Delighted to announce the publication of our open access book Story Work for a Just Future: Exploring the Plurality of Knowledge and Method within the Digital Storytelling Community.
This collection from 47 authors in 15 countries represents the diverse voices of our international Digital Storytelling community, both in style and content. We hope it will inspire deeper connections, fruitful collaborations, and the creation and sharing of new stories that together will build a just future.
Very grateful to everyone who contributed to this important piece of work and to the Smithsonian Scholarly Press (SISP) for giving us the opportunity to publish with them.
In this piece we reflect on our process of coming together as an interdisciplinary and inter-professional team to challenge pre-conceived meanings and assumptions when ‘talking about’, ‘designing’ and ‘doing/facilitating/delivering(!)’ community engagement activities around environmental issues.
This paper proposes a critical reflection on the use of language to address the challenge of promoting and supporting civic agencies in adaptation to increasing extreme weather risk. Such reflection needs to focus on the opportunities and limitations of language, and the navigation amongst multiple or contested meanings within interdisciplinary and inter-sectorial collaborations. This commentary was inspired by the authors’ conversations on their journey in writing the paper — Liguori et al. (2023) “Exploring the uses of arts-led community spaces to build resilience: Applied storytelling for successful co-creative work” and the impact it had on their understanding of various language systems. Here writing was conceived as a form of networking, undertaking a sequence of intimate, in-depth discussions in a safe space. ‘Playing’ with words, moving out from our disciplinary homes, provided a fertile way of thinking within multi/inter-sectorial/disciplinary conversations to expand the language system for meaningful community engagement around local climate adaptation. Three key terms were at the core of these diverse — and sometimes divergent — ways of looking at social preparedness for extreme weather events: disruption, empowerment, and creative ecosystem. The meta-reflections, based on iterative conversations around these three key terms, highlight the importance of explorations of language as a generative meaning-making process that can be boundary-spanning.
There is significant value in understanding the implications of language used in public engagement — its different interpretations, their loading and potential for transformed thinking when conceived creatively. Such insight can contribute to more effective approaches for participatory research and practice working with communities when addressing issues related to climate adaptation. This commentary argues that the socially engaged or participatory arts are particularly well placed to be active in such processes.
Delighted to have published our editorial and have worked with fantastic colleagues and dear friends (Philippa Rappoport, Smithsonian Institution, US; Antonella Poce, University of Roma Tor Vergata, Italy; Matthew Rabagliati, UK National Commission for UNESCO) on this very important Research Topic published by Frontiers, that addresses the fourth Sustainable Development Goal, which is to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.”
This is the beginning of our editorial: Ambitious targets, as defined in the fourth United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 4) on “quality education” (WEF, 2016), are essential to stimulate innovative research around complex systems and also to extend and amplify the debate well beyond the academic community. Yet to achieve those targets inclusive language within policy and practice play a critical role (Kennett, 2021), in particular when considering communication as a tool to support democratic participation and knowledge exchange beyond institutionalized borders.
Antonia Liguori / Participatory Storytelling 