Chapter 1: Introduction, Background, and Statement of Problem Introduction and Background Humans have been telling stories for tens of thousands of years. The disciplines of evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology all support the proposition that language, in general, and storytelling, in particular, evolved as a way to adapt and, ultimately, survive as a species (Darwin, 1859; Dennett, 1991; Gardner & Laskin, 2011; McBride, 2014). Indeed, storytelling has numerous functions related to survival of the human species including: 1) promoting cooperation among individuals in groups (Boyd, 2009); 2) developing social norms and shared beliefs (prerequisites for establishing social institutions) (Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005); 3) transmitting culture to subsequent generations (Gardner & Laskin, 2011; Tomasello et al., 2005); and 4) enhancing high-level cognitive communication which improved humans cooperation and sociality (Tomasello, 2009; Yang, 2013). In short, academic literature reminds us we are storytelling animals with a long history of following the leader who told stories that inspired change in the thoughts, behaviors, and actions of followers. In fact, over the last two decades, the link between storytelling, on the one hand, and leadership, on the other, has received a great deal of attention, especially among scholars and practitioners who define leadership as an influence relationship. Gardner and Laskin (2011), for example, focused their book, Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership, on the phenomenon of narrative leadership. They defined narrative leaders as "persons who, by word and/or personal example, markedly influence the behaviors, thoughts, and/or feelings of a significant number of their fellow human beings" (p.8). For instance, according to Gardner and Laskin's account, cultural which both narrative leadership and shared leadership, in principle, at least, could have flourished. This study attempted to create a reasonable facsimile of the women consciousness groups of the past and used it to explore the possible contributions of photovoice techniques for promoting narrative and, possibly, also, shared leadership. Related to Fisher's narrative paradigm is Bormann's symbolic convergence theory of communication (Bormann, 1985). This theory posits "the appearance of a group consciousness, with its implied shared emotions, motives, and meanings, not in terms of individual daydreams and scripts but rather in terms of socially shared narrations or fantasies" (Bormann, 1985, p. 128). Symbolic convergence is considered a general social theory of communication in which theories "deal with tendencies in human communication events that cannot be ignored or rescinded by the participants" (Bormann, 1985, p. 129), and transcend historical boundaries and are trans-cultural. These general theories are equivalent to natural science theories that explain expansive classes of events. Therefore, the symbolic convergence communication theory is a general theory because it ex...