[ecrea] storytelling and justice

*The Tenth Annual George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling Symposium @ 
University of South Wales, for more info and booking please visit our 
website: 
*http://storytelling.research.southwales.ac.uk/news/en/2016/feb/08/DS10/
*
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*STORYTELLING AND JUSTICE*
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*13th - 14th May, 2016*
*ATriuM, University of Wales, Cardiff*
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*Abstracts*

*Keynotes *

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*Friday, 13^th May, 1.00pm - Dr Lina Dencik: *

*Title: From Surveillance Realism to Data Justice: Mapping the Snowden 
Story*

Abstract: The Snowden leaks, first published in June 2013, provided 
unprecedented insights into the workings of contemporary state-corporate 
digital surveillance. Rooted in the everyday communication 
infrastructures and platforms of ordinary citizens, the documents 
revealed the entrenched nature of surveillance into citizens’ lives and 
relations. However, almost three years on, what have been the social and 
political implications of the Snowden leaks? What has been the nature of 
public debate, policy outcomes, and types of resistance to the practices 
of mass surveillance? In this presentation I will discuss how mass 
surveillance has been enabled and advanced through policy and 
technological frameworks whilst being justified and normalized in media 
and public debate in the aftermath of the Snowden leaks. This has 
manifested itself in the knowledge, attitudes and imagination amongst 
ordinary people as well as those seeking to challenge and counter 
surveillance. I identify this condition as ‘surveillance realism’, a 
pervasive atmosphere that regulates and constrains thought and action in 
which it has become impossible to imagine a coherent alternative to the 
prevailing system. In such a context, I advance the framework of ‘data 
justice’ as a way to articulate surveillance in relation to economic and 
social justice rather than the limited techno-legal narratives that have 
dominated data debates post-Snowden. I argue that such a framework is 
needed in order to reassert the possibilities for another way of 
organizing society.

*Saturday, 14^th May, 10.15am – Dr Marta Minier*

*Title: **Whose Child Is It Anyway? Whose Story? Whose Justice? : Notes 
on the Drama of Custody Battles From the Judgement of Solomon to 
Contemporary Documentary Theatre*.

This talk will discuss the dramatic complexity and polyphony of stories 
centred on custody battles, from various versions of the child custody 
story in mythologies, and the biblical story of the judgement of Solomon 
in particular, to a contemporary dramatization of a child custody battle 
following the break up of a multi-ethnic British family. Different 
religions, hermeneutic traditions as well as schools of criticism throw 
somewhat different lights on the biblical story of wise Solomon and the 
two mothers fighting for a child. Still, much beyond its rich history of 
critical and creative reception across the centuries, the story’s strong 
resonance in an age when one might have two biological mothers thanks to 
developments in medical science is unmissable. Even more so than the 
only superficially straightforward case of the judgement of Solomon, 
custody stories of our day are polyphonic stories with several agents 
and several voices to be heard. How might converging and diverging 
stories such as those of Sudha Bhuchar’s characters in /My Name Is/ 
(2014) facilitate ‘doing justice’? Whose child is it anyway? Whose 
story? Whose justice?

**

*Sessions***

**

*Session One*

**

*Prue Thimbleby *

**

*Digital stories as part of a complaints process in the NHS*

A workshop with three case studies

She will show each story and present the reflections from the 
storyteller and from a member of NHS staff. Then open it to the audience 
to judge if the intervention (story telling) was successful and how it 
could have been better.

We record the stories so that the NHS can learn and improve – but is it 
working and how can we improve the process?

How can telling, recording and listening to the stories bring justice, 
resolution and improved practice?

*Carlotta Goulden*

*Digital Stories for Justice*

Why we should listen to prisoner stories? (workshop and presentation)

Carlotta will present the work of her latest project, Stretch Digital. 
This is a Lottery funded programme that takes digital storytelling into 
prisons and criminal justice settings via the charity STRETCH 
(www.stretch-charity.org) <http://www.stretch-charity.org)/>. Carlotta 
has been to prison herself and has employed ex-prisoners to be 
facilitators. (Fabian Spencer may attend https://vimeo.com/142049707). 
In this presentation we will present the case for using storytelling 
within criminal justice settings and different innovative applications 
of the practice. We will discuss how storytelling can be a tool in 
restorative justice and conflict resolution situations. We will also 
look at how we measure the social impact of the work. Using Stretch 
Digital as a model, we will look at ways of measuring the social return 
on investment (SORI) – what indicators can we track to measure the worth 
to the stakeholders; be it prisoners, prisons or the state? Can we 
viably make a case for storytelling in the rehabilitation of offenders? 
What is our rationale for these measurements?

