Sensory Stories is an exciting new project that teaches researchers how to communicate their work to the public. These stories will be told through appeals to the senses – taste, smell, vision and touch – using public spaces, performance and objects to reveal vital aspects of current research.
The initiative has been awarded a prestigious grant by the Arts and Humanities Research Council to increase academic engagement with the public. It is organised by a team of postgraduates based in the Humanities Research Centre at the University of York, led by Claire Wood from the Department of English.
In January 2011 the project hosted a training day for sixty students from Northern universities. The event combined ‘spotlights’ from specialists in media communication, storytelling and the heritage sector with innovative workshops that encouraged participants to start developing these skills for themselves. Now in its second phase, Sensory Stories is helping students to put their training into practice through a range of ‘Sensory Opportunities’ within the local community. The project will culminate in a ‘Sensory Stories Café’, which brings together a number of the stories and activities that we have developed as part of the University of York’s ‘Festival of Ideas’.
Sensory Stories is all about opening a dialogue so please feel free to add your comments or send us an email to hrc-sensorystories@york.ac.uk.
Past events
The project is featured here as a case study on the AHRC website.
The Sensory Stories training day was held on Saturday 15 January 2011, Berrick Saul building, University of York. You can download the programme and read the article here.
On Friday 26 November Sensory Stories was presented as part of the discussion panel at the ‘Storytelling: Imagination and the Past’ conference organised by Oliver Betts and Sarah Clark at the HRC.
The Sensory Stories team presented their project on Thursday 21 October 2010 at the Berrick Saul Treehouse as part of the HRC’s Proposition series. For information about the series, download the poster here. See the article here.
On Thursday 7 October the Sensory Stories team trialled the gruel-tasting activity with a different target audience: a group of children aged 4-9. Check out the article here.
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