CARA Events

Narrative and Storytelling in the Research Lifecycle. 
Jun 20 2023, 12-1pm EST. 

Once upon a time, a cohort of researchers, knowledge mobilizers, and science communicators asked: "What can twenty-first-century researchers learn from the millennia of storytellers? What if we assumed that funding adjudicators, journal reviewers, knowledge users, policymakers, and the general public are narrative-bound, meaning-making animals? How might narrative theory, as conceptualized and theorized across fiction, cinema, and drama, help us communicate knowledge more clearly and effectively across the academic research lifecycle?" As a starting point, we take a first principles approach to the exchange of ideas: communicating any knowledge – even the most quantitative ‘bench science’ data – ultimately involves communicating with other human beings. Investigators are often admonished to “tell the story” of their research but frequently provided little or no additional training in narrative theory, storyboarding or storytelling. In response, the purpose of our program of inquiry is to translate the principles and theories of storytelling, as deployed by creators like dramatists, novelists, and filmmakers, into usable concepts for research communication. Towards this end, our ongoing interdisciplinary synthesis spans narrative theory, neuroscience, psychology, ethnography, dramatics, literary criticism, and film studies. The result, in continual development, is a transdisciplinary amalgamation of concepts contextualized to varying junctures of communication in the research lifecycle. We aim to provide a helpful conceptual map for supporting the mobilization and translation of academic research through a better understanding of the nature and anatomy of stories. This hands-on workshop will unpack critical findings of our inquiry thus far, providing an applicable set of exercises for developing compelling narratives to further research impact and reach.

Primary learning objectives for this session: 1. Understand how and why narrative is entwined in all human interaction, including science communication 2. Apply fundamentals of narrative theory to construct an engaging story arch for a research project or program