Real moving stories of the unheard voices of prisoners will be presented 
along side case studies of the ‘storytellers journey’ – the theory of 
change – and how we measure the ‘good’ the storytelling process was.

*Session Two*

**

*Cath Heinemeyer*

*Young people’s voices in the policy process: must we tell our own stories?*

The experience of young people within the mental health system is 
increasingly being regarded as a resource to tap in the quest to improve 
services for them; ‘their voices must be heard’.

As Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in York were being 
recommissioned in 2015, an ‘appreciative enquiry’ was launched to obtain 
the views of, among others, young people themselves. As the first round 
of submissions was not considered ‘appreciative’ enough, I was asked to 
work with teenage inpatients to work through digital storytelling to 
obtain more detailed and considered input from them.  The process of 
developing the collective story was a departure from my usual practice, 
which took myth and folktale as its starting point, rather than 
explicitly dealing with young people’s personal experiences or illness. 
While ‘The Story of Rob(y/i)n’ generated an output which was genuinely 
valuable to the recommissioning process, it arguably fixed the young 
people’s identities as ‘patients’ rather than ‘artists’, encouraging 
them to use their personal stories as political capital.

This paper will address the use of the term ‘storytelling’ to frame 
young people’s contribution to public discourse within narrow 
parameters.  I will draw on James Thompson’s critique of applied 
theatre’s reliance on ‘trauma narratives’ and the ‘imperative to tell’; 
also on Nick Rowe’s discussion of the value of ‘opening up’ people’s 
stories.  I will contrast the ‘Robyn’ project with more open-ended 
projects I have led in the same setting, and argue for a more nuanced 
approach to allowing young people’s voices to be heard in the policy 
process.

*Prof. Ilona Biernacka-Ligięza*

*Students radio storytelling – the case of Poland***

Present-day media are all about motion and the visual culture, or it may 
just  feel this way. The culture of radio reception, called sometimes 
the fossilized medium, and modern sound reediting proves otherwise.

There are many genres of radio and we can distinguish between different 
channels, specializations or geographical orientation (local, sub-local, 
national, global). The peculiar type of local radio is a student radio. 
This type of radio is correlated narrowly with the University that 
created it. The target in this case is the youth population aged between 
19 and 24 years old (particular University students), the content of the 
transmission including news, storytelling, music department and so on, 
is in a large degree different from other local broadcasters.

This research used the case of: 1) “Radio Centrum” (University of Maria 
Skłodowska-Curie) from Lublin; 2) “Sygnały” (Opole University) from 
Opole; 3) “LUZ” (Wroclaw Polytechnic); 4) “Na Głos” (Jelenia Góra 
College). Above cases of different type of schools local radio stations 
have been chosen to show different forms of sound storytelling. Issues 
embraced among many other have been correlated to the topics of local 
music use, local information, students year organization and cultural 
use of the radio and the city (in reference). The main interest is 
connected to the art of storytelling, using sound as a medium. How, 
exactly, radio broadcasters are able to tell a story about surrounding 
word with sound only? Digital story telling in this aspect is an 
opportunity for specified group of people (students) to tell their own 
story concentrated on problems and creations directly from the mentioned 
group. It is a way to promote students culture in the media stream, it 
is a chance to fight for equality in the process of public 
participation. A medial voice for students: their own way to express 
themselves.

Schools chosen for analysis represent different profile of education: 
general academic studies and professional studies. Moreover regions of 
analysis were separated due to the urbanized level from highly urbanized 
(with advanced IT sector) to the rural one (based on agricultural market).

This analysis is important in the era of Radio 2.0 (greatly adopted and 
developed by the students’ radio), the distributions patterns, the 
awareness of the convergence problem and the social participation, due 
to high ration of recipient participation of discussed format.

The aim of our work seeks answers to questions such as the synergies 
between online and local radio, audience participation, and community 
affirmation in the terms of local radio use. The problem of 
interactivity of the audience is also included.

To present complexity of the matter this research paper is based on 
content analysis of mentioned broadcasters and sociological methods for 
example interviews and  survey for the recipients of analyzed formats.

