The Art of Collaborative Storytelling: A Discussion on Arts-based Representations of Narrative Contexts

The call has been sounded asking social scientists to develop designs of
enquiry and dissemination which rest on processes of art rather than science
and to represent the subjects of biographic research with the complexity we
associate with literature and works of art more generally (Clough, 2004;
Denzin and Lincoln, 1994, 2002; Hollway and Jefferson, 2000; Sandelowski,
1991; Rorty, in Hiley et al., 1991). The emerging synthesis of the arts and
social sciences presents challenges to the methodological-philosophical
foundations of knowledge. At the very heart of this matter is knowledge
transfer. The need for innovation in dissemination of detailed descriptive
information has, until recently, been neglected in the social sciences. As
collage-makers, narrators of narrations, dream weavers - narrative researchers
are natural allies of the arts and humanities. Possibilities include, but are not
limited to, performance, film, video, audio, graphic arts, new media (CD ROM,
web-based production), poetry and so forth.
The format of my presentation at the Narrative & Memory Research Group
5th Annual Conference at the University of Huddersfield (April 2005) was
performative, collaborative and conversational. Through the use of three audiovisual
PowerPoint presentations, an attempt was made to revisit the arts and
humanities in search of lenses through which the intricacies of social science
data might be represented. At the conference, I explored examples of
(re)presentation from my own biographic narrative work and discussed the
potential of use of various media (studio recording, audio/visuals, etc.); I then
shared several examples of visual/arts-based production through the three short
narrative sequences described below (audio/visual links available on my
website: http://www.kipworld.net).