The Lab
How does attention become authorship?
Storytelling methods, learning and experiments in who gets to author the story.
Method and learning
Seeing the Story
A working curriculum for community-embedded practitioners who already live and work near the stories that matter, but need a deliberate way to see, gather and shape the material.
Its methods move through attention, listening, story forms, ethical decisions, capture and the work of shaping observation into narrative. Story witnessing, never story extraction; presence before technique.
A practice from Seeing the Story
Listen for what changed.
In pairs, one person describes an ordinary moment from recent fieldwork while the other listens without interrupting. The listener then asks, one question at a time:
- What did you notice in the person's face or body?
- What changed in that moment?
- What did you say to yourself?
The exercise moves from what happened, to what was noticed, to what the moment meant.
Discuss a workshopIn development
Who gets to author the story?
The Lab is developing a participant-authorship framework that separates being heard from consenting to publication. It asks what ownership means in practice: the ability to refuse, revise, revoke and be paid.