Episoe 63: How Storytelling Affects the Social Science with Prof. Michael Wilson

2:29PM Dec 19, 2024

Speakers:

Dr. Ian Anson

Keywords:

UMBC-Loughborough partnership

storytelling academy

applied storytelling

interdisciplinary collaboration

digital storytelling

social science research

Fulbright Scholar

community engagement

intellectual humility

wicked problems

storytelling methodology

storytelling impact

storytelling in academia

storytelling projects

storytelling benefits

Ian, hello and welcome to retrieving the social sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science scholarship. I'm your host. Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science here at UMBC on today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting speakers and community partners about the social science research they've been performing in recent times, qualitative, quantitative, applied, empirical, normative, on retrieving the social sciences, we bring the best of UMBC social science community to you. What is a podcast, if not a kind of story. In each episode, we learn a little bit about the host, a little bit about the guests and a little bit about the reason for the podcast existence. In fact, from episode to episode, the podcast raison d'etre can often evolve meaning that the medium itself reflects the growth of a university, of a center, and of a person. So long term, listeners can enjoy a story that has a real arc, provided they keep on listening. Storytelling transcends medium as much as it transcends time. After all, it's one of the oldest and most fundamental human activities. But how can storytelling inform the way that we practice social science?

On today's episode, I'm delighted to hear a story that reveals this connection by speaking with Professor Mike Wilson from the storytelling Academy at Loughborough University. My guest is a professor of drama and director of the storytelling Academy. What's more, Professor Wilson serves as the academic host for UMBC own Dr Sarah Jewett, who is visiting Loughborough this year. And it's there that the story of UMBC connection to Loughborough University begins to deepen. You see, Dr Jewett is a Fulbright scholar, and just completed her Fulbright Scholar Award semester at loughborough's storytelling Academy in the fall of 2024 the formal partnership between Loughborough University and UMBC was signed in 2023 however, this inter institutional relationship has been cultivated since 2018 the study of storytelling across the two universities has been fostered by faculty, staff and students who have collaborated around storytelling practices, festivals and conferences over that entire time span. Going forward, this partnership will take on new forms of collaboration and teaching, research and creative practice. Let's listen in to hear a story that has all my favorite elements, personal connections, coffee and eating at the pub, and, of course, the social sciences. You today,

I'm really delighted to have the opportunity to welcome a transatlantic collaboration on retrieving the social sciences. Today, we're delighted to welcome Dr Michael Wilson, Professor Michael Wilson, to the podcast, and first of all, Professor Wilson, thank you so much for joining us all the way from Loughborough University, all the way on a very different time zone than when I'm recording right now in the afternoon. So we really appreciate you going the extra mile, so to speak, to be with us.

Oh, it's a pleasure, absolute pleasure,

wonderful. So the subject of today's recording, today's podcast is about storytelling. And obviously, I think our listeners, many of whom are not professional social scientists or scholars, are probably familiar with the idea of storytelling. I mean, after all, who hasn't sat around a campfire and made smores and marshmallows or listened to a beloved elder tell tall tales and be extravagant in the way they describe things, and so that would be a great conversation to just talk about storytelling in general. But Professor Wilson, you're here to tell us a story about storytelling with a more specific academic usage, and especially about a project called branching out. And so what do we mean when scholars talk about storytelling, and how does that influence what you're doing in branching out? So

