Search Results (40)

This article examines collaboratively produced poems by displaced Lebanese and Syrian women created within a Participatory Arts-Based Research (PABR) project in Akkar, North Lebanon. The study asks how creative writing pedagogy and participatory research methods can reduce forms of ‘othering’ that may arise in top-down research on conflict and displacement. The project combined creative writing workshop practice with participatory research methods, including joint analysis workshops with NGO partners and participants. Writing prompts, group workshops, and subsequent collaborative translation resulted in reflective and creative texts drawn from lived experience. The work documents war, migration, economic hardship, and fractured social relations. Close readings show how metaphor, dialogue, and narrative fragments function as acts of self-narration rather than passive testimony. Participants describe writing as a way of thinking and coping, and several texts foreground storytelling as a relational process. The study argues that Creative Writing practice, based on the participatory tenets of the ‘workshop’ can support shared knowledge production and ethical engagement. The writings suggest that a counter-archive can emerge in which storytelling can resist victimising narratives and can instead, within a social literary practice participatory paradigm, model new forms of collaborative reflection. Full article

This article brings visual thinking into the speculative fiction classroom, drawing on critical autism studies and on work on Indigenous futurism. It is the collaborative work of a neurotypical academic and an artist on the autism spectrum. Using one Canadian short story by a member of the Norway House Cree Nation, David A. Robertson, as a sample primary source, the project offers strategies for developing a multimodal classroom through assigning visual close readings as forms of literary criticism and critical thinking. This project aims to show the value of thinking in pictures as a respectful tool for both decolonization work in the classroom and for the encouragement of student creative work. Focused on a lesbian love story, the project presents critical love in the academy as queer and creative. Full article

Dementia care research has been largely shaped by Western biomedical and cognitive paradigms that privilege verbal, linear, and memory-dependent methods of data collection. While these approaches have generated valuable insights, they also reproduce epistemic and ethical limitations, particularly in cross-cultural contexts. Linguistic dominance, culturally mismatched diagnostic and care frameworks, and reliance on caregivers as proxy informants can marginalize culturally and linguistically diverse communities and risk pathologizing cultural difference as cognitive deficit. In response, this conceptual paper advances a participatory arts-based framework for cross-cultural dementia care research that centers multiple ways of knowing beyond language. Drawing on principles of co-creation, shared decision-making, reflexivity, power-sharing, and relational ethics, the framework positions people living with dementia as collaborators rather than subjects. It articulates five interrelated dimensions: (1) modes of expression (visual, embodied, sensory, and performative); (2) forms of participation (co-design, co-creation, and co-analysis); (3) cultural situatedness of meaning-making; (4) relational ethics, including ongoing assent, trust, and reciprocity; and (5) intersectionality across culture, gender, migration, class, and caregiving roles. The paper illustrates how participatory arts-based methods, such as photovoice, body mapping, collaborative art-making, and sensory storytelling, can enable culturally resonant engagement across stages of dementia while addressing power asymmetries inherent in conventional research designs. By foregrounding embodied, sensory, and culturally grounded forms of expression, this framework offers a critical reorientation of dementia care research toward more inclusive, ethical, and culturally responsive knowledge production in diverse care contexts. Full article

Scholars across disciplines are urging a rethinking of human–nature relationships beyond anthropocentrism, but these ideas remain difficult to convey to broader audiences and to implement in environmental management practices. This study analyses the design and performance of a serious game (used in 12 sessions with 99 participants in total) developed to encourage participants to reflect on modes of attention and relationships with non-humans in an everyday environment. The game draws on storytelling and art-based approaches to guide players through a thought experiment in which humans and non-humans can gradually communicate and coordinate. A series of game features have been designed to challenge players’ perception of ownership, stakeholders and agency beyond humans. In the sessions played, players initially competed against each other. The revelation, throughout the game, of non-humans’ presence in the landscape, and among the game’s characters themselves, led players to cooperate. Yet they mostly cooperated among human characters to address the needs of non-humans, but they rarely engaged directly with the non-human characters themselves through voluntary interactions. Engaging participants to act as, and interact with, non-humans through role-play allows questioning established interpretations and power dynamics in land or resource management. It offers an imaginative yet embodied experience for exploring what happens if non-humans are treated as active partners with whom we can directly communicate and coordinate to address environmental challenges. Full article

