Stories Project Research Articles

Crowdsourcing Memories: Mixed Methods Research by Cultural Insiders-Epistemological Outsiders

This paper examines the role that the two lead authors’ personal connections played in the research methodology and data collection for the Partition Stories Project - a mixed methods approach to revisiting the much-studied historical trauma of the Partition of British India in 1947. The Project collected survivors’ oral histories, a data type that is a mainstay of qualitative research, and subjected their narrative data to statistical analysis to detect aggregated trends. In this paper, the authors discuss the process of straddling the dichotomies of insider/outsider and qualitative/quantitative, address the “myth of informed objectivity”, and the need for hybrid research structures with the intent to innovate in humanities projects such as this. In presenting key learnings from the project, this paper highlights the tensions that the authors faced between positivist and interpretivist methods of inquiry, between “insider” and “outsider” categories of positionality, and in the quantification of qualitative oral history data. The paper concludes with an illustrative example from one of the lead authors’ past research experiences to suggest that the tensions of this project are general in occurrence and global in applicability, beyond the specifics of the Partition case study explored here.

The neighborhood story project: Co-creating learning, caring, and empowering environments.

The study examines the Neighborhood Story Project, a facilitated three-month action research project that engages residents in community change. In particular, this paper identifies design and facilitation elements that facilitated participant growth within the project. This constructivist multi-case study examines three Neighborhood Story Projects, all located in Nashville, TN. The analysis draws on observational, focus group and interview data. Findings suggest that the intentional cocreation of a learning, caring, and empowering environment propelled member gains. The paper identifies specific design elements that fostered these conditions, suggesting a group-work practice model for intervening in gentrifying neighborhoods. This study contributes to theory and practice related to group-level interventions in neighborhoods undergoing rapid demographic changes. Findings can be leveraged to better understand processes and strategies for fostering place attachments, social ties, and civic action.

The neighborhood story project: a practice model for fostering place attachments, social ties, and collective action

The injustice of gentrification is often reduced to residential displacement and the loss of affordable housing. Yet, in addition to physical displacement of residents, gentrification also displaces community histories, social ties, and spaces of cultural gathering and civic action. The Neighborhood Story Project is a participatory action research intervention designed to engage residents of gentrifying neighborhoods in addressing more than the material effects of gentrification. This multi-case study of three Neighborhood Story Projects finds that participants experienced gains in (1) place knowledge and attachments, (2) social relationships, and (3) self and collective efficacy. Findings from this multi-case study suggest a broad practice model for group-level interventions to advance justice in gentrifying neighborhoods.

Reflections of stress in US abortion narratives

A trauma-informed, thematic analysis that identified stress-related themes evident in 39 personal abortion narratives from the Tennessee Stories Project in the United States is presented in this paper. Using the Braun and Clarke model of thematic analysis, guided by the trauma-informed social work framework, researchers examined these narratives to identify stress related themes. Findings An overall theme of stress and traumatic stress was found to be present throughout the abortion narratives. These themes were categorized into subthemes, including: (a) existing life stressors preceding the abortion experience, (b) stressors while trying to access abortion services, (c) stressors while obtaining abortion services, and (d) stressors arising after the procedure. Applications These results suggest that stress and traumatic stress were reflected in these abortion narratives throughout the abortion seeking experience. This finding supports the need for social work practice responses that are designed to address and eliminate stress during the process of seeking and obtaining an abortion in the United States. A trauma-informed framework is recommended for guiding social work education about abortion, social worker interactions with clients who are seeking abortions, and the development of abortion policy in the United States in order to better align the abortion seeking experience with the principles of trauma-informed care.

Secondary Multimodal Discourse of the Modern English Mass Culture as a Phenomenon of the Convergence Culture

