Description
Storytelling, by way of recalling memories, cements identity to become an important source of legitimacy and belonging in displacement contexts. These fragments of memory are pieced together by multiple generations, creating non-linear stories, moulding official discourses with family histories to stimulate unspoken emotions. Drawing on nine months of ethnography, engaging mobile methods, and participatory film-making and creative workshops in northern Jordan, this paper illustrates how stories ‘make us feel in place in the world’ (Madouly and Nassar, 2021: 14).
It works through various forms of storytelling beyond linguistic articulations to include movement, art and emotion, showing that our methods and ways of learning must constantly adapt and be flexible to the dynamic worlds we research, acknowledging the potential troubles which arise when trying to represent others. As a methodological enquiry, this paper interrogates the ethics around participation while engaging creative space as an alternative to technocratic narratives populated by the international aid regime and academic space. Thinking with a storytelling method invites us to consider ‘how we re-tell the narrative we uncover, encounter, or retrieve’ (ibid: 21), to provide an ethical bridge between the communities we research and the academy (Tilley, 2017).
