on the premise that not every form of narrative has a “restorative” intent – for instance, some narratives are exclusionary or generate stereotypes – STORIES seeks to clarify the underlying values of narrative constructs through an interdisciplinary approach. Although anchored in a humanistic tradition, the project seeks to expand its purview to also incorporate today’s postdigital and posthuman concerns with regards to health and illness.
Indeed, for STORIES, interdisciplinarity is not an empty descriptor but a real scholarly engagement. The project brings together scholars from across the humanities, social and physical sciences. Throughout the project’s four planned phases, researchers from different subject areas will meet both within the individual disciplines, in order to map recent research and knowledge-specific experiences on narratives, as well as together, with the aim of sharing the results of the disciplinary mapping and locating new areas for research.
This type of dialogic engagement within and across disciplinary boundaries certainly presents an array of difficulties, from epistemic to methodological ones, and the risk of getting “lost in translation” is high. Nonetheless, the richness that is bound to emerge through this cross-disciplinary dialogue will be vital to the work of conceptualising and classifying these narratives, as well as to the definition of the key terms such as “restorative” and “narrative.”
During the interdisciplinary phases, the project members will come together to elaborate the criteria for and identify the patterns within which a “restorative narrative” takes shape, both in the physical and social senses. We will likewise reflect on how to ethically approach narrative practices by preparing contextually situated, ethically sustainable, and effective guidelines to conduct narrative research, experimentation, and practices. STORIES’ different disciplinary research strands strive to establish an epistemological framework based on the value of narratives as capable of making differences coexist. To this end, we will seek to link these narratives together, with a view to developing a definition of narrative research as a “diagnostic” method and of narrative practices as a “healing” method for relationships.
We understand narrative research as “diagnostic” in two ways. Firstly, it can help to detect social issues or pathologies thanks to the study of form and content. Secondly, at a symbolic level, narrative research works on its contents as if they were a text that can interpret reality and social or relational conflicts or problems. At the same time, narrative practices can also be “healing,” insofar as they aim to analyse bonds as if they were tissues. In this context, the narrated word is understood to be capable of sewing differences back together or re-narrating experiences otherwise.
Restorative narrative practices and the limits of the reparative
The first planned project workshop took place on 20 February 2025 at the University of Macerata. Chaired by Silvia Pierosara, it featured presentations by Marta-Laura Cenedese, Patrizia Patrizi, Paola Nicolini, and Andrew Benjamin. Although the four speakers came from different disciplinary fields and spoke about different objects and case studies, from the literary/visual to the judicial, the pedagogical to the urban, throughout the workshop many similarities and critical concepts emerged regarding the contexts and practices of restorative narratives. The speakers all interrogated the ways in which the word “restorative” can be understood and employed, and its relation to close synonyms such as “reparative.” In so doing, they playfully moved and translated across languages (Italian and English), a testament to Arnaldi’s (2023) suggestion that “[r]eception and translation of foreign word-ideas is not a passive encounter,” but “a bold, metamorphic process that tests, and sometimes subverts, our assumptions about the nature and scope of the original.”
A key idea that arose in all talks was that of relationality and its importance within “restorative/reparative practices.” The so-called “danger of a single story,” and the power imbalance inherent in such one story, highlights the need to attend to the complex, sometimes subverting and de-essentializing connections that are built through relations of solidarity and mutual accountability. Instead of honing in on competitive, individually centred narratives, then, we suggest that our focus should be on “restorative narratives,” which provide ways to imagine otherwise; to envision other forms of living, meeting, coming into agency, and healing.
The second STORIES workshop took place on 10–11 April 2025. Titled Ai limiti della riparazione [At the Limits of the Reparative], it featured talks by Sergio Labate, Clio Nicastro, Michela Meschini, Matteo Cavalleri, Ivelise Perniola and Riccardo Marchese, and Silvia Pierosara. With contributions from several branches of philosophy, as well as from literary and film studies, these two days took the concept of “restorative narrative” to its extreme expression. Participants interrogated the (im)possibility and (im)potency of “restorative narratives” and problematised the flawed relationship between “healing” (or “curing”) and “repairing.” In so doing, they engaged with the complex dynamics of trauma, considering repetition, fixation, and the process of working through.
Speakers also addressed the role of images as reparative moments, going beyond their solely representative dimension. Like in the first workshop, the conversations critiqued a normative understanding of what repairing and restoring mean, and of the redemptive qualities of narrative, thus leaving open the tensions within the concept itself. Understanding “curing” as somewhat of an illusion in the context of narrative, this workshop instead positioned repair as an everyday practice that has political relevance – both in its individual and collective dimensions.
The third STORIES workshop, Narrazioni e discorso pubblico: oggetti, luoghi, culture [Narratives and Public Discourse: Objects, Places and Cultures], took place on 20–21 May 2025 and included talks by Maria Letizia Zanier, Anna Lisa Tota, Andrea Volterrani, Lucia Picarella, Emiliana Mangone, Marta Scocco, Francesca Cubeddu, Daniele Battista, and Melanie Sara Palermo. The days proved particularly fruitful for investigating the methodological relevance of the narrative approach in sociology, with numerous points of agreement emerging among the participants regarding the ambivalence of restorative narratives.
