news – Page 3 – Antonia Liguori / Participatory Storytelling

Digital Storytelling workshop for museum professionals in Paris

As a member of the Advisory Board, I will join the Digital-Spektrum project team for a workshop at the Petit Palais in Paris, on Friday 24 January from 14:00 to 17:00 CET, to explore Digital Storytelling as an inclusive approach for audience engagement.

The priority of the Digital-Spektrum project is to promote inclusion, diversity, and accessibility in all areas of education, particularly educational experiences that take place in museums. One of the main objectives of the Digital-Spektrum project is to provide museum staff with digital skills to design inclusive museum experiences with and for people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

12th International Digital Storytelling Conference, Brazil 2025: Submit your proposal by the 15th of February

The call for proposal to participate to the next International Digital Storytelling Conference, hosted by the Museu da Pessoa in Brazil from the 6th to the 8th November 2025, has just been published.

There is time until the 15th of February to submit a proposal and you can read all the key information below.

The conference theme, Lives, Voices, and Knowledge in a World on Fire, focuses on the climate crisis and the many ways storytelling can help us think about, observe, and address the interconnected challenges reshaping our world. The gathering invites us to examine how storytelling can drive meaningful dialogue and action around the intersecting crises that define our era.

To frame your proposals we encourage you to consider these thematic tracks. These tracks represent key lenses for exploring how personal narratives, collective experiences, and shared knowledge can inform and inspire action in response to the world’s most pressing social and environmental challenges:

The Art of Cultural Fluency: Exploring Digital Storytelling as a ‘Translational’ tool

The video recording of my talk part of ‘The Art of Cultural Fluency’ event hosted by The 7th Bridge – a network of cultural heritage professionals based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – is now available on LinkedIn (from 6’10”) via the link below:

https://www.linkedin.com/events/theartofculturalfluency7240688618904682497/theater/

New project: Making Waves – A UKYA project promoting ocean literacy across UK secondary school subjects

I am delighted to announce that from January 2025 I will work with Aditee Mitra (Research Fellow, Cardiff University), Alistair McConnell (Assistant Professor, Heriot-Watt University), Imrose Muhit (Lecturer in Sustainable Infrastructure Engineering, Teesside University), and Charles Maurice Pigott (Lecturer in Hispanic Studies, University of Strathclyde), on the UKYA project Making Waves.

Recognising the vital role of education in fostering ocean literacy, this project aims to embed vital knowledge about plankton ecology and the impacts of human activities within the UK senior school curricula.

Making Waves will develop innovative, inclusive learning resources through participatory storytelling and by co-creating engaging methods, ensuring that students of all backgrounds and abilities can access the information. The project will thus foster young people’s understanding and appreciation of marine ecosystems, empowering the next generation to continue the vital work of conserving and restoring our oceans for the future health of our planet.

For more information: https://ukyoungacademy.org/activities/making-waves/

The video-recording of the HPCA’s Storytelling Community Webinar is now online

The benefits of the story-telling/story-listening loop within participatory research: Exploring diverse experiences and methods for the co-production of knowledge.

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?