The article focuses on psycholinguistic features of the secondary multimodal discourse of the modern English mass culture as a linguistic, social and cultural phenomenon and a specific type of communication with a peculiar context. This research paper represents the unique and valid definition of the secondary type discourse, its role, and place as the phenomenon of the convergence culture in the modern English youth subculture.
 Based on the differentiation of such related concepts as «youth subculture» and «interpretative community» the research proves that the latter concept is a structural element of a fan subculture. Both of these two concepts model the environment of the secondary textual spaces arranging. The focus of the paper concerns the creation of interpretative communities based on large-scale transmedia projects. The latter develop narration to transfer the world or the project story to the recipient from various perspectives and in different forms.
 Another concern of the study is that development and expansion project platforms can go far beyond technical means of information creation and transfer. Transmedia project can concentrate on the primary literary source, TV series, a computer game, and different related products thus anyway contributing to the representation of the whole story. Therefore, this psycholinguistic study focuses on a large-scale factual material the Marvel Universe with its elements represented on various platforms. In combination, these elements create a cohesive plot and a compositional space.
 Based on the sociolinguistic experiment results (questionnaires of totally 100 English native speakers), it is claimed that an integrative condition of the Marvel Universe transmedia storytelling is the independence of each separate platform. The main findings of this research cede on the statistical data, the results of online-questionnaires, and show that only 15% of the respondents are acquainted with the part of the Universe represented in comics. 80% of the respondents believe that movies are the starting point for the Universe entering and thus they are perceived as independent works. Only 5% of the respondents expressed their uncertainty about the priority of one or another platform.
 Another finding is that transmedia storytelling and participatory сulture are two key features of convergence culture. The recipients of such large-scale projects lose the status of passive consumers and within the interpretative communities, they become producers of a new media content. Thus, we identify the psycholinguistic mechanism of the modern English mass culture secondary textual spaces arranging through the dominant features of a new cultural paradigm, such as an active development of participatory culture, intertextuality, multimodality, and transmedia storytelling.
 In the social and discoursive space of the youth subculture, the recipients borrow any idea, image, plot or a character from the cult textual space, convert them into diverse media formats, and expand them across all available platforms. Thus, the recipients create the unified and inseparable secondary multimodal textual space.

Sculpting stories project: an action research with sociocultural animators for promoting digital storytelling within socioeducation paths

‘Sculpting stories’ is a national project funded by Law No. 383/2000 which allowed approval of experimental projects to meet important social emergencies and to facilitate the application of advanced methods of intervention for developing personal and social empowerment. Target group of project was children with sociocultural disadvantage in residential care facilities. The need of enhancing educational interventions for children under 18 years old is determined by the configuration of Italian welfare system that provides for the decreases of social protection measures for young people when they come of age. Theoretical assumption that has guided the action research was the relationship between self transformation processes due to the use of methods of sociocultural animation, education as a tool for change and identity construction and the new perspectives offered by technological evolution.

Pedagogical tasks for collaborative digital storytelling creation: Practical design and implementation

This article demonstrates a step by step into digital stories creation in a language classroom that teachers may adapt or adopt for their classroom purposes. At the outset, it will explore the nature of digital storytelling and empirical evidence of digital storytelling implementation across levels. Additionally, the article proposes ideas on how collaborative learning can be integrated in the making of digital storytelling. The design and implementation of pedagogical task emphasize on giving more opportunities for students to engage in the genre based collaborative digital stories project and foster their critical thinking and creativity. At the end of this article, alternative assessment is promoted to assess the learning process as well as the students’ project of digital storytelling. Providing students with scaffolded activities, I contend that every language teacher now can empower their learners to become digital storytellers.

‘We’re Getting so Far Away from the Land’: Disrupting the Traditional Rural Literacy Myth through Ohio Farm Stories

The Ohio Farm Stories (OFS) project began with a grant from the Ohio Humanities Council with a goal of collecting and showcasing narratives that focus on family farm life and the ways in which agriculture has and continues to shape lives and local Ohio communities. Integral to these narratives are ideas of how farming practices and values have evolved to meet societal demands in the 21st century. This article situates OFS research within Royster and Kirsch’s (2012) three-step inquiry framework, layered with a discussion of what is often understood as traditional rural literacy within the context of public memory. Two OFS video montages are included within the article, so that readers might listen ‘deeply, reflexively, and multisensibly’ (20) to the words and images of the project. These words and images evoke questions regarding myth, education, agriculture, and societal change. The article closes with a discussion of how the rhetoric of farming disrupts the rural literacy myth and positions farmers as powerful advocates in shaping the future as well as future understandings of where and how our nation’s food sources are grown and harvested.

Constructing Knowledge Together: Collaborating with and Understanding Young Adults with Autism

ABSTRACTMuseums’ social resources, along with their status as places of informal learning, make them well-suited to serve people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). As autistic young adults report high instances of social isolation and receive fewer services after high school, there is a clear need for more programing for this audience. In 2017, the San Diego Natural History Museum piloted SPECTRUM: Social Stories Project; the museum hosted 10 young adults with ASD who, in partnership, created pre-visit tools for other autistic museum visitors to Balboa Park. Supported with evaluation findings, including interviews with the young adults and museum professionals, and three naturalistic observations, we explore the reciprocal museum learning between program young adults with ASD and museum staff, who deepened their understanding of ASD because of social interaction in a museum setting.

