Lecturer in Interactive Media.
University of York
debbie.maxwell@york.ac.uk
2014 Cruciblist

Debbie’s research interests are on the ways that people interact with and reshape technology and the roles that storytelling can play across media. She explores this in a number of ways, including:

the use of storytelling as an active process to foster empathy in and across communities of interest and practice
the roles of stories in encoding knowledge (tacit and articulated) through oral and digital forms
experimenting with voice to create multilayered texts and narratives that reflect and co-create nuanced understandings of place and issues
developing methods of documenting and capturing imagined futures through participatory story generation

Debbie uses an interdisciplinary approach drawing on a range of fields including Human Computer Interaction (HCI), ethnography, interaction design, social anthropology, and service design.

Currently she is exploring the potential of stories as value propositions, conceptualising stories as currency, where I hope to examine their shifting value across media and contexts, for example from traditional oral folklore to digital retellings and distributed data flows.

Past research includes her doctoral research working with traditional storytellers in Scotland, mobile digital interpretation projects in rural Northumberland, and the design of digital tools to facilitate and encourage serendipitous encounters in research.

Debbie is PI on the AHRC Connected Communities research project, ‘Telling the Bees’ (£53K) and was PI on ‘Skills in Action’, an AHRC and Creative Scotland funded ECR Skills Development programme (£10K). She has been a Co-Investigator on two networks, ‘StoryStorm’ (£15K), a Digital Economy Communities & Culture Network+ network; and ‘Seannachies: Addressing Social Isolation through Storytelling’ (£18K), a Scottish Universities Insight Institute programme. She is also Co-I on ‘Listening to Voices: Creative Disruptions with the Hearing Voices Network’, a £48K AHRC Connected Communities research project. Finally, she is also a researcher on the AHRC Knowledge Exchange Hub, Design in Action.

For more information on Debbie, see her webpage at the University of York.