Delighted to co-author this paper with two brilliant colleagues and friends from Loughborough University and the Institute for Creative Futures LU London, Valentina Volpi and Ksenija Kuzmina, who will be presenting our paper at the Sport Anthropology Conference 2025, whose theme this year is “Sport Beyond Definitions”.
The paper is inspired and informed by the work we are developing together through participatory digital storytelling and co-design with young people in Bangladesh, Jordan, and Fiji, at the intersection of climate displacement and sport.
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:
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.
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.
Co-developing a Framework for Adaptive Participatory Storytelling Approaches (APSA)
Another paper just published from the DRY project, exploring how applied storytelling can support knowledge exchange and public engagement.
Please, read the abstract below.
The transdisciplinary Drought Risk and You (DRY) project aimed to interweave storytelling and science as a way of increasing the different voices and types of knowledge (specialist, local) within drought risk decision-making in the UK. This paper critically reflects on our emergent process of drawing across different methodologies to create Adaptive Participatory Storytelling Approaches (APSA). APSA enable more tailoring to people and setting than existing methods, recognizing the specificity of local risk contexts and communities, and in terms of social dynamics, cultural values and local knowledge. APSA are situated, storytelling methodologies applied in the social sciences and arts/humanities, giving strong attention to meaningful participation and sustainable coproduction in both process and outputs. The paper offers other researchers and practitioners insights into working with APSA as a suite of creative storytelling options prioritizing methodological principles of active listening and adapting. APSA require creative thinking along multiple spectra, including how to balance different axes in APSA including: topic (drought risk)-focused with topic (drought risk)-peripheral or oblique, participant-led with researcher-led, and visualization-led with audio-led. We reflect on the challenges, opportunities and values of co-working with APSA, and offer a flexible framework for its application and iterative evaluation embedded through the process. We propose this as a starting point for other transdisciplinary projects to tackle themes that prove difficult for communities to connect with during community-engaged research, in this case, hidden risks like drought and climate change. This is timely given the power and mounting popularity of storytelling for behavior change, research insight and policy, and the need to capture and share different knowledges for climate resilience.
Please, cite as: Roberts, L, Liguori, A, McEwen, L, Wilson, M. (2023). The challenge of engaging communities on hidden risks: co-developing a framework for Adaptive Participatory Storytelling Approaches (APSA), Journal of Extreme Events, ISSN: 2345-7376. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1142/S2345737623410026
Antonia Liguori / Participatory Storytelling 