that's a very good question, Ian, and the answer is a very broad one and a very long winded one. So I'll try and I'll try and keep it short, because in the research group that we have at Loughborough, which is a group called the storytelling Academy, our focus is particularly on what we call applied storytelling. And what we mean by applied storytelling is using storytelling as a sort of methodology, if you like, as a practice to be applied to some of the big challenges that we face in society today, and what we understand storytelling as is as a way. Way of of thinking as a way of knowing about the world. So it is a it's a knowledge system. It's a way of knowing in the same way that we have, you know, legal knowledge systems. We have academic knowledge systems, scientific knowledge systems, technical, technocratic, bureaucratic. We have all these different ways of knowing and storytelling is something that humans have evolved over millennia as a way of interrogating the world, understanding the world, building our identities, creating relationships with each other and with the environment, the places that we live so as human beings, we think through stories. Very often though academia, or certainly Western academia, has gone through a much more kind of scientific, rational approach to the generation of creation and sharing of knowledge and storytelling tends to get forgotten a little bit, and we're interested in using storytelling as not to replace other forms of knowing and thinking, but but to add that into the mix, because we think the other thing it can do is to bring voices into the conversation that are so often either unheard or even under heard in those conversations, and when we're talking about some of the challenges that we're facing, whether that's to do with health or the environment or whatever it may be, these great big challenges, very often the people who are at the rough end of that particular problem are the ones whose voices are not included in the conversations, and often because they are conducted within language from which they are excluded. And as academics, we are all we are so often guilty of that, of excluding people simply by the way that we talk about about things that talk about the knowledge. So we think that storytelling is a good way of of widening the discourse. And I think that's something that we need to do. So we look at applying storytelling as a way of thinking, of knowing, of discussing, of interrogating the world, with our collaborators, with our partners, and we're always working with partners as well. That's the other thing I should say, is we never work on our own. We are we are interdisciplinary to the core, and I'm not going to be with you this evening, stroke this afternoon, trying to pretend that storytelling is a magic bullet is going to solve everything, and it can't do on its own, but it's, it's a Swiss Army knife of a tool with many different functions, one that we have as human beings. And in collaboration with our our scientists, with our social scientists, with our our legal scholars, with our business scholars, with our engineers, whoever it may be, our policy people, we can actually try and make some progress. We always work in collaboration. As I said, that was a lot that would that was the short answer, much, much longer answer. And everyone will tell you, storytelling is different from their perspective. Of course, all I can do is talk from my own perspective and that of our research group.

Well, from my perspective as a social scientist, as somebody who has been trained and very deeply embedded in these certain norms of inquiry, I find this to be a fascinating rejoinder, especially to some of the other folks that we've had on this program before. I think these kinds of conversations are evolving in the social sciences as well, in part because, as you're saying, right? These are wicked problems. I think that, you know, as a political scientist myself, right? I think that that's, you know, it goes without saying that there are wicked problems for us to try to solve. And so it's really an kind of all hands on deck, you know, find every possible approach that might help this situation that really resonates with me. I think it would resonate with a lot of the other folks that we've recently had on and so I also want to think about how you got to this position where you're able to bring this particular arsenal to bear on these wicked problems. Tell me a bit about your background and your path towards this storytelling process in your own career?

