Implicating Practice: Engaged Scholarship Through Co-creative Media

Abstract

This chapter centres co-creative scriptwriting and the intellectual and aesthetic labour of two research practitioners as a means to explore digital storytelling as a form of engaged scholarship. It draws from research with asylum seekers and refugees in Ireland that advanced a longitudinal (four years) and inquiry-based approach to digital storytelling. Research findings indicate that this approach to digital storytelling facilitated dynamic opportunities for engaged inquiry into the asylum regime, recognition of storytellers and stories, and sustained encounters of narrative exchange. In particular, co-creative scriptwriting served as a vehicle for learning from and about research subjects in more equitable ways. In contrast to the rules of storytelling enforced in asylum proceedings, the monologues created by research practitioners are more akin to poetic meditations than to legal testimony or political confession. Of equal importance for consideration is the narrative time of the stories–in terms of the time it took to think through and compose them, and the lifespan and relationships these stories reveal. The reflexive use of digital storytelling raises questions related to the inherent complexities of participatory knowledge production through media practice. These issues are discussed coupled with theoretical considerations from visual and cultural anthropology.