“Doing Your Life”: Narrative Intervention with Young Mothers as Storytellers

The familiar story about young pregnant and parenting Latinas relies on commonsense logic about the timing of reproductive lives. We explore young mothers' own sense making, captured in local vernacular through participants' digital story depictions, our fieldnotes of digital storytelling workshop talk, and participants' follow-up interview reflections about enduring judgment and doing their lives. In this article, we introduce the Hear Our Stories project and present key digital stories and related ethnographic material that serve as local exemplars of “doing your life.” Findings reveal ways participants negotiate value making about their reproductive lives. As a narrative intervention, digital storytelling helps to gain a firmer grasp on social worlds and to better understand inequality, while also engaging participants in a process that affords them the opportunity to shift from being a judged teen mom to co-creators of knowledge and change as strategic storytellers.

Il digital storytelling nell’educazione dell’infanzia: la formazione degli insegnanti nel progetto STORIES

The key themes addressed by the Erasmus Plus STORIES project (2015-2018) are the promotion of media literacy practices in early childhood education and teachers’ professional development in media education. One of the main outcomes already achieved is a training course on digital storytelling in early childhood education. Dedicated to in-service preschool teachers, the course was provided in the four countries involved in the project: Italy, Finland, Germany and Turkey. The course was designed to address all the components foreseen in the TPACK model. The paper explores the training course structure, the key contents and the activities implemented.

Somerstown Stories and the benefits of using a design charette for community engagement

Somerstown Stories was a local heritage project supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, collaborating initially with Somers Park Primary School in Somerstown, within the City of Portsmouth. The aim of the project was to enable people to reconnect with their locality by exploring local history. In addition, the project explored the question: does knowing more about where you live change how you feel about living there? At the time of the project, the area of Somerstown was at the beginning of a process of phased redevelopment, so it was timely for local groups and organizations as a whole to look back at their history and the shaping of the area, in order to prepare to look forward and plan for the future. As part of the larger Somerstown Stories project, the University of Portsmouth School of Architecture was invited to coordinate a design charette for Year 9 students from the local Charter Academy School. This paper explores the nature of the charette, and its value in engaging different stakeholders. The paper is written using commentaries, conclusions and reflections from the key people involved with this project, including Canon Nick Ralph from the Diocese of Portsmouth; Sharon Court, Creative Practitioner and Project Manager for the Somerstown Stories project; Martin Andrews, Architect and Principal Lecturer at the University of Portsmouth School of Architecture; and Andrew Joyce, a University of Portsmouth student at the time of the design charette and now a registered architect working at ArchitecturePLB in Winchester.

O Projeto Ruas de Histórias Negras e a representação da matriz africana em Campinas: a disputa do território urbano – um estudo de caso

O artigo tem como objetivo apresentar um resumo do estudo de caso do Projeto Ruas de Histórias Negras, que buscou evidenciar, através do levantamento de alguns monumentos, praças e ruas que receberam nomes de personagens negros, a presença da matriz africana na cidade. Campinas, como a maioria das vilas consolidadas durante a colônia com grande número de escravizados, acabou por desenvolver estratégias para a manutenção da ordem contra revoltas e fugas de escravizados, que influenciaram e acarretaram um processo permanente de apagamento da percepção dessa presença da matriz africana no espaço urbano. Nos últimos anos tornou-se mais acirrado o processo de reterritorialização desse espaço com novas iniciativas, ações e a participação de coletivos ligados a essa matriz.

Fostered children make film about their lives with care leaver Kriss Akabusi

Provider National Youth Advocacy Service Name Digital Life Stories Summary Digital Life Stories project sees young people collaborate to create a video where children in care can share their experiences

Purposeful Tensions: Lessons Learned from Metaphors in Teacher Candidates' Digital Stories

ABSTRACTThis collective case study examines how two teacher candidates' digital story projects created in literacy methods courses made visible their negotiated and evolving visions of teaching and learning. The digital stories were created to show and describe their future literacy classrooms. Using metaphoric analysis, the researchers uncovered the implicit metaphors of teachers and students present in each of the teacher candidates' digital stories. Looking across these metaphors, tensions and alignments between how the teacher candidates envisioned the role of teacher and the role of student and how these relate to prominent models of education including Industrial and Inquiry models are apparent. Implications for practice include modifications made to literacy methods courses to support teacher candidates to begin the negotiation of their professional identities as they explore multiple experiences of teaching and learning. These modifications include: (a) prompting teacher candidates to see themselves as readers, writers, and inquirers; (b) modeling and experiencing inquiry in teacher education coursework; and (c) providing opportunities for teacher candidates to experience purposeful tensions within their teacher education classes.

