Session Description
Modern Impact Assessment (IA) frameworks heavily favor quantitative data, often failing to capture cumulative community impacts, historical trauma, and land connections. Aligned with the IAIA27 theme Ka mua, ka muri ("looking back for the future"), this interactive 90-minute workshop demonstrates how Storywork serves as a rigorous, qualitative methodology that bridges science-based metrics with lived experiences. Designed as an experiential "Story Studio," participants will move beyond transactional engagement to experience storywork as verifiable qualitative data. The session opens with a live sensory narrative to ground attendees in relational listening, emotional literacy, and metaphor parsing. Participants will then engage in a hands-on qualitative coding exercise using real-world narrative transcripts, mapping community land relations, historical impacts, and cultural indicators directly into standard IA reporting structures. Finally, using a Solution Room rotation format, attendees will collaborate on trauma-informed safeguards, relational consent, and strategies to address power dynamics between project proponents and rights-holders. Practitioners will walk away with practical qualitative tools to honour past narratives while designing accessible, holistic, and forward-looking impact assessments
Session Summary
Experience Storywork as a rigorous qualitative tool. This interactive 90-minute workshop uses live narrative immersion, qualitative coding exercises, and table discussions to equip practitioners with practical tools for integrating trauma-informed community narratives into standard IA framework
Session Chair
Somia Sadiq
Narratives Inc.
Canada
Session Co-chair
Desiree Theriault
Narratives Inc.
Canada