Well, it's an interesting it's an interesting journey. I think, well, well, I think it's an interesting journey. I hope you do too. But my background is in theater. That's my discipline, is drama theater, and I worked before I became an academic, I was working in community theater as a as an actor, as a director, as a as a writer, as an animator, and I found myself working. With some musicians. They were traditional musicians, folk musicians, and we used to do projects together. I was the theater guy. They were the music people. And we'd be working, say, in a community, in a village, somewhere or wherever it might be. And at the end of a day's work, we would always retire to the pub. That's that's what happens. And we would be in the pub, and we'd get talking to people, people from the community in which we were working, and what my musician friends did, before long, their instrument cases would get unlocked, and the instruments would come out, and before we knew what was happening. There was songs being sung, music being played, and there was a big music session going on in the pub. And I very much enjoyed that, but found it very frustrating as an actor, because I couldn't do that, because I didn't have my other actor friends with me, or I didn't have my costume with me, or my props, or a stage and all those kinds of things. And I asked myself the question, how do I as an actor respond to an audience in the way that those musicians can? And it came down to me to two things. One was not taking any more space than your body occupy sat in a chair. And the second thing was being able to work from repertoire. And that led me to because the long story short, that led me to start looking at storytelling as a way to solve a problem about acting for me. And of course, as soon as I started looking at storytelling, then I suddenly realized just how big this thing was. So I came to storytelling as a performer, and I brought a performance sensibility to my understanding of storytelling. And as I started working as a storyteller and working in schools, I found myself working with teenagers in what we what we call secondary school. So this is the sort of 12 to 16 year old age group, and schools would hire me to come in and work with their students on storytelling. And at the end of every session, suddenly all these kids would come up to me and say, Oh, that's I've got a story like that. I got, let me tell you a story. And I suddenly realized that, contrary to what people were telling me, that teenagers weren't interested in stories. All they wanted to do was play on their video games or whatever. Yeah, I suppose it was early video game days. Then they had stories to tell, and they told each other these stories, so that then, when I realized that they had this very rich tradition, oral tradition of their own of stories, that then was the basis of my PhD, and I then decided, oh, I need to go back to university and and that led one thing to another, and then before I knew it, I got a PhD, and I was starting working in universities, and I met other people who were interested in storytelling. And at the university, I was that that we set up a storytelling center, and as soon as I did that, I found that other people I'd never spoken to, people who were, say, in computer science, I found that they were interested in stories. They said, Oh, I do storytelling. I said, really? And I here, was I as a theater? I thought, I own story. I thought, you know me, Amy, this was ours. And suddenly I found that that computer scientists and social scientists, they all thought they did storytelling too, and it was theirs. And I suddenly started having conversations through storytelling that I'd never thought I'd have before, with colleagues who I'd previously thought were a bit weird, you know, because they studied different things. They were interested in different things than I was. But when we talked, we found, actually, we were all interested in the same things. We just came at it from a different direction and with a different set of tools in our tool bag. But we were all interested in trying to make things a bit better, you know, and trying to solve some of the problems. So it just grew from there. And I then got invited to be involved in projects, again, things that I never thought I'd be in. I'd be involved with. I thought, why am I spending my time at conferences, talking to people who know the same sort of useless stuff that I know when there are people over here who know different stuff. And that's much more interesting for me as an academic, to be able to talk to an engineer who knows stuff I haven't a clue about and find our way to work together. Together towards trying to solve these sort of these problems. And having had a background in applied theater, finding ways of applying storytelling to social contexts was not that difficult, but it still was a bit of a leap from what I'd been doing before. And one thing led to another, and we suddenly met, started meeting people who were playing with stories and technology and developing this thing that became known as digital storytelling. That's what's interesting. Oh, technology, yeah, that's that's a new thing to me. This is 20 odd years ago now, but suddenly the world starts opening up when you're prepared to have conversations with people you didn't think you had anything in common with. So now I think we are in a situation. I kind of feel as I've achieved an ambition here, and when I I said, one of these days, we are going to be over every corner of this campus like a rash, you know, it will be everywhere. And indeed, we are now. I think everyone now is talking about storytelling, not not, I don't like claim any credit for that particularly, but things have changed, and storytelling is everywhere, everywhere in the university now, and it's that's a really big change I've seen over the past 25 years. So

I was poised to ask you about some of the big impacts of a program, like reaching out, but it seems like what I really want to ask you now is more about some of the details of these specific collaborations. Maybe if you have some examples of times when you've collaborated with folks across the disciplines and that's led to them changing their practices in some meaningful way, do you have any examples you could bring in? Well,

yeah, I mean, there's plenty of examples. I think probably, I always think one of the things that you know you've got somewhere when you start hearing your arguments repeated back to you. And I remember one one bid project that we were doing about 10 years ago now, and it was a big project about about drought and water scarcity. Now, again, this is not my realm. I am not a drought scientist. I'm not an environmental scientist. I'm, you know, this is not my area. But we collaborated with a group of people. They were geographers. There were sociologists, there were psychologists involved, and there were agricultural scientists as well. And I remember, oh, hydrology, we had a lot of hydrologists involved in it, of course. And I remember there was a very nice guy who was an agricultural scientist. He he was a lecturer. He taught at an agricultural university. We have a few of those in the UK, so a university that specializes in teaching agricultural sciences to farmers, essentially. And he had a small holder. He was a kind of a farmer himself. And he was, I could tell from the get go, he was a little bit skeptical about this, this storytelling stuff, really. He wasn't really quite sure why we were doing it, but he went along with it. And I remember one, one day we had, we had a public meeting, and we had some stakeholders from the community that were working in the area we were working in, and we were explaining what we were doing and showing examples and having a discussion. And there was one guy who I think must have got out of bed the wrong side that morning, and he was, it was in it wasn't in a very good mood, and everything. Everybody said. He was always against it. He was always trying to pick a hole in it. That's okay. That happens in these, these public meetings. And at one point he decided he was then going to have a go at storytelling and why we were wasting our time doing storytelling when we could be be doing something else. I'm not sure. Whatever it was he he had that he wanted doing, and I was just about to respond in a very sort of kind gentle understanding way. And and this guy, this this farmer stood up and interrupted me and gave the most robust defense, far better than I could have done. And this was someone who'd been previously seemed rather skeptical, but he'd actually all the time been been listening and thinking about about storytelling, and had taken on board some of the things. That we'd said and argued and showed for and and had formulated his own very staunch defense of why storytelling was absolutely crucial and central to this whole, this whole project and things like that sort of making, oh, right, okay, yeah, yeah, we're getting we're getting somewhere people, and they probably think the same for me, you know, I suddenly, you know, I might start with a project feeling very, very skeptical about why we're going around measuring all these things all the time, you know. And but, you know, I hope, I hope that I learn from them as much as they learn from us as well. But it's a journey. I mean, as you kind of suggested, you know, there's always an assumption, I think, because you are a researcher at a university and you have letters after your name, or letters in front of your name, or what letters wherever they happen to be, that that you must you must know stuff. You must know exactly what you're doing. And, of course, we don't really know what we're doing. That's what that's what makes it interesting. You know, that's what drives us. It's not that we know stuff, it's that we don't know stuff. It's the curiosity about that. So we're kind of feeling our way with this, with this work all the time, and and storytelling, for me is, is a kind of a journey, and it's not one we're at the end at we're probably not well, we may, we're at the the end of the beginning, but we're certainly no further than that. And it will carry on long after, you know, I'm, you know, got my got my pipe and slippers out, you know, the other people will, will take that on. So we're constantly trying to trying things out, constantly learning about storytelling. So I I don't claim expertise. All I claim is curiosity.

