Discussing the weather: digital stories, communities and the climate change conversation

Between 2010 and 2012 researchers at the University of Falmouth and Glamorgan in the UK collaborated with White Loop Media Company and the UK Government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) to explore whether storytelling might provide a framework for improving engagement in the public climate change conversation. Project ASPECT built upon earlier work with flood communities and in the broader disaster management arena on the use of digital storytelling to build community resilience. Taken at its starting point a particular problem; the more DECC promoted climate change science, the more the public became disengaged. The idea was to use digital storytelling to subvert the knowledge hierarchies and expert-driven discourses that typically characterize communication in both the science and policy arenas. This paper reflects on ASPECT and related work by showing examples of the stories created and also by theorizing the practice of digital storytelling as a sustainable cultural practice/cultural practice for sustainability. Thus it explores notions of authority and credibility within personal storytelling and the potential for creating deeper levels of public engagement in complex policy-making areas such as climate change, whilst interrogating the democratizing potential of both storytelling as a form and Web 2.0 as a platform.