The video recording of our presentation at the Smithsonian National Education Summit 2025 is now online.
In this presentation, Philippa Rappoport and Antonia Liguori showcase ways to use digital storytelling with museum objects from the Smithsonian Learning Lab. You’ll leave with a toolkit of resources and activities to amplify student voices, build community, and increase classroom engagement and active learning across disciplines.
If you are interested in participatory storytelling and the role of AI within the cultural heritage sector – and you speak Italian – this webinar could be an interesting opportunity to share ideas, think together about co-creation and explore current case studies and future research.
You can read below the post just shared by the organisers in Italian.
Continue reading “Free Webinar on AI-Powered Storytelling: Can we train AI through Storytelling? (in Italian)”After last week’s seminar at London School of Economics and Political Science, where I had the privilige to share my experience in applying digital storytelling as a praticipatory research approach with a group of brilliant researchers based at this world-leading social science specialist university, just awarded University of the Year 2025, this week I am delighted to join the Reflective practice in applied storytelling network as one of their speakers.
On Tuesday the 25th of February from 10:00 to 11:30 UK time, I’ll be talking about The benefits of co-facilitation within digital storytelling. In particular I will focus on a number of co-facilitation techniques that can enhance active listening and co-creation within the conventional digital storytelling process.
To participate you can register via eventbrite.
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?
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.
Antonia Liguori / Participatory Storytelling 