Introduction

Storytelling, understood as a transformative and performative practice, emerges as a key cultural practice capable of challenging entrenched power structures and reconfiguring social imaginaries. This interdisciplinary inquiry investigates how narratives-across literary, visual, and hybrid media-serve as critical tools for resisting systemic oppression, fostering inclusivity, and envisioning sustainable futures. Engaging with perspectives from Cultural and Literary Studies as well as Linguistics, this chapter foregrounds storytelling’s capacity to redefine the human subject as relational, embodied, and deeply entangled with both human and more-than-human worlds. The investigation is structured around the intersecting problem-spaces of body, space, and posthumanism, offering a rhizomatic approach that traces dynamic networks of meaning-making across a range of text-types. Drawing on theoretical insights by scholars such as Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and bell hooks, the analysis interrogates the cultural work of narratives that unsettle anthropocentric, binary, and exclusionary paradigms. Through a critical exploration of counter-narratives that bear witness to trauma, reclaim marginalised identities, and speculate on alternative futures, this introduction advocates for storytelling as an ethical and political act-one that cultivates response-ability, rethinks community and kinship, and resists the fatalism of the Anthropocene by insisting on the generative power of multiplicity, dissent, and imagination.