Screen Seminars at Glasgow

Speaker: Dr Nicole Matthews, Maquarie University, Australia
Date/Time: 9 Oct 2013, 5-7pm
Venue: Room 408, Gilmorehill Centre, University of Glasgow
Title: The Afterlives of Digital Life Stories: Learning to Listen in Dementia Education

Over the past two decades, publicly available repositories of digital life stories have proliferated. A wide array of “ordinary peoples’ ” voices and images are now readily available online, collected by broadcasters, community organizations, advocacy groups, libraries, and museums. Increasingly, soliciting life stories from citizens has become a standard part of public participation and consultation on government policy.  Equally, in education, narrating your own life experience has been viewed as an innovative strategy to help students become reflective practitioners. If as O’Donnell, Lloyd and Dreher (2009) point out, voice rather than listening has dominated social and cultural theory in recent times, equally, there has been little scholarly attention to the process of listening to other peoples’ life stories. This paper will open up questions about the afterlives of mediated life stories.  How are digital stories circulated, deployed and framed?  Who listens to them and how?

Part of a larger project, also involving the research of Naomi Sunderland (Griffith University), exploring the way digital life narratives might inform policy making and professional practice, this paper explores a rare instance in which digital life stories as used resource for professional education.  In 2009, the Dementia Training Study Centre in South Australia collected a set of digital life stories by people with dementia and their carers.  As well as circulating 6000 copies of the DVD, the collection has been used for in-service professional education of medical, health professionals and aged care workers, as well as in training for undergraduate medical, nursing, psychology students.  Drawing on observation and interviews with trainers about their strategies for making these confronting life story narratives listenable, this paper begins to think through the ethical, methodological and political implications for research around listening.

Dr Nicole Matthews lectures in media and cultural studies at the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney. She is the author of Comic Politics: gender after the new right in Hollywood Cinema (Manchester, 2000) and co-editor, with Nickianne Moody, of Judging a Book by its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers and the Marketing of Fiction (Ashgate, 2007).  Her current research interests are at the intersection of media studies, disability studies and education.   Recent publications include articles on affect in inclusive art, design and media education, on Deaf young peoples’ use of participatory media, on historical formations of reading popular fiction and (with Catherine Simpson) on voice in Rolf De Heer’s Dance me to my Song.  She is currently, with Naomi Sunderland of Griffith University, writing a book entitled Moving Stories: Listening to Digital Life Stories.