The ACE-funded project Clay and Augmented Reality (CAR) explored how the combination of tactile and digital media might activate embodied memory, foster art expression, and stimulate new forms of creative learning. The project investigated memory recollection by integrating clay sculpting with immersive Augmented Reality (AR), focusing on psychoanalysis and participatory art research. The created multisensory environment was a significant element in reconnection with early-life experiences. Six workshops engaged over 40 participants in memory-mapping through AR interfaces and tactile activities. Extensive theoretical and methodological research focuses on theories of Freud, Polanyi, Ettinger, and art practice of Hepworth, integrating embodied making with experimental technologies, including 3D scanning, ARvid/HoloLens experiences, and qualitative feedback analysis. The outcome is a hybrid repository of over 120 memory-informed artefacts titled My Mother and I, presented on the sketchfab platform. The collection showcases intergenerational memory, imprints of intangible and visual storytelling. During the research, the significance of slowness, play, and relational presence was underlined as conditions for memory activation. It concludes that memory lives in gesture, spatial perception and given care, and that hybrid arts-based methods offer new epistemologies of healing, creativity and pedagogical inquiry. CAR presents a model for participatory research that bridges physical and digital realms in deeply human ways. Full article

Background: Due to communication problems, people with primary progressive aphasia (PwPPA) are often affected in their self-image and experience a reduced quality of life (QoL). Biographic-narrative therapy is an effective approach to improve QoL in post-stroke aphasia. This study describes how PwPPA experienced their participation in the biographic-narrative intervention called Cope PPA. Methods: The intervention comprised a combination of five individual and seven group therapy sessions as well as the use of music and art therapy elements. Inclusion criteria were a capacity to give consent and sufficient visual/auditory abilities of PwPPA. Exclusion criteria were the presence of severe depression (MADRS > 35) or severe cognitive deficits (MMST < 10). After the therapy, PwPPA and their family members took part in half-hour semi-structured interviews. Interviews were analysed according to the reflexive thematic analysis by Braun and Clarke. Results: The qualitative analysis was based on a data set of 34 interviews. A total of six themes were identified: (1) Participation required adherence; (2) Materials were considered remarkable; (3) Storytelling was conducted in an aphasia-free area; (4) Group participation created a sense of belonging; (5) Experiences encouraged self-reflection and (6) Coping is lengthy and ongoing. Conclusions: The findings of our reflexive thematic analysis suggest that PwPPA experienced the intervention as meaningful. Some PwPPA described the effects of our intervention on their self-image. Others emphasised that coping with their condition was an ongoing process requiring continuous support. Full article

This article critically examines the growing interest in what most contemporary scholars consider still a new and underdeveloped mode of environmental storytelling in video games. Different models of games that provide strong narrative techniques within highly detailed, environmentally sophisticated land/soundscapes have been released over the last decade by well-known studios like Fullbright Productions, Giant Sparrow and Campo Santo. This new perspective will draw several critical questions formed from prior research in several foundational articles, the area of game studies and several journals directed at the question of how game spaces function as narrative devices. For example, an early 2016 article by John Barber for the Cogent Arts and Humanities, “Digital storytelling: New opportunities for humanities scholarship and pedagogy” was one of the first essays to explore how Fullbright’s well-known game Gone Home utilizes spatial design, object placement, and ambient details to convey stories without explicit narration. Gone Home, according to Barber and many others, continues to emphasize environmental storytelling as a form of semiotic communication—one where the “text” is the game world itself, inviting players to read and interpret more complex layers of literary meaning. Contemporary scholars have built on these more foundational studies to consider how AI and procedural generation further complicate narrative agency and structure in digital spaces, enabling the current study to consider what could be considered a distinctly post-AI theoretical perspective based upon these primary determinants: (a) how game environments may dynamically adapt narratives in response to player interaction and algorithmic input, and (b) the evolving notion of narrative agency in digital spaces where human and machine contributions intertwine in AI systems. The two chief aims of this proposal are thus to reconsider traditional environmental storytelling within new innovative, post-GenAI narrative frameworks and, looking at contemporary insights from leading examples in the field, deepen current academic understandings of narrative spaces in games from new narratological perspectives. Studies in this area seem uniquely valuable, given the rapid development of GenAI tools in creative content production and what appears to be a new epoch in narrative engagement in all interactive media. Full article

