Storytelling

Participatory storytelling

By Marion Jay, Gonzalo Cortés Capano, Laura Kmoch and Tobias Plieninger.

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1. Marion Jay (biography)
2. Gonzalo Cortés Capano (biography)
3. Laura Kmoch (biography)
4. Tobias Plieninger (biography)

How can studies make use of the unique potential of participatory storytelling to explore the complex interrelations between people and places? How can researchers and local communities co-create rich, place-based narratives in dynamic and inclusive ways?

Participatory storytelling is a collaborative approach in which participants are co-creators of both their stories and the research results. As both a research method and a space for dialogue, participatory storytelling helps bridge knowledge and action while supporting more reflexive and transformative practices. By focusing on the lived experiences and voices of diverse actors, it reveals the values, emotions, and power dynamics that shape social-ecological systems.

Here we provide practical guidance for undertaking participatory storytelling. While our focus is on place-based narratives, the guidance is more widely applicable.

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Stories of self, us, and now: A tool for navigating uncertainty

By Gemma Jiang, Alexis Niki, Darius Melvin and Sarah Hind.

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1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Alexis Niki (biography)
3. Darius Melvin (biography)
4. Sarah Hind (biography)

In times of uncertainty, especially when the role of research, as well as research funding are under threat, how can research teams effectively respond? How can storytelling help?

We show how Marshall Ganz’s (2009) Stories of Self, Us, and Now framework can move groups from individual experiences of uncertainty (Self) to shared meaning (Us), and toward concrete action steps (Now).

Workshop Context

Leadership team members from a large transdisciplinary, cross-institutional research center, entering the fifth (final) year of their funding cycle, partnered with an external team science expert

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Four conditions for co-designing for First Nations leadership

By Jessica Wegener, Barry Williams, Jacqueline Gothe and Sarah Jane Jones.

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1. Jessica Wegener (biography)
2. Barry Williams (biography)
3. Jacqueline Gothe (biography)
4. Sarah Jane Jones (biography)

How can research effectively strengthen Indigenous leadership and incorporate respectful design to support Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination? 

We retrospectively reflected on our experience of working together in a project focused on land and fire management in a specific region in Australia, a project that involved Indigenous Cultural Fire Practitioners, Elders, and community members, as well as Local Aboriginal Land Councils, local councils and government agencies (Gothe et al., 2025). This reflexive analysis aimed to understand and share what we have learned as participants in this Indigenous project as a contribution to the complex work of ensuring meaningful ways to support Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and the use of co-design in Indigenous-led land-based projects situated in urban contexts.

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The SPIRAL of systems leadership

By Josep M. Coll.

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Josep M. Coll (biography)

How can systems leadership be structured in a way that facilitates clarity and organization in its implementation and use, especially given that it is a collective type of leadership that harnesses the power of collective intelligence for solving a complex or wicked problem, in order to enable system-level change?

The SPIRAL of systems leadership is a practical model aimed at framing, developing and facilitating the transformative power of systems leadership for conscious and impactful organizations and practitioners that work in the domain of systemic transformation, regeneration and sustainable development.

SPIRAL is a name mnemonic that helps in remembering the five principles and in organizing the five phases of the model: S for Systeming, P for Purposing, I for Inviting, R for Re-designing and AL for Adaptive Learning, which are shown in the figure below.

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Storytelling and systems change

An i2Insights story based on one originally told by Thea Snow, David Murikumthara, Teya Dusseldorp, Rachel Fyfe, Lila Wolff and Jane McCracken

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1. Thea Snow; 2. David Murikumthara; 3. Teya Dusseldorp; 4. Rachel Fyfe; 5. Lila Wolff; 6. Jane McCracken (biographies)

How is storytelling important in driving systems change? What does good storytelling look like? What makes it hard to tell stories about systems change work? We address these three questions.

But first, what do we mean by systems change? We use the definition developed by New Philanthropy Capital (Abercrombie et al. 2015): “Systems change aims to bring about lasting change by altering underlying structures and supporting mechanisms which make the system operate in a particular way. These can include policies, routines, relationships, resources, power structures and values.”

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Three narratives describing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary researchers

By Laura Norton, Giulia Sonetti and Mauro Sarrica

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1. Laura Norton (biography)
2. Giulia Sonetti (biography)
3. Mauro Sarrica (biography)

How do inter- and trans- disciplinary researchers talk about themselves? Do these narratives disrupt the status-quo and help integrate inter- and trans- disciplinarity into current academic institutions?

Below, we describe three narratives that can be applied to how inter- and trans- disciplinary researchers talk about themselves, namely as:

  • Heroes
  • Refugees in sanctuaries
  • Navigators of shifting borders.