Although seemingly removed from the medical humanities in the strict sense, sociological reflection has contributed to the understanding that the social, cultural, and economic context is fundamental to defining, understanding, and interpreting the experience of illness and pain, which always have social roots. As a restorative practice, narrative concerns both the social and personal fabric, both of which can be subject to fractures, unravelling, and tears in the perception of individual and collective identity.
The fourth and last workshop of the academic year took place on 27 May 2025. Beyond Revenge: Prison and Restorative Justice featured talks from scholars and legal professionals, namely Lina Caraceni, Raffaella Niro, Marcello Bortolato, Ornella Favero, and Lorenzo Sciacca. The workshop investigated in depth the context and practices of restorative justice, critiquing the punitive prison system and highlighting the importance of narrative practices as a means of achieving autonomy and emancipation from a guilt-ridden and stereotypical self-image.
Like sociological disciplines, legal disciplines also recognise the value of recreating the bond associated with storytelling. In these cases, too, the connection with care practices is clear, as a connective element always emerges from storytelling, as does the role of mediation, reflection, and attributing meaning to experience. Ultimately, the experience of guilt and the reintegration of the convicted person into society is often viewed as an ailment of society, which needs to be healed or, at least, managed.
What’s next for STORIES?
Two international conferences are in the works for the spring of 2026, one of which will be directly related to scholars and the field of the medical humanities (provisional dates are 3–4 March). Two publications, resulting from the above-mentioned workshops, are also in preparation. Overall, the project is trying to build on recent scholarship within the field of medical humanities, which has urged the expansion of its geographical and linguistic borders (Arnaldi 2023; Wilson 2023). It also responds to the call to critically reorient the field, by “pos[ing] more critical questions […] explor[ing] new scenes and sites […] understand[ing] how concepts, frameworks and data operate in more public spheres” (Whitehead and Woods 2016, 2).
The “Restorative Narratives” of the project’s title are thus seen critically at the level of methods, contexts, and approaches by engaging in a transdisciplinary dialogue that maps recent research and experiences on narrative and attempts to pose new questions regarding their value within society at large. In the next phase of the project, we will develop criteria and guidelines for the use of narratives in a way that is ethical and sustainable. This collaborative work will reveal the resources and limitations of restorative narratives. We will also disseminate guidelines for good practice in contexts such as medicine, computer engineering, and urban planning. In these contexts, the relational dimension of human beings is evident and needs to be taken care of. As this project has shown, the humanities are particularly well placed to take care of this relational dimension.
Acknowledgements
The following individuals and institutions have participated in the workshops organised so far:
Daniele Battista, University of Salerno, Italy
Andrew Benjamin, Monash University, Australia
Marcello Bortolato, President of the Supervisory Court of Florence, Italy
Matteo Cavalleri, University of Chieti, Italy
Marta-Laura Cenedese, Durham University, United Kingdom
Francesca Cubeddu, National Research Council of Italy (CNR), Italy
Ornella Favero, President of the National Conference on Voluntary Justice, Italy
Sergio Labate, University of Macerata, Italy
Emiliana Mangone, University of Salerno, Italy
Riccardo Marchese, University Roma Tre, Italy
Michela Meschini, University of Macerata, Italy
Clio Nicastro, Bard College Berlin, Germany
Paola Nicolini, University of Macerata, Italy
Melanie Sara Palermo, University of Macerata, Italy
Patrizia Patrizi, Sassari University, Italy
Ivelise Perniola, University Roma Tre, Italy
Lucia Picarella, University of Foggia, Italy
Silvia Pierosara, University of Macerata, Italy
Lorenzo Sciacca, criminal mediator and President of “La Ginestra”, Italy
Marta Scocco, University of Macerata, Italy
Anna Lisa Tota, University Roma Tre, Italy
Andrea Volterrani, Tor Vergata University of Rome, Italy
Maria Letizia Zanier, University of Macerata, Italy
About the authors
Marta-Laura Cenedese is a UKRI (MSCA Horizon Guarantee) Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University (UK). Marta is a literary scholar with research interests in postcolonial literatures, critical medical humanities, cultural memory studies, queer death studies, and decolonial feminism. Her research has been published, or is forthcoming, in several peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. She is the author of Irène Némirovsky’s Russian Influences: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov (2021); editor of Written on the Body: Narrative (Re)constructions of Violence(s) (2023); and co-editor (with Clio Nicastro) of Violence, Care, Cure: Self/perceptions within the Medical Encounter (2025).
Silvia Pierosara (PhD in Philosophy and Theory of Human Sciences) is an Associate Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Macerata, Italy. Her research interests include theories of recognition, foundations and applications of narrative ethics, universalism and contextualism, transcendentality and historicity, critical theories of justice, moral autonomy, relational autonomy, narrative autonomy, history of ethics and moral philosophy, and critical philosophies of history including progress, memory, and nostalgia. She is the author of several monographs and articles.
References
Arnaldi, Marta. 2023. “Medical Humanities in the Italosphere.” The Polyphony, July 28, 2023. https://thepolyphony.org/2023/07/28/medical-humanities-italosphere.
Whitehead, Anne, and Angela Woods. 2016. “Introduction.” In The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, edited by Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods, 1–31. Edinburgh University Press.
Wilson, Steven. 2023. “Manifesto for a Multilingual Medical Humanities.” The Polyphony, May 30, 2023. https://thepolyphony.org/2023/05/30/manifesto-multilingual-medhums.