*Hugh Griffiths*

**

*The Merthyr Migration Project*

**

Currently migration is a key voting issue for 46% of the UK public (and 
THE major issue for 25%). However it has been shown that the general 
public are not aware of facts about migration with 53% believing its 
costs outweigh its benefits. Merthyr Tydfil showed the highest 
percentage increase in Wales (+227%) of non-UK born population from 2001 
to 2011.

The Merthyr Migration Project is intended as a record of the positive 
effects that inbound migration from international Catholic communities 
have had, and continue to have on the culture of Merthyr Tydfil and 
seeks to challenge a number of recently emerging negative attitudes in 
the general public. The project explores social justice through digital 
storytelling (involving oral histories and participatory documentary), 
historical research, digital archiving and communication and cross 
generational approaches.

We focused on Catholic migration as Polish-born people now represent 
Wales' largest group of migrants and through history Spanish and Italian 
groups have also had a significant effect on the economic and cultural 
development of the area.

The project was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and young people-led 
involving fifty Year 7 pupils and ten Year 9 mentors from Bishop Hedley 
School, Merthyr (where 22% of pupils come from ethic minority 
backgrounds) as well as a number of community groups including Wales and 
Marches Catholic History Society, Communities First, The Merthyr 
Heritage Forum, Merthyr Library and St Mary's Church. Participants were 
trained in digital storytelling techniques so that they could document 
their changing attitudes during the project and record oral histories 
leading to a series of short films functioning as a platform for 
newly-settled peoples to tell their positive stories with a goal to 
rebalancing public opinion, as well as an historic record.

The final works will form part of an exhibition at Cyfartha Castle 
Museum & Art Gallery in June 2016 and through a range of digital 
platforms including the People's Collection, Wales. This presentation 
will give an overview of the project to date (organisation, examples of 
films produced, project themes etc.) and will then discuss several 
issues that arose (including participants responses to migration).

**

*Session Three*

**

*Colin Thomas*

**

*BLACKLISTED*

The story of film maker – and story teller – Paul Turner is one of 
injustice. A film editor at BBC Cardiff, he was repeatedly turned down 
for promotion to director. Only after investigative journalists from the 
/Observer /did some digging did it emerge that Paul Turner – and many 
others – had been secretly blacklisted by a MI5 representative working 
inside the BBC. By then Paul Turner had left the BBC and become a 
successful freelance director, eventually directing /Hedd Wyn,/ the only 
Welsh language film to be shortlisted for an Oscar.

The presentation includes a short video telling Paul Turner’s story, 
made with documentary students at Aberystwyth University. It includes 
interviews with senior BBC managers who admit that they went along with 
a system that they now acknowledge was unjust.

Paul Turner is now in the early stages of Alzheimer’s but it is possible 
that he might be able to attend.

*Amanda Esons*

*The Ripple Effects of Digital Storytelling***

For this 20 minute presentation I will apply Maire Dugan’s /Nested 
Theory of Conflict/ to exemplify how storytelling can fuel positive 
social change.  I will follow the stages of the process identifying the 
source of change and how it interacts on different structural levels. 
Within the Nested theory I apply the digital storytelling process 
beginning with Individual/Issue to Relationships then Sub-Systems and 
Systems.  In integrating the storytelling process with this model, we 
follow the story from individual to system.   This application sheds 
light on the interactions of systems and illustrates the potential that 
story has to expand from micro to macro in effecting social change.

Text Box: Application of Story Issue = individual/identity Relationship 
= workshop Sub-systems = community/organizations Systems = public 
realm/policy
Within the *issue* and *relationship* sections of the Nested Theory of 
Conflict I focus primarily on the lived experiences of the group of 
participants from the digital storytelling workshops I attended. As we 
move into the *sub-systems*, I look at organizational leadership and 
address how specific issues realized in stories are brought to the 
foreground.  On the *systems *level, we follow the story to the public 
realm.  I look at how an individual’s story has the potential to create 
change on the macro level not only by being viewed by those in power but 
also by shifting collective consciousness.  These reflections are based 
on my perceptions of how the group has benefited from their own 
experience of storytelling and how this experience influenced the 
journey of stories gathered from the participants.

*//*

*Nested issue as empowerment*

The model suggests that development of story and voice is where an 
individual may become empowered through the sharing of their personal 
experience. This healing begins to take place as the issue is liberated 
and placed in contextual framework. This personal healing is an 
important first step in moving toward social change.  Focus on 
individual positive transformation is necessary to interact with 
transformation on the macro levels.

