Practices of Storytelling Spanning Durham

In October 2023, the Narrative Practices Lab (NPL) within the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities held its first event, "Narrative Practices Across Durham," at the Confluence Building. The workshop, organised and led by Dr. Emma Smith, brought together researchers from various disciplines to discuss the role of narrative methods in health, illness, and disability research.

The event was facilitated by Mary Robson and Bentley Crudgington from the Creative Facilitation Unit, and participants came from a diverse range of fields. These included those traditionally focused on the narrative articulation of experience, those working in community or educational settings with marginalized groups, and researchers who work with quantitative data.

The participants shared a common interest in the critical articulation of the possible uses and abuses of narrative, the need to attend to voices and experiences that may be disregarded as too complex, and a sense of the urgency of interdisciplinary methods. They also expressed a commitment to understanding subjectivity as a vital component in clinical and health outcomes.

The Lab was requested to offer more spaces and structures for meeting with those outside the same discipline who are working on health challenges through narrative methods. As a result, the first newsletter of the Lab will go out in January 2024, providing a space for continuing interdisciplinary conversations about narrative methods. This newsletter will serve as a platform for discussions both within and beyond the university.

Participants also expressed a need for mentoring around partnership working, nurturing productive collaborations, and interdisciplinarity. They requested spaces to workshop ideas for projects or grant proposals and support for making connections with stakeholders beyond the University.

Barriers to producing meaningful research on or with narrative were identified as time constraints, intolerance of complexity, and concern for mistranslation across sectors. The group, however, expressed confidence in doing justice to the distinctive expertise and knowledge brought by research participants and collaborators in interdisciplinary research.

The Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities has a new website, which can be found at [the Platform website here]. The purpose of the workshop was to develop an understanding of how the Lab can support Durham University researchers working on narratives or storytelling and health, illness, and disability.

The first newsletter of the Lab's initiative will mark a significant step towards fostering a vibrant interdisciplinary community at Durham University, engaging in meaningful conversations about narrative methods in health research.