Spatial Augmented Reality (SAR) has evolved in the past fifteen years from a whimsical, projection-based approach to a socially nuanced medium of interpretative scholarship for culture, education, and storytelling. This paper presents a critical literature review on SAR systems and cases in arts and culture, based on 52 papers selected over the last decade. The perspective of the review is that of interaction design, which is concerned in general with the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services, and in particular with how the specific characteristics of a physical space, the interaction modality, and the narrative impact the design and efficacy of SAR in art and heritage contexts. This paper reports on the technology landscape, the physical contexts and scales of deployment, interaction modalities, audiences, and evaluation methods of SAR in arts and culture. Then, we present our reflections on the current state-of-the-art in terms of sketching out a historic trajectory of the field, SAR-oriented narrative design patterns, issues of inclusion and accessibility, and several design tensions, constraints, and recommendations for interaction design. Finally, we discuss potential further work in several dimensions of designing SAR for arts and culture, and we present a research agenda. Full article

This study examines how hand-drawn comics became a site of critical and creative resistance during fieldwork at Artist Village Aso 096k in rural Japan. The international artists in residence initially came to learn about the professional environment of the Japanese manga (comics) industry and to publish original works. However, the corporate-led system revealed barriers that constrained their early careers. In response, I employed Arts-Based Research (ABR) to invite the artists to create comics by hand, in contrast to the digital tools central to their daily workflow. This shift from digital to material practice foregrounded the affective and epistemological potentials of slowness, irrevocability, and embodied storytelling. The analog process functioned not only as an introspective tool for artists but also as a form of care that resisted the restrictive logic of Japan’s immigration policy. I argue that reflective drawing, as a situated and material practice, provides new ways of navigating social precarity. By centering comics as a research method, this study calls for renewed attention to the ethics and politics of artistic labor—particularly for international artists whose social and economic stability is increasingly threatened by xenophobic discourse. Full article

Urban heritage, when enhanced by digital technologies, can become a living laboratory. This study explores the Art Nouveau Path, a mobile augmented reality game implemented in Aveiro, Portugal, as part of the EduCITY Digital Teaching and Learning Ecosystem. Designed as a circular path of eight georeferenced points of interest, it integrates narrative cartography, multimodal media, and sustainability competences framed by GreenComp, the European Sustainability Framework. A DBR approach guided the study, combining four interconnected datasets: the game’s structured curriculum review by 3 subject specialists (T1-R), gameplay logs from 118 student groups (4248 responses), post-game reflections from 439 students (S2-POST), and in-field observations from 24 teachers (T2-OBS). Descriptive statistics and thematic coding were triangulated to examine attention to architectural details, the mediational role of AR, spatial trajectories, and reflections about sustainability. The results present overall accuracy (85.33%), with particularly strong performance on video items (93.64%), stable outcomes on AR tasks (85.52%), and lower accuracy in denser urban contexts. Qualitative data highlight AR as a catalyst for perceiving hidden features, collaboration, and connecting heritage with sustainability. The study concludes that location-based AR games can generate semantically enriched geoinformation. They also act as cartographic interfaces that embed narrative and competence-oriented learning into urban heritage contexts. Full article

Conflict-related sexual violence against men in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has profound psychological, emotional, relational, and spiritual consequences. Nevertheless, male survivors can achieve post-traumatic growth through processes that rebuild fractured identities, foster resilience, and cultivate renewed purpose. This article adopts a comparative framework by combining (a) original Canadian qualitative data—an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) study entitled “Silent No More: Surviving Male Rape,” conducted with survivors and trauma-informed practitioners—and (b) a phenomenologically informed synthesis of peer-reviewed studies, NGO/UN reports, and survivor testimonies from the DRC. The Canadian component focuses on the journey from victimhood to survivorship, demonstrating how breaking silence, being believed, and receiving compassionate, trauma-informed care foster meaning-making, resilience, and post-traumatic growth. The DRC component foregrounds culturally rooted pathways to recovery—especially communal and music-based practices—within conflict-affected settings. Across contexts, we identify convergent themes: beauty as a relational and embodied experience that regulates affect and restores safety; creative practices (music, visual arts, storytelling, ritual, and nature-based activity) as vehicles for dignity, connection, and purpose; and self-transcendent emotions (awe, gratitude, and wonder) that support the transition from threat to contemplation and agency. Divergences reflect cultural and structural conditions: in the DRC, healing often unfolds through community-embedded practices amid insecurity and stigma; whereas in Canada, clinical resources are more accessible, but masculine norms and isolation can impede disclosure. We argue that aesthetic and communal practices can complement clinical care and propose practice implications for arts-based, culturally grounded interventions, as well as a comparative research agenda. Full article

