Introduction Towards an Ecological Perspective on Learning and the Stories People Tell

Doing biographical research is no isolated, individual, solipsistic endeavor but is shaped by larger ecological interactions – in families, schools, universities, communities, societies and networks – that sustain or destroy hope. Sustainability is often to do with creating sufficient hope in individuals and communities by building meaningful dialogue and creating good enough experiences of togetherness, across difference. Telling life stories or listening to them celebrates the complexity, messiness, ecological challenge but also rich potential of learning lives. But we have grown more concerned about the rapid disruption of sustainable ecologies, not only ‘natural’, physical, and biological, but also psychological, economic, relational, political, educational, cultural, and ethical. We live in a precarious, frightening, liquid Covid world and believe that our kind of research can both chronicle this while also illuminating how resources of hope are created in deeper, aesthetically satisfying ways. Biographical research offers insights, and even signposts, to understand and transcend the often ignored or defended darker side of the human condition, alongside its inspirations