Reconsidering Manifesta 10: Big Exhibition Project as Narrative

This article analyzes the exhibition project of Manifesta 10 (St. Petersburg, 2014) as a complex of narratives including media texts and artists’ myths and stories. Two main, mutually affecting themes of the Manifesta 10 narrative are defined as a dialog between classical and contemporary art and an idea of “total work of art” in the context of the theory of “Gesamtkunstwerk”. The basis of the theory was laid by R. Wagner, and it had later continued in contemporary cultural studies in relation to interactivity of contemporary art. Big exhibition projects transform the idea of “total work of art” into the concept of unity of different artistic elements (artistic methods, media, art spaces, mythologies, commentaries, critical texts) in the whole of the exhibition. The curator’s idea of dialog between classical art and contemporary artworks stresses the key role of the Hermitage in the project of Manifesta 10 and demonstrates benefits and disadvantages of an exhibition mega-project in a classical museum. The “big story” about the opposition of contemporary art and tradition consists of minor stories of particular projects in the exhibition. In this regard, the criteria of Manifesta 10’s critical reception and interpretation are considered.

Sharing Stories

The focus of this study is the role of health narratives play in mobilization when shared among community members experiencing exposure to air pollution from numerous sources of industrial pollution. Grounded in the practice of community-based participatory research, The Stories Project (as the collection of narratives has been colloquially named) highlights various aspects of both the process and outcome of community and academic partnerships. Drawing attention to the process illustrates the complexity of such relationships in the field, and how an understanding of these relationships is vital to successful engagement of community members in such studies. The process of storytelling became the tool for successful mobilization in this community. Narratives became strategies and vehicles for social justice. Throughout, the reflexivity of the researcher also informed the process. It is this complexity that serves as the primary focus of the study, for intertwined in a reflection of storytelling and empowerment is the role the researcher plays in such outcomes.

Unsettling Narratives: Overcoming Prejudices in the Hostel Stories Project

ABSTRACTIn 1988, Jock Collins boldly suggested that Australia’s earlier migrant arrivals, the subject of prejudice themselves, often become the perpetrators of prejudice. Indeed, as we collect oral histories from post-war migrants, we are regularly confronted with angry statements such as “asylum seekers are just let in and given everything”. What lies at the heart of this phenomenon? Clearly, prejudice and stereotyping exists in all societies but seems to be particularly evident in societies where an ongoing flow of migrants continues to change and alter the ethnic and racial mix. This article reflects upon research conducted in the Hostel Stories project, where we frequently were confronted with stereotyped, prejudicial, and even racist comments about other migrants and refugees during interviews with migrants. These statements made us ask whether Collins was correct in his observations. Drawing on the literature from various disciplines, we consider various influences on migrant attitudes towards other migrants. We propose that it is critical to continue to progress beyond the conventional topics explored in migration studies and ask difficult questions in order to contribute to a growing global discussion on ethnicity and intergroup relations, especially in relation to prejudice and racism.

Beer and Libraries? Challenging the Community’s View of the Public Library

When you think about beer, you might not think about your local library. You almost certainly are not going to think about the Aspen Institute’s 2014 report, Rising to the Challenge: Re-Envisioning Public Libraries. Nevertheless, these three things—beer, libraries, Rising to the Challenge—all came together in a digital collection created by Multnomah County Library called Portland Brew Stories. The Portland Brew Stories project was a community-focused effort to gather and share images and other primary documents that celebrate beer culture in Portland and Multnomah County. Planning began in 2014, the bulk of the project work took place in 2015, and the collection went live to the public in February 2016. This article provides a broad description of how the Portland Brew Stories collection was conceived and created, based on conversations with library staff who were involved and my own experiences with the project. Successes are identified and advice is presented for libraries who want to embark on a similar digital project within their community. Finally, the article reflects briefly on how this project embodies the ideas and strategies in Rising to the Challenge.

The not-so-barren ranges

This is an impressionistic and informal essay written near the end of a novelist’s Australia Research Council funded research project: ‘Developing narratives from language and stories indigenous to the south coast of Western Australia’, and informed by how that research project morphed into an emphasis on revitalization of Noongar language, and the attempt to restore connections between a particular Creation Story and landscape in an area regarded as ‘massacre territory’. A sympathetic reader might think of the topic as ‘The Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project meets The Barren Ranges’.