By Catia Rebelo
As part of my research Project – Place Ambassadors – I developed a satellite case study in Portugal in a very small rural area called Carvalhal de Vermilhas, Vouzela. For this satellite case study, I focused on only one of my research questions: How would Place Ambassadors like to co-create a place brand and which collective narratives can best communicate this brand?
Visual narratives
To answer the stated question I developed a visual multimethods methodology which aims to give voice to local communities by allowing them to share the narratives/stories about their place. If you are curious, get a glimpse of some of these narratives in the embedded video.
The video shows three narratives that according to the speakers best represent their community and identity. I could not agree more but I also think that these narratives may help to boost communities’ pride, sense of belonging, and self-identity; and create a tangible impact on the territory by providing an opportunity for dialogue and knowledge co-creation across communities, which may boost local initiative for place-shaping.
Reflective workshop
In addition to these narratives I developed a workshop to promote reflection and dialogue among the project participants. In the workshop participants watched a composite film (that will also be available for you very soon) with each individual story that was developed (by the researcher and the local audio-visual association Binaural-Nodar) to bring out a collective narrative from each single story. The pictures illustrate some of the results gathered in the workshop. If you enjoyed the video, please keep an eye on SUSPLACE page: one of my next posts is going to reveal some of the preliminary results that came out from this innovative methodology!
