Antonia Liguori

HPCA Storytelling Community Webinar -The benefits of the story-telling/story-listening loop within participatory research

I am delighted to join the Healthcare Project and Change Association – HPCA for the november webinar with a talk on “The benefits of the story-telling/story-listening loop within participatory research: exploring diverse experiences and methods for the co-production of knowledge”.

Please read the abstract below and register to this event via this link.

Storytelling has been defined as ‘the artform of social interaction’ (Wilson, 2021), not only for its inner dynamics, but also for its power to unlock grass-roots knowledge, explore dilemmas, develop community resilience, and engender change. In a time when academia and cultural institutions are being challenged to encourage broader engagement with diverse knowledges, practices that support shared knowledge and co-creation become important. Stories can generate empathy and trust among diverse communities and audiences and at the same time demonstrate their usefulness due to their power to give meaning to human behaviours and to trigger emotions (Bourbonnais and Michaud, 2018).

In this talk we acknowledge the existence of multiple truths when we recognise, as the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie observes, ‘the danger of a single story’ (2009). As she describes, ‘because our lives and our cultures are composed of a series of overlapping stories, if we hear only a single story about another person, culture, or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding’. In a time of worrying ‘critical misunderstandings’ worldwide, this talk – linked to the soon to be published by Smithsonian Scholarly Press open access book ‘Story Work for A Just Future’ edited by Antonia Liguori, Philippa Rappoport, Daniela Gachago – explores the value of co-created “Story work”.

In particular, we will focus on how different storytelling approaches could blur boundaries and expand opportunities for collaborative research, while proposing mutual learning and co-creation of knowledge as a way forward to improve our society.

Key questions prompted by this talk are:

How do we make the digital storytelling practice further expand globally in a way that is both locally-tailored-led-owned, but also coherent with the original ethos?
Is co-creation an infallible antidote to exclusion and marginalization?
Can we determine when digital storytelling ends and a new practice starts, if they are based on the same ethos?

Everyday Creativity Conference: Exploring Musicking with a ‘Community Engineer’

Thursday 26th September Mike McGrother, Sally Blackburn-Daniels, Natasha Vall and I facilitated our first session to reflect on the emerging concept of ‘community engineering’ exploring musicking as an approach for community dialogue.

Our workshop was part of the very successful Everyday Creativity Conference, hosted by the AHRC Everyday Creativity Research Network and Creative Lives.

[In the photo of the Pre-conference dinner at the ‘Engineer’ from the left: Sally Blackburn-Daniels, Antonia Liguori, Mike McGrother, Natasha Vall]

This performative presentation has introduced Mike McGrother’s musicking practice as a co-created approach to enhance everyday creativity while exploring community’s sense of place in the Tees Valley. Starting with the premise that ‘the meaning of musicking lies in the relationships that are established between the participants by the performance’ (Small 1999), in this presentation we have explore ‘embodied listening’ (Giomi 2019) and the transition from personal to collective within the telling-listening loop (Liguori 2023) as a manifestation of everyday creativity and as a trigger for community-led placemaking.

We have also offered a platform for the audience to reflect on how to identify skills, approaches and tools that could support emergent ‘community engineers’ to replicate, adapt and expand existing practices.

Three songs were performed by McGrother – a song about, a song for and a song with – as stimuli to discuss the following three community projects, that offer new and nuanced understandings of community’s perspectives on placemaking and collective resilience:

• The Speakeasy – a (generally) pub based open gathering of older people who, through sociable and musical intervention, reminisce and share their stories – reconnecting with their community and enjoying company.

• Trailblazers, narrative focused walks with a musical edge that are co-created by people and enable stories to be shared.

• Infant Hercules and The Haverton Hillbillies. Musical, sociable, and empowering ensembles that underpin and provide a collective voice for a community.

Across the three initiatives, over 1,500 community members were involved in the three Boroughs of Middlesbrough, Stockton-on-Tees, and Redcar & Cleveland.

This performative presentation has ended with a collaborative mapping exercise (see padlet below) to explore the potential impact of these musicking initiatives beyond their current regional reach and to challenge existing barriers for their replicability and longevity.

“Storytelling and Story-listening to create change”: Opening the Series 5 of the Change Stories podcast with Susanne Evans

The ChangeStories podcast is for people who are interested in change, whether that is within organisations or for individuals.

Hosted by the brilliant Susanne Evans, an organisation change consultant, coach, trainer and researcher, each podcast episode features a conversation with a guest about their work to provide ideas and inspiration.

I had the joy to be the first guest of the opening of the Series 5 of this successful podcast and to share ideas storytelling and story-listening to address big problems and generate change.

You can listen to my conversation with Susanne Evans here:

And on YouTube:

Digital Storytelling as an evolving practice – Smithsonian Education Summit

This short video was recorded by Prof. Antonia Liguori, Teesside University, UK, as part of a Digital Storytelling workshop delivered by Philippa Rappoport (Smithsonian Office of Educational Technology), Sara Ducey and Matthew Decker (Montgomery College) at the Smithsonian Education Summit 2024.

Digital Storytelling as an evolving practice – Smithsonian Education Summit 2024

The Smithsonian’s fourth annual National Education Summit took place from the 16th to the 18th of July 2024. This year’s theme, “Together We Thrive: Connecting at the Intersections,” emphasises the power of interdisciplinary approaches to effectively engaging students with complex and challenging content.

The free three-day event combined virtual and in-person sessions, including keynote speeches, workshops and behind-the-scenes experiences at various Smithsonian locations. Sessions led by Smithsonian educators and collaborating partners explored relevant themes at the intersections of art, culture, history and science across four main tracks: Using Art to Connect Past and Present, Inclusive Storytelling, Thinking Globally, Acting Locally and Youth Taking Civic Action.

A companion Smithsonian Learning Lab collection was created to facilitate the workshop Story Work to Increase Engagement and Empathy, which this video is part of, and it is accessible via this link.

#DRS2024 – Developing A Tool To Empower The Disempowered: The Components Of The Feeling Of Home

Led by the brilliant Eszter Hegymegi, Loughborough University, UK, this paper was presented at the Design Research Society international conference, hosted by the College of Arts, Media, and Design at Northeastern University, in Boston from the 24th to the 28th of June 2024.

You can read the abstract here.

The rate of homelessness is rising, resulting in a need for better-designed services to support those affected. Building on the sector’s acknowledgement that personalised support is needed to reverse this trend and based on the psychological concept of the emotional home, we propose a tool that helps those experiencing housing issues feel empowered to better express their housing needs to support teams. The tool breaks down the complex concept of ‘home’ into tangible components of the feeling of home, developed through qualitative studies. Here, we discuss the process of working in partnership with a local charitable service provider to refine the components, and we present the tool’s initial assessment and potential to mitigate the inherited power dynamics in a situation where help is provided for vulnerable individuals. This research will be helpful to those involved in the design of services to support vulnerable people affected.

You can download the full paper via this link and on the DRS Digital Library: https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2024/researchpapers/56/