health – Antonia Liguori / Participatory Storytelling

On the 30th of April we are facilitating our first digital storytelling workshop for the new project Flippin’ Pain through Storytelling funded by AHRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA), Teesside University.

What is this project doing?

Persistent pain effects 30-50% of the UK and is the biggest cause of disability. Public misconceptions about pain are common and a significant barrier to good management leading to the development and maintenance of the condition. This project is seeking to address these public misconceptions by improving public understanding through Storytelling. We will organise Digital Storytelling workshops to support the co-creation of short films in which participants will reflect on their pain journey. These films will be shared at public events and on online platforms to increase public awareness on pain management by amplifying lived and living experiences of pain.

Why is it needed?

The Flippin’ Pain campaign – a key partner of this project – is both a national and regional award-winning public health campaign, collaborating with Teesside University to improve public understanding. The campaign has reached over 100,000 people through public engagement activities, but it has struggled to engage with people from more disadvantaged communities. This project will help to address this problem the campaign has been having.

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?

Tag: health

New project: Flippin’ Pain through Storytelling

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