ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ways in which narrative can redirect our energies to the type of thinking adequate to the particular challenge of intergenerational justice, connecting narrative's possibilities with the institution of the theater in ancient Athens. Schiff argues that narrative can help transform three 'dispositions that problematize our acknowledgment of structural injustice and social connection, and thus threaten our ability to confront our political responsibility: thoughtlessness, bad faith, and misrecognition'. In terms of intergenerational justice specifically, narrative has several very specific advantages over other forms of discourse. Narratives, when they are focused on showing (rather than proving), can be an invitation to a larger conversation that one did not know one even needed to have. Narrative provides the possibility of overcoming the reluctance to even see intergenerational aspects of politics and can help citizens recognize agency across great temporal distance.
