Current Projects
Projects that are currently being supported by the Center for Engaged Storycraft are listed here with tags indicating which of the center’s ongoing research themes they pursue.
Sculptures in the Air Project
“Sculptures in the Air” is a project supported by a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The grant program is made possible by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Fantastic Folktales from The Ghanaian Savannah - ebook and online intermedia archive project
Growing out of several workshops and exchanges with Dr. Helen Atawube Yitah, Professor of English and Dean of the School of Languages, University of Ghana, Accra, this project explores the potential of digital technologies to enhance understanding of oral, written, and multimedia storytelling practices generated at distinct cultural sites around the world.
Transnational Digital Creation Workshop with l’Université de Paris 8
Annually, since the fall semester of 2020, this Transnational Digital Creation Workshop, bringing together small teams of RIT graduate and advanced undergraduate students and graduate students at l’Université de Paris 8, has allowed students to develop creative digital installations of their own design.
Women & Power
In partnership with the pathbreaking Berkeley-based StoryCenter and the California State Library, in 2019 the Center for Engaged Storycraft faculty organized a a series of gatherings at which stories relevant to women and power were generated and shared as short video narratives. Exploring the dynamics of spaces, spatial-relations, power, listening, and sharing stories, CES co-organized gatherings at multiple locations with select groups of storytellers to share stories from a range of scholars, activists, artists, scientists, students, and community partners.
Parking (Lots of Love) Art Installation
Sometimes a parking lot is more than a parking lot. It’s history. It’s life. It’s love. Its story just needs to be excavated. Such is the case at the 297 Alexander Street parking lot downtown, the site of the first house inhabited by Anna and Frederick Douglass in 1848 when they moved to Rochester with their 4 kids. A fifth would be born the following year. The Douglass family welcomed freedom seekers into their home there, a stop on the Underground Railroad. Today this remarkable piece of history has fallen victim to the 1954 blades of bulldozers and urban renewal.
Annual Documentary Film Series
The annual documentary film series, CES started in spring semester 2019. We continue to organize annual documentary film screenings, after a brief hiatus due to the pandemic restrictions on large gatherings.
If you are an RIT faculty member or student organization, please feel free to propose a documentary film for screening in 2022-2023 by emailing this suggestion to lxsgla@rit.edu or ces@rit.edu.
Edited collection on Women in Mechanical Engineering: Energy and Environment
Co-edited by Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) faculty Margaret Bailey, Ph.D., P.E., Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Laura Shackelford, Ph.D., Professor of English, Women in Mechanical Engineering: Energy and the Environment combines cutting-edge research and first-person narratives. This edited gathers new visions, transformational work, and address pressing challenges in the areas of energy and the environment in Mechanical Engineering.
Story-driven Learning in Engineering and STEM Classrooms
Have you ever wondered how story might provide impactful ways to engage students in STEM learning? This project, led by Clark Hochgraf, Associate Professor of Electrical, Computer, and Telecommunications Engineering Technology, Jeanne Christman, Associate Professor of Engineering Technology, and Laura Shackelford, Professor of English at RIT, focuses on developing workshops, classroom modules, and faculty development opportunities.
Gathering Stories: Digital Storytelling Workshop for High School Students
CES is pleased to announce that it has received funding from the Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation's New ERA Women Writers Grant again this fall of 2022. These funds will allow us to offer a second week-long summer workshop - Gathering Stories: Digital Storytelling Workshop for Young Women in 11th-12th grades - July 10-14, 2023, as we did in July 2021.
Research Themes
Gesture, Performance, and Embodied Story Practices
Current media practices and cross-cultural circulations of narrative and diverse story traditions have brought renewed attention to storytelling’s basis in bodies and to its unfolding through embodied relations, nonverbal gestures, and in complex conversation with physical dimensions of space, time, and environment.
Interactive Storytelling
One of the primary drivers increasing interest in storytelling today is low-cost, portable, networked digital technologies and the development of easy to use, non-specialist apps for the collecting, editing, disseminating, and metadata tagging of story practices.
Transformational Storytelling
This research focuses on the creation of story as this crosses and/or recombines traditional and emergent media and disciplines and publics in ways designed to significantly transform their understanding, behavior, interaction, movement, affective and interpersonal relationality, geographies, or other aspects of day-today living.
Data Meets Story
This area of research addresses the omnipresent, yet diverse combinations of data and story that inform knowledge-building, communication, socio-political, and economic life.
Storycraft
This area invites researchers, writers, creators, creative technologists, educators, and diverse makers to examine their own or others’ storycraft, their practical application of unique combinations of story and technologies or techniques of making. It encourages projects that develop creative, analytical, craft, and/or technological skills for telling stories and fiction-making, more broadly, with attention to different modes and kinds of engagement.