This study examines how Caribbean families visually represented resilience and emotional coping before and after the onset of COVID-19 pandemic. Using an arts-based research methodology, 25 English-speaking families created visual artworks depicting their strategies for managing stress across these two periods. Visual and thematic analyses identified four central themes of resilience: emotional expression, shifting family dynamics, wellness practices, and enduring cultural traditions. While spiritual and familial values remained foundational over time, the pandemic prompted new forms of emotional expression, as well as greater reliance on nature-based healing practices. These findings highlight resilience as a dynamic, relational, and culturally embedded process of creative adaptation. By integrating creative methodologies with family resilience theory and multisystemic resilience frameworks, this study advances understanding of non-verbal, culturally relevant forms of coping in underrepresented contexts. The use of visual storytelling further demonstrates its potential as both a methodological tool for capturing emotional complexity and a practical resource for fostering intergenerational dialogue and family well-being. Full article

This paper presents a qualitative case study on the design, implementation, and validation of the Art Nouveau Path, a mobile augmented reality game developed to foster sustainability competences through engagement with Aveiro’s Art Nouveau built heritage. Grounded in the GreenComp framework and developed through a Design-Based Research approach, the game integrates location-based interaction, narrative storytelling, and multimodal augmented reality and multimedia content to activate key competences such as systems thinking, futures literacy, and sustainability-oriented action. The game was validated with 33 in-service schoolteachers, both through a simulation-based training workshop and a curricular review of the game. A mixed-methods strategy was used, combining structured questionnaires, open-ended reflections, and curricular review. The findings revealed strong emotional and motivational engagement, interdisciplinary relevance, and alignment with formal education goals. Teachers emphasized the game’s capacity to connect local identity with global sustainability challenges through immersive and reflective experiences. Limitations pointed to the need for enhanced pedagogical scaffolding, clearer integration into STEAM subjects, and broader accessibility across technological contexts. This study demonstrates that these games, when grounded in competence-based frameworks and inclusive design, can meaningfully support multimodal, situated learning for sustainability and offer valuable contributions to pedagogical innovation in Education for Sustainable Development. Full article

In the recent K-12 educational literature, arts-based data visualization has been positioned as a compelling means of rendering data science and statistical learning accessible, motivating, and empowering for youth, as data users and producers. However, the only research to attend carefully to youth’s data-based, artistic storytelling practices has been limited in scope to specific storytelling mechanisms, like youth’s metaphor usage. Engaging in design-based research, we sought to understand the art and design decisions that youth make and the data-based arguments and stories that youth tell through their arts-based data visualizations. We drew upon embodied theory to acknowledge the holistic, synergistic, and situated nature of student learning and making. Corresponding with emerging accounts of youth arts-based data visualization practices, we saw regular evidence of art, storytelling, and personal subjectivities intertwining. Contributing to this literature, we found that these intersections surfaced in a number of domains, including youth’s pictorial symbolism, visual encoding strategies, and data decisions like manifold pictorial symbols arranged to support complex, multilayered, ambiguous narratives; qualitative data melding community and personal lived experience; and singular statements making persuasive appeals. This integration of art, story, agency, and embodiment often manifested in ways that seemed to jostle against traditional notions of and norms surrounding data science. Full article

Intersectional oppression and invisibility are primary drivers of cognitive and mental health disparities that affect Black women’s wellness. Older Black women additionally experience compounding effects of ageism, which may place them at increased risk for a decline in cognitive functioning and mental wellness. To date, limited strengths-based, culturally relevant programming has focused on aging Black women. Fewer have incorporated Black women elders into conversations on Black liberation and the transformational change needed to create possible futures rooted in equity, healing, and health. This manuscript describes the inception and development of Radical Imagination, a creative aging program for Black women in the San Francisco Bay Area. Over ten weeks, 42 Black women (M age = 73.6, SD = 6.20; range: 58–85 years old) participated in the program, which incorporated brain and mental health education, art-making, storytelling, and photography. Grounded in principles of Afrofuturism and radical healing, participants explored past narratives of Black women and created a collective vision for a future that centers on Black women’s needs. Approximately 54.8% of participants attended more than one workshop. Upon program completion, exit surveys indicated that participants reported a moderate level of hopefulness about their ability to shape the future. Respondents reported overall satisfaction with the workshop series. We conclude with reflections on our process and recommendations for ways to support aging Black women using Afrofuturism and the arts. Full article