Making spaces: Multimedia storytelling as reflexive, creative praxis

Rice, C., LaMarre, A., Changfoot, N., & Douglas, P. (2018). Making spaces: Multimedia storytelling as reflexive, creative praxis. Qualitative Research in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2018.1442694

Abstract

In this article, we explore our experiences as researchers and participants in multimedia storytelling, an arts-informed method wherein we work with artists and aggrieved communities to speak back to dominant representations through film. In positioning ourselves as storytellers, we do research with rather than “on” or “for” participants, allowing us to connect in practical and affective ways as we co-create films. Drawing from dialogues about our workshop experiences, we outline four themes that make the storytelling space unique: reflexivity; structure and creativity; transitional space and reverberations; and fixing versus being/becoming with. We analyze our self-reflexive films on mind-body difference as “biomythographies,” as films that situate stories of ourselves in technological-temporal-spatial relations and that highlight how we make/experience change through creative research. Multimedia storytelling, we argue, allows us to enact reflexive creative praxis in a way that opens to difference rather than trying to fix it, forging an ethic we find all too rare in the neoliberal university.