Visual participatory storytelling: an art-based creative mapping of everyday weaving storylines, meanings and heritage

In this paper, we explore Northern Ghanaian weaving traditions using Visual Participatory Storytelling (VPS) as a collaborative methodology to address critical gaps in knowledge production and craft documentation. We demonstrate this by showing how key weaving practices, traditions and histories – from material sourcing to finished textiles – and textile wearing codes function as living repositories embodying both human and non-human entanglements, cultural semiotics, spiritual beliefs, and community knowledge systems. Through co-creation with communities in the documentation process, we contribute to design anthropological and decolonial scholarship as well as participatory research by proposing a six-stage VPS framework that positions communities as primary knowledge holders.