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My research in Co-Creative Media and Community Engagement on the land border of Ireland explores the process of applied artistic practice in a mutually beneficial relationship based on knowledge exchange between participants and researcher/facilitator. I have adopted and developed the practice of Digital Storytelling to explore individual and communal border experience in an attempt to remove professional interpretation and ventriloquism while empowering individuals to represent themselves in the process. This work is based on a constructivist hermeneutical approach, which values accounts of personal experience based on social actions and outcomes. The work builds on existing theoretical knowledge through an alternative form of knowledge generated within communities of interest. Using a mixed methods approach I have been able to establish a more comprehensive and complete picture which combines complimentary data from PAR, Field Work, Case Study, Focus Groups and Interviews. Participatory Action Research (PAR) ensures collaboration, power, ethics, knowledge and building theory, are central to the community engagement process. Through extensive community facilitation and process development I combined several narrative practices from Digital Storytelling, Life Story Method, Every Object tells a Story and Story Circle to facilitate the recovery of difficult and traumatic narratives enabling participants to rediscover their voice around complex and volatile experience. Working on the land border it is difficult to encounter anyone who has not experienced some form of trauma as witness, victim, survivor or perpetrator. The process was not about truth recovery or reconciliation but exploring the potentialfor engagement and participation and communication. The significance of merging traditional narrative practice with Digital Storytelling lies in the capacity for authentic individual self recovery, discovery, expression with the support of the community in the age of New Media. In a post-documentary age, Digital Stories function as performances of mediatised actuality.

The speaker in this collection is a continually evolving entity which is both aware of, connected to, and separate from the previous versions of themselves. In the first section, the speaker still needs to explore and spends a great deal of time wondering about what they are. The speaker eventually realizes that they are not the same as the members of their family, or possibly not even humanity as a whole. By the second section, the speaker has become aware of themselves, but still feels the need to explain or describe themselves to the reader, and sometimes even to the previous versions of themselves referred to as “she” and “you,” with “she” being the oldest or original version of the speaker. The speaker does not have much compassion for the lack of enlightenment in their previous counterparts in this section, but that begins to change by the third and final section. In the last section, the speaker has become fully aware of themselves and has developed a more mature and confident voice. Their wondering has disappeared, as has any lingering bitterness toward their previous selves. Instead, the speaker, while still viewing themselves as separate from the “she” and the “you,” speaks more directly to them in a more tender and understanding tone, as the speaker knows what it is they will have or have gone through to become the “I.” The collection as a whole deals with themes of birth, metamorphosis, the self, and what it means to be entirely other, however one might interpret the idea of otherness.