Contribution short abstract:

Using narrative interview methods, photography and film, my PhD project explores how people with multiple long-term health conditions morally navigate narrative experimentations. For this workshop, I would like to share text, images, and short clips (co-)created by and with participants.

Contribution long abstract:

For people living with complex, long-term illness, storytelling is a delicate endeavour: many chronic illnesses are rooted in traumatic pasts, then blamed on people through “lifestyle”-narratives, and finally framed as incurable, thus diminishing the possibility of imagining a hopeful future. Using narrative methods, photography, and film, I am exploring multiple ways in which people employ narrative to learn how to “live well” with chronic illness.

For this project, people with multiple health conditions participated in photography workshops where they told each other stories through the use of images. Based on these images, we are creating ‘hidden stories’ that we will enact through film. In the workshop, I will show a rough cut of four of these ‘hidden’ visual stories, along with some texts and still images. The aim is to create an exhibition or platform in which these modalities can speak to each other.

In the workshop, I would value feedback on how different modalities speak to one another, and how I can effectively juxtapose and combine the different forms of stories I am collecting to tell a story. Ideas and feedback on how to tie text, still images, and film together in an installation or digital storytelling format are very welcome. Additionally, I am very much just beginning to explore working with film, so any feedback on the visual ‘hidden stories’ in terms of editing, sound and narrative structure would also be very valuable.

Click this link to see some images emerging from this project: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1tH-pjkMreUxixrBCckt0FI4tiphb9_6m?usp=sharing