Drawing What Words Cannot Say: Visual Storytelling as Research and Community Practice

This participatory workshop positions drawing as an accessible methodology for storytelling, research, listening, and community engagement. Through guided exercises that require no prior drawing experience, participants will explore how drawing can unlock memory, perception, and narrative exchange in both personal and collective contexts, enabling the communication of experiences that are often difficult to express through words alone.

As participants engage in these exercises, the presenter demonstrates how the same prompts operate as practical tools across education, artistic practice, and community-based research. Drawing from her work as a visual artist and educator, she shows how these methods have been adapted within diverse settings.

Examples include workshops with educators and university students in Singapore, where drawing supports teaching and learning; collaborative projects with the Kayan people, an ethnic community living as refugees in Thailand, where drawing facilitates ethnographic research and cultural storytelling; and trauma-informed workshops with earthquake survivors in Türkiye, where drawing creates supportive spaces for reflection and emotional expression.

Together, these examples demonstrate how drawing and storytelling function as a practical methodology for education, research, community engagement, and wellbeing. Through case examples and hands-on activities, participants gain strategies for adapting these methods to support dialogue, reflection, and storytelling in their own professional or community contexts.