We invite you to join an online engagement event for practitioners and researchers whose work focuses on storytelling in health. We will bring together a diverse group with whom we can both share the aims and aspirations for the newly-established Narrative Practices Lab and better understand the key challenges, barriers and aspirations that you have in your work. This initial event, which we hope will be the first of several opportunities for us to come together and focus on specific issues that arise, will be led by our creative facilitators in the Institute for Medical Humanities. We will be recording themes and quotations from the plenary discussion in an anonymised and aggregated form to inform future research activities and we will also share this with all participants after the event.
The outline of the event will be as follows:
- 2.00 – 2.20pm – Introduction to the Narrative Practices Lab by Laura Mazzoli Smith.
- 2.20 – 2.30pm – Introduction to their Bridging and Curatorial Fellowships by Pip Hardy and Tony Sumner (Patient Voices).
- 2.30 – 3.20pm – Initial break-out groups to start to discuss the main questions for the session: what is the power of storytelling in health? What are your key challenges, barriers and aspirations with respect to storytelling in health?
- Break
- 3.30- 4.00pm – Further creatively facilitated exercises considering challenges of evidence and scale in particular
After the event we will share with the group the outcome of the afternoon and start to consider what follow-up activities this suggests.
About us
Laura Mazzoli Smith is co-lead of the Narrative Practices Lab, part of the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities at Durham University.
Pip Hardy is currently a Bridging Fellow and Tony is currently a Curatorial Fellow, also in the Narrative Practices Lab. They are the founders of Patient Voices and the editors of Cultivating Compassion: How digital storytelling is transforming healthcare (2018) and they have published a number of other articles and book chapters, including: ‘Humanizing Healthcare: A Conversation with Pip Hardy & Tony Sumner’, in Digital Storytelling: Story Work for Urgent Times, edited by Joe Lambert and Brooke Hessler (2020); ‘Digital Storytelling with Users and Survivors of the UK Mental Health System’, in Digital Storytelling: Form and Content, edited by Mark Dunford and Trisha Jenkins.
Please note: this is open to practitioners and researchers who engage in any method of storytelling in health/healthcare. This event will be recorded for us to create a document exploring the themes and anonymised/aggregated content of the session, but the recording itself will not be shared and will be deleted after this document is created. Signing up to this event will therefore mean signing up to the recorded session, although you are of course free to withdraw at any time in the run-up to the event or during it. We will keep you informed about how the contributions from this engagement session are used and we will contact you to ask you if you would like to be involved in future developments in relation to this event.
The deadline for registering is Thursday 29 February 2024. In the following week, we will contact you with details of a short pre-session activity.
Zoom details will be circulated in time closer to the event.
