Tag: writing

“Caravan of Civilizational Tales” and the Power of Connective Imagination

I had the privilege of contributing the Foreword to “Caravan of Civilizational Tales”, a peace-centred anthology conceived and curated by Melika Tabrizi, founder of the Silky Land Storytelling Institute. A writer, storyteller, playwright and tireless champion of peace-making, Tabrizi has brought together voices from multiple countries in a project inspired by Iran’s historic caravanserais, transforming these ancient spaces of encounter into a contemporary dialogue about culture, connection and peace. The book was officially launched in Tehran on the International Day of Peace.

While writing the Foreword, I found myself reflecting on what storytelling can offer in a world increasingly shaped by division, conflict and uncertainty. This led me to explore the definition of the process of storytelling as social act of “connective imagination“. Not just “collective” through the telling-listening loop, but “connective” as a driver for social justice.

By connective imagination, I mean our ability to engage with lives, experiences and perspectives beyond our own. The ability not only to understand, but also to feel and see thorugh someone else’s heart and eyes, even where we perceive ‘distance’. Stories allow us to travel across cultural, linguistic and geographical boundaries, not by erasing difference but by creating opportunities to encounter it. Through storytelling, we are invited to listen, reflect and imagine relationships that extend beyond the limits of our immediate experience.

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

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?