Storytelling Space Research Articles

‘The Tower and the Quest’: A storytelling space for avatars

Abstract In this article, we discuss a project that was co-authored by a storyteller and a visual artist in the metaverse of Second Life in 2009. The aim of the project was to create a storytelling space that would be used by its visitors to create their own unique narratives, as well as their own original performances, all of which would take their trajectories by being immersed in a virtual architecture/landscape, through avatar costumes and a substantial library of dramatic poses and animations that were put at their disposal by the authors at the location of the event. The project wove together several concepts: these are Roy Ascott’s tenets of ‘distributed authorship’ and ‘participatory poesis’, which were brought together with a term that was coined by Axel Bruns to describe novel collaborative electronic forms of creative output in which the roles of the ‘user’ and the ‘producer’ have become merged, manifesting as a novel type of online behaviour that the author defines as ‘Produsage’. These primary concepts were substantiated by research that combined the fields of performance art, storytelling, memory arts and the usage of mnemonic devices, including the Renaissance notion of the ‘memory theatre’ with Cyberpsychology, particularly in relation to avatar studies.

Creating, viewing, and assessing: Fluid roles of the student self in digital storytelling

This paper presents findings of a mixed-methods study of students as creators and viewers of digital storytelling projects in the intermediate technology classroom (students ages 9-11) and two middle school libraries (students ages 11-13). The study was designed to investigate how the interactive, participatory roles of listeners in traditional library storytelling might be extended to the digital storytelling space. During the construction of digital storytelling projects, students fluidly and independently shifted roles from creator to "listener-viewer" and back again. These dual roles students assumed as creators and viewers in the formative, or work-in-progress, stage of digital storytelling afford opportunities for self-assessment, a key skill for school librarians to support and teach.

The Princess, the Witch, and the Fireside: Yanagi Miwa's Uncanny Restaging of Fairy Tales

The visual recasting of fairy tales by Yanagi Miwa (1967–) reverses, blends, and dissolves the binary oppositions well established in traditional European fairy tales, which are often typified by the opposition between the princess and the witch. Although her fairy-tale reimagining can be seen as a feminist reinterpretation of the Freudian uncanny ( unheimlich ), the same image may reveal itself as just another artifice that can constrict women’s lives and imaginations. Yanagi also dismantles the quintessential storytelling space of the fireside—a symbol of the homely and the familiar ( heimlich )—to which women and children have traditionally been confined in a patriarchal society.

The Classroom as a Storytelling Space Where the Exotic Meets and Greets the Domestic

Summary One of Poland's leading universities offers South African studies to Polish students of English. Here, Polish students learn about the South African reality first and foremost in cultural studies and Afrikaans-language acquisition classes. This is not as easy as it might seem at first glance. There are thousands of kilometres, in a literal and figurative sense, of almost completely unknown territory between Poland and South Africa. The distance, however, does not necessarily have to stand in the students' way to successfully and comprehensively study a subject many of them previously deemed to be essentially “exotic”. In order to assure a full understanding of a given culture, one should preferably immerse oneself in it, otherwise it will remain remote and exotic. This article illustrates how to, through experiential learning and teaching, practically bridge the gap between this “exoticism” and the “domestic”, well-known “Polishness” of the learners. This is done within the classroom that becomes the meeting point where two different countries and even more different cultures and languages meet.

The arts of the remix: ethnography and rap

In this paper I take note of 'the arts of the remix', in which techniques of producing hip-hop music with First Nations young people in Canada involved remixing both music and research practices. Through a school-based leisure programme called The Beat of Boyle Street, I taught Aboriginal young people to use computers and audio software to make, produce, and record their own hip-hop music. The programme's research component involved a bricolage of arts-based and performance ethnographic techniques and analyses. The shared music-making process opened space for storytelling, and the songs that were produced articulated many of the struggles and hopes of First Nations youth.