*//*

*Nested relationship- empathy*

*//*

As everyone in the digital storytelling workshop is involved in the 
process of both sharing their story and listening to others as they 
share theirs, equality develops among the group and connections at a 
core human level appear to form.  Story circle moves the group towards 
elements of social change as a new understanding might alter the way 
that they view themselves, others in the group, and societal structures 
that influence the issues that arise from peoples personal experiences. 
This understanding can create a ripple effect as the stories do not 
leave the room at this point but the understanding and insight will be 
carried with the individual into their social interactions. The 
connections formed during this process support the group as they move 
into group leadership.

*//*

*Nested sub-system*

In working with the “Seven Steps of Digital Story” the group begins to 
transition from the micro to macro level. Participants are challenged to 
use concepts to think about the identity of the audience and what life 
the story will have after its completion

**

*Nested system*

*//*

The system level in this particular application of the nested theory 
represents a montage of the experiences, learning, and transformations 
that have taken place during the storytelling process through the series 
of workshops. This is where the created digital stories are shared with 
people outside of the immediate group and begin their journey towards an 
expansive, global audience.

**

*Professor Florence Ayisi*

*Looking at Ourselves: Audience Reception of /Sisters in Law/ in Cameroon*__

This presentation is based on a pilot film audience reception study 
using focus group research In an African context. It aims to presentthe 
findings of how a small group of audiences in Cameroon responded to, and 
engaged with a social documentary film, /Sisters in Law/ (Florence Ayisi 
& Kim Longinotto, 2005).Since its release in 2005, the film has received 
critical acclaim as evidenced by numerous prestigious awards 
includingthe *Social Justice Award for Documentary Film* at the Santa 
Barbara International Film Festival (USA).

This audience study is based on the view that cinema audiences are 
constituted in different ways based on cultural contexts and settings. 
The main focus is to posit African audiences as cultural readers of a 
transnational documentary film that reflects universal human-interest 
stories. The global reach of film raises questions about cross and 
intercultural constructions and interpretations of visual 
representations of universal human-interest stories that connect 
experiences and emphasise a local-global dialectic.The way audiences 
interpret and make sense of a film is as important as the film text 
itself in the processes of communicating meaning in film. What kinds of 
meanings and debates are generated when an audience actively engages 
with a film that reflects real issues? In particular, how do communities 
or people who have limited knowledge of, and access to education about 
their rights and matters of social justice respond to issues that 
reflect realities that they can relate to?

The results present a portrait of differing reactions, and 
interpretations based on the different socio-economic and ethnic 
backgrounds of respondents; perspectives that reveal and question the 
complexity of crime, punishment and matters of justice as perceived and 
understood by different audiences located in the same time-space.

The presentation examines these findings from a neo-pragmatic 
perspective, and the results ascertain a degree of “textual facticity 
rather than infinite elasticity or malleability,” (King, 1998). Since a 
film’s aesthetics is the first point of reference for spectators, this 
paper also encompasses close readings of the film within a 
cognitive-hermeneutical framework, considering notions of narrative 
structuring.

This study is situated within the wider context of what Mahoso (2000) 
calls a “valuable opportunity that allows the postcolonial ‘silent 
audiences’ to explore their own consciousness, their own memory, their 
own space”. In this context the conclusions will be expanded to a 
media-political sphere. I argue that Ideological State Apparatuses 
(Althusser, 1970) need to embrace more self-reflexive and pluralistic 
practices, whereby the representation of postcolonial subject positions 
becomes a conscious ideological discourse; audience agency in an African 
context intersects general questions of media democracy.

**

*Provocations*

**

*Provocation One:**Prof Robert Smith and Prof SimonBurnett*

Professors Rob Smith (UWS) and Simon Burnett (RGU) will present several 
interrelated aspects of their research work on UK police blogging. In 
their provocation, Rob and Simon will discuss how blogging has been used 
by UK police officers; the content of the blogs; and the potential and 
actual benefits of those blogs and their associated communities. Rob and 
Simon will also discuss the significance of storytelling within the blog 
content, and the tension created by the personal and organisation 
perspectives placed upon the blogs.