That really resonates with me as I've been thinking a lot about intellectual humility and about some of the claims that we make as social scientists. This is a kind of a topic that I think is very current, especially given, you know, just sort of social changes in our political climate. And, yeah, you know, I also think about just how easily convinced I am by the utility of this stuff based on how you've described the ARC of this particular story. And I wanted to ask you as well, you know, if I wanted to get involved in telling stories in this particular way, how would I start?

Well, I mean, you're very fortunate that you've got lots of colleagues around you who who know all about this. So there are people that you know that UMBC to talk talk to and and they'd be able to give you excellent advice. But the thing I always say to people when they say, How do I get started in storytelling? That is that, well, you're already started in storytelling. I mean, you you wouldn't have got to where you are today without being a good storyteller, because being an effective storyteller is kind of basic, basic skills and social functions. You know, we, you know, we have to be good storytellers in order to be effective human beings, and most of us, well, all of us have been telling stories since probably even before we had language, so we're very well practiced in this. So when we're asking people to contribute stories, we're not asking them to do anything that they're not already really, really good at, an expert, even if they don't realize how, how strong their facility is storytelling, we know that, that, you know they're very able at it. So you've already got a great platform to do it. The the, I suppose all you need is the opportunity to to engage in in projects and to come up with ideas and and that is done through literacy talking to people. I have to say that I spend probably far too I have to be careful how I say this and hope that the university isn't necessarily listening, but I spend far too much time drinking coffee with people and having meals with people. And, you know, I've always felt that in order to build our research group, we always needed to make sure we had good coffee available, you know, because that's when people come and come and see you, and they come and have the conversations and a lot of the work that we do now, well, I would say probably, perhaps, 70% of the projects that we do don't start with us anymore. They start with other people and their ideas, and they're thinking, we. Really need some storytelling in this. And they come to us and say, look, we've got this project. We've got this idea might be something you're interested in. What about? And they'll come up with some something that is something I've never I've never even contemplated before. And I always say, yes. I say, yeah, yeah, we'll get you even if I have no idea what it is they're talking about, or no idea about what we're going to do, I'll always say yes, because if you don't say yes, you're never going to surprise yourself, you're never going to find anything new if you only say yes to the things you understand and you're familiar with. So there's always that little bit of risk taking, but largely it's so it's served as well. And you know, the opportunities then that then grow, and you, of course, then get known as the person who always says yes, so, and that's a good position to be in.

