International Collaboration, Online Workshop Series: “Animation and the Ethics of Narratives Across Cultures” 

I am designing and preparing an international online workshop series in collaboration between the Bachelor’s in Design of Fictions and Transmedia Narratives at Universidad Iberoamericana (Mexico) and the MA in Animation at LCC. Its aim is to create a shared, practice-led learning environment where students can explore the power of storytelling as an emotional, ethical, and multicultural act.

Through four to six co-taught sessions and one reflective closing, students will engage in a structured journey from narrative fundamentals to animated expressions of identity, justice, and emotional experience. The workshops explore how stories are shaped across cultural contexts and how visual and movement-based storytelling can convey complex emotional and social meanings.

Each session builds progressively—from developing narrative concepts and visualising emotions to experimenting with animation techniques and discussing the ethical implications of representing others’ stories. Invited talks by international industry professionals, such as Clara Chan (Sony Imageworks) and Kate Jessop (BIAF), will be held during each session, providing real-world context and creative inspiration related to the topics of that day.

The collaborative model encourages intercultural empathy, teamwork, and storytelling grounded in social consciousness—qualities essential to today’s creative industries. Final outputs include visual narratives, animation experiments, and a shared digital exhibition or showcase. This project also lays the groundwork for future academic exchanges and shared curriculum development between the two institutions.

Additionally, in relation to this project, I will be hosting a workshop on the topic of Ethics of Narratives, titled “The Emotional Architecture of Storytelling: Ownership, Emotion, and the Ethics of Narrative,” at the CIECT Congress 2025 in late October in Mexico this year. I’ll make a test run on the concepts and see how they can be applied to this larger project.

Indicative literature:

Harris, K., 2022. Embracing the silence: introverted learning and the online classroom. Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal, 5(1), p. 3.

Quinlan, K.M., 2016. How emotion matters in four key relationships in teaching and learning in higher education. College Teaching, 64(3). Available at: Research gate

Lagay, F.L. (2014) ‘The Ethical Force of Stories: Narrative Ethics and Beyond’, AMA Journal of ethics, 16(8), pp. 622–625. Available at: https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/ethical-force-stories-narrative-ethics-and-beyond/2014-08

Phelan, J. (2013) ‘Narrative Ethics’, in Hühn, P. et al. (eds.) The Living Handbook of Narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg University. Available at: https://www-archiv.fdm.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/node/108.html

Shang, B. (2025) ‘Ethics of Narrative’, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, pp. 1–7. doi: 10.1080/0895769X.2025.2453490. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/10.1080/0895769X.2025.2453490?scroll=top&needAccess=true

Appendix

Draft 1 of the proposal

**I apologise for the first page being in Spanish; it’s just that one. Scroll down if you want to see the workshop proposals.

Video Pitch proposal for the CILECT Congress 2025