Engaged Scholarship and Engaging Communities: Navigating Emotion, Affect and Disability Through Digital Storytelling

Abstract

This chapter describes the development of a collaborative digital storytelling research project for exploring the lives of disabled people. Literature on the geographies of emotion and affect informs an analysis of vignettes of three workshop participants whose co-created digital stories demonstrate workshops as performed spaces of care and empathy. Digital storytelling workshops are important collaborative research spaces for conceptualising the lived experience of disability. Attention to digital storytelling workshops as performance spaces illustrates the ways in which emotion and affect shape understandings of disability. In this research, workshop participants’ embodied performances created an emotional and affective atmosphere of care and empathy where alternative understandings of disability were constructed. This collaborative research project upset the traditional gap between researchers, community practitioners and people with disabilities by acknowledging knowledge creation and expertise as collective achievements.