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Advancing considerations of affect in interdisciplinary collaborations

By Mareike Smolka, Erik Fisher and Alexandra Hausstein

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1. Mareike Smolka (biography)
2. Erik Fisher (biography)
2. Alexandra Hausstein’s biography

Have you ever had a fleeting impression of seeing certainty disrupted, the impulse to laugh when your expectations were broken, or a startling sense of something being both familiar and foreign at the same time?

As social scientists engaged in collaborative studies with natural scientists and engineers, we have had these experiences repeatedly while doing research. Whenever we recognized that our social science paradigm was confronted with a different approach to knowing the world, unsettling experiences of difference emerged, which we later analyzed as moments of disconcertment.

In a comparative analysis of the affective substrates of interdisciplinary collaboration (Smolka et al., 2020), we found that attending to disconcertment facilitated collaborative knowledge production.

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Facilitating narratives for knowledge co-production: A knowledge broker’s role

By Faye Miller and Jess Melbourne-Thomas

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1. Faye Miller (biography)
2. Jess Melbourne-Thomas (biography)

How can knowledge brokers facilitate transdisciplinary knowledge co-production and mobilisation? How can a narrative approach contribute to the knowledge co-creation process?

A knowledge broker often sits between different stakeholders (researchers, end-users, policymakers) to facilitate knowledge co-creation and knowledge mobilisation. Their main role is to make evidence accessible, understandable and useful for knowledge users. As knowledge mobilisation is usually experienced by participants as a personal and social activity, a key starting point for facilitating knowledge co-production with different stakeholders is to develop a narrative approach.

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Providing a richer assessment of research influence and impact

By Gabriele Bammer

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Gabriele Bammer (biography)

How can we affirm, value and capitalise on the unique strengths that each individual brings to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research? In particular, how can we capture diversity across individuals, as well as the richness and distinctness of each individual’s influence and impact?

In the course of writing ten reflective narratives (nine single-authored and one co-authored), eleven of us stumbled on a technique that we think could have broader utility in assessing influence and impact, especially in research but also in education (Bammer et al., 2019).We wrote the reflective narratives for a special issue on Julie Thompson Klein’s academic work, in our case especially her impact in Australia and New Zealand. (A taste of Klein’s work can be found in her contributions to this i2Insights blog.)

The process of writing the reflective narratives was unstructured, with each of us writing as much or as little as we wished on whatever aspect of Klein’s work had resonated with us.

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A framework to evaluate the impacts of research on policy and practice

By Laura Meagher and David Edwards

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1. Laura Meagher (biography)
2. David Edwards (biography)

What is meant by impact generation and how can it be facilitated, captured and shared? How can researchers be empowered to think beyond ‘instrumental’ impact and identify other changes generated by their work? How can the cloud of complexity be dispersed so that numerous factors affecting development of impacts can be seen? How can a way be opened for researchers to step back and reflect critically on what happened and what could be improved in the future? How can research teams and stakeholders translate isolated examples of impact and causes of impact into narratives for both learning and dissemination?

We have developed a framework to evaluate research impact in a way that addresses these questions. It has been piloted on 12 case studies led by Forest Research, a government research agency in UK (Edwards and Meagher 2019) and is likely to be useful to researchers more generally, perhaps especially but not exclusively those in applied fields. To date the framework has been found to be user-friendly and fit for purpose.

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Using a cartoon video to achieve research impact

By Darren Gray, Yuesheng Li and Don McManus

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1. Darren Gray (biography)
2. Yuesheng Li (biography)
3. Don McManus (biography)

In the right circumstances, a cartoon video can be an effective way to communicate research information. But what’s involved in developing a cartoon video?

This blog post is based on our experience as a Chinese-Australian partnership in developing an educational cartoon video (The Magic Glasses, link at end of post) which aimed to prevent soil-transmitted helminths (parasitic worm) infections in Chinese schoolchildren. We believe that the principles we applied are more broadly applicable and share them here.

Developing the cartoon video involved three major steps: formative research, production, and pilot testing plus revision.

Formative research

The aim of the formative research is to better understand what you want to change, which in our case was a reduction in behaviours which put Chinese children at risk of being infected by soil-transmitted helminths.

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Designing scenarios to guide robust decisions

By Bonnie McBain

Bonnie McBain (biography)

What makes scenarios useful to decision makers in effectively planning for the future? Here I discuss three aspects of scenarios:

  • goals;
  • design; and,
  • use and defensibility.

Goals of scenarios

Since predicting the future is not possible, it’s important to know that scenarios are not predictions. Instead, scenarios stimulate thinking and conversations about possible futures.

Key goals and purposes of scenarios can be any of the following:

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