*Provocation Two: Dr Ananda Breed*

Dr Ananda Breed is Reader and Programme Leader of Drama, Applied Theatre 
& Performance at UEL. She is co-director of the Centre for Performing 
Arts Development (CPAD) research centre.

Ananda has worked both nationally and internationally as an applied 
performance practitioner and researcher, contributing to several 
important projects exploring the relationships between 
theatre/performance and conflict resolution.

She has facilitated workshops for the UN Special Session for Children, 
UN Third World Water Forum, and the NY City Hall Forum Theatre and Video 
Initiative, and conducted research in Rwanda, Congo, and Burundi 
regarding justice and reconciliation. Ananda served as lead facilitator, 
consultant and curriculum specialist for the Youth Theatre for Peace 
project located in Indonesia, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Currently, she 
is working on a project for conflict prevention with UNICEF in the Osh 
and Jalalabad regions of Kyrgyzstan.

Ananda has co-directed a participatory theatre project based on domestic 
violence in Rwanda that was funded by Coopération Technique Belge (CTB) 
in cooperation with the Ministry of Justice (MINIJUST) and toured 
nationally. She has trained theatre practitioners in participatory 
theatre methodology for Search for Common Ground in Bukavu and Kinshasa, 
Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Ananda was a project member of In Place of War, a three year AHRC funded 
project researching the use of theatre in conflict zones.

*Provocation Three: Christine McMahon*

**

/ “The goal of every storyteller consists of fostering in the child, 
whatever cost, compassion and humanness, this miraculous ability of man 
to be disturbed by another’s misfortune, to feel joy about another 
being’s happiness, to experience another’s fate as your own.”/(Korney 
Chukovsky)“

This talk considers the connections between restorative justice and 
storytelling and asks the question,

   ‘Do storytelling and restorative justice have the same goal of 
fostering compassion?’

Working both as a storyteller (with offenders and those at risk of 
offending) and a restorative justice practitioner and trainer the two 
subjects for me became intertwined.  Questions emerged about both the 
role of storytelling within the restorative justice process and the role 
of  justice within storytelling process.  How can storytellers tell 
stories to those who may not want them such as those in prison or those 
at risk of custody and help to foster compassion?

   The ability to tell our story in a way that expresses thoughts and 
feelings is essential to finding resolution with someone we have harmed 
or who has harmed us.  Yet those who most need this skill and the 
language to express themselves may not have had much access to stories 
or the development of the skills that story listening may have helped us 
to acquire.

Are the storytellers and their stories currently addressing this need 
and if not how can we ensure they do?

*Provocation Four: Phil Morris*

A group of theatre-gamers sit crammed inside a people-carrier parked on 
a rain-swept Newport backstreet. The driver assures us that we have 
arrived at a ‘safe place’. We tentatively enter the rear-entrance of an 
anonymous building where we are met by a dozen asylum-seekers and the 
strong whiff of beef stew. We have just concluded a 30-mile trip as 
participants in /Bordergame/ - staged by National Theatre Wales in late 
2014 - which won the inaugural Space Prize, receiving £20,000 for the 
development of innovation in the field of digital theatre.

For most of its duration, /Bordergame/ offered its audience a fugitive 
immersive theatre experience, putatively based on refugee journey 
narratives and involving actors playing shady people traffickers and 
aggressive police officers. The piece culminated in a staged, albeit 
unscripted encounter between audience members and actual asylum-seekers.

I reviewed /Bordergame /(as an editor of /Wales Arts Review/) and found 
its ludic fusion of online gaming aesthetics and immersive theatre all 
too often worked to trivialise the complex and politically sensitive 
nature of the escalating human tragedy it purported to address. The 
presentation of asylum seekers as a theatrical spectacle appeared to 
fatally compromise the ostensible progressive aims of the production.

The formal innovations of /Bordergame/ were a problematic means of 
exploring subject matter that demanded greater nuance, sensitivity and 
intellectual rigour. Which raises the question as to how theatre-makers 
should engage with refugee/diaspora communities in a creative process 
that sufficiently prioritises the ethics of developing dramatic work 
from the lived experiences of vulnerable people. The fates of individual 
asylum-seekers are frequently determined by the plausibility and power 
of their narratives - what ethical questions are posed by the 
appropriation of these personal and painful narratives by theatre-makers 
who stage them for public consumption?

This provocation invites a discussion as to how a less hierarchical 
intercultural exchange might affect a more meaningful and ethical 
dialogue between refugees and professional theatre-makers.


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