It's also a good reason to always be highly caffeinated. Of course it is, yeah, yes, as I'm well known, to be that sort of person on my campus. So, but speaking of UMBC, I also wanted to just briefly ask you about the storytelling Academy and about this partnership with UMBC that is that is getting launched,

yeah, and it's, well, it's built on a on a collaboration that's been going on for a little while now. So I think it probably started back in 2016 17, something like that, originally, when my colleague at the time, and Antonio Liguori won some funding to go and spend some time or her three months little fellowship at the Smithsonian and was based in DC for for three months, during which time she met colleagues from UMBC and Montgomery College and some of the other institutions around and was very much promoting digital storytelling and finding connections with like minded souls across those those organizations. Then I think it was in oh gosh, 2018 we were at the International digital storytelling Conference, which that year was in zakintos, the island off the southwest coast of Greece, and some of the UMBC colleagues were there at at sakin thoughts, particularly I remember Bill shrewbridge was there, and before we knew, I'm not sure how it happened, but at some point we had, before the conference ended, we had agreed that between us, we would host the next two digital storytelling conferences that Love Brewer would host in 2020 and UMBC in 2022, at the time that was and, but we would make it a partnership in that. We would, we would host them, sort of kind of kind of together in collaboration, where we take the lead on the first and have it in Loughborough, and UMBC would get involved in leading the second and we'd all come over to DC and Maryland for that. Then, of course, COVID happened, and we had lockdown, I think about a month before we were about to have the conference, lockdown happened. And of course, we all stopped, and we thought, what we're going What are we going to do? So we had a little collaboration that we call the digital Decameron. So this was taking the idea of Bucha chose Decameron, where a group of people go away from the plague and they isolate themselves and spend time telling stories. We thought we'd do that digitally. So we had a little collection of 100 digital stories that were hosted on the buy bill at UMBC website, and we postponed the conference until the next year, till 2021, and then COVID continued, and we found we couldn't have it in 2021 so we had another collaboration, where we did an online conference. We did 24 hour conference, Chasing the Sun. So we went for 24 hours starting, I think that started probably in in Australia, and working our way as the sun went, different people from different parts, different time zones, joined the conference and presented, but it ran for a full 24 hours, and that was a huge lot a lot of fun and completely exhausting and a completely bonkers thing to do, but we very much enjoyed it. And then finally, in 20. 22 we got to do the, do the actual conference, the face to face conference. So everybody came to Loughborough, and we hosted everybody in Loughborough in 2022 and that was absolutely fabulous. And we had a great time. And at the end of it, we all caught COVID. That was the other thing. It was the first event since the pandemic, and it became a bit of a super spreader event. But there you go. We had a great time. And then a couple of years later, of course, we then all went off to to UMBC, well, to Maryland, Baltimore, and had a fabulous time at the conference. At the conference there as well. Sorry, the 2023 that was. And then this year we were back in second thoughts for the first festival of digital storytelling. So we've already been doing things over the past number of years, and we decided we wanted to start a more formal collaboration. So we we did the usual thing, and signed, sign the paperwork. And then, of course, part of that was Sarah applying for Fulbright Scholarship, which was successful, and now we're able to host Sarah for three months as our Fulbright Scholar visiting scholar, and that has enabled us to actually really put some some legs on this. So it as you know, we were saying earlier, it's not just an agreement on paper, you know? I mean, like most universities, I'm sure UMBC is the same, we've got draws full of these agreements that that that we're all signed with good intentions, but never, somehow, never, get off the ground. And this has enabled us to actually think much more ambitiously and to get that things off the ground. So we've got all kinds of, all kinds of discussions about some of the things we can do together and and so well. And we're really quite positive that this is going to be quite an extensive collaboration in the years to come.

Professor Mike Wilson, thank you again, so much for coming on today's show. I think we'll probably be hearing a lot more about these collaborations in the months and years to come and hopefully on this very program. So again, thank you so much. I learned a lot about storytelling, and I'm sure that our listeners did as well. Great.

Thanks very much. It's been great fun. Thank you.

That's all for today's episode of retrieving the social sciences, I hope that we can take what we've learned today about storytelling and think about all the narratives we might be able to unfurl if we continue to keep questioning. Retrieving the social sciences is a production of the UMBC Center for Social Science scholarship. Our acting director is Dr Eric stoken, and our undergraduate production assistant is Gene Kim. Our theme music was composed and recorded by Dewan Moreland of the UMBC class of 2024 find out more about CS three at Social science.umbc.edu and make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, where you can find full video recordings of recent CS three sponsored events until next time keep questioning you.