Our Team
Dr Joanna Wheeler
I am founder and director of TransformativeStory. Over the last 20 years, I have designed hundreds of storytelling processes around the world. Each process is unique. But in each one, storytellers combine personal and collective forms of storytelling and use drawing, dance, music, creative writing, drama, photography, video, audio, and sculpture to craft powerful stories. I have worked with thousands of storytellers from a wide range of groups, from activists against sexual violence in Cape Town to young people from southern Africa working for gender equity. I am passionate about making the creative practice of story-making better for everyone.
I also work with groups and organisations that want to build their capacity to use storytelling in an ethical and effective way.
Dr Alison Buckler
I am a Senior Research Fellow at The Open University in the UK. Over the past fifteen years I have used a wide range of creative, narrative and storytelling approaches in my research. I am especially interested in the relationship between storytelling, inclusion and belonging in education. I have worked with Joanna on storytelling initiatives all over the world and online, and Transformative Story’s ethos and approach underpins a number of my own research studies. These include a longitudinal storytelling study with young women in Zimbabwe who have not completed formal schooling, and a story-based research approach with teacher educators in Uganda. I am also a co-founder of the Ibali Network which connects and supports early career researchers interested in storytelling and education research.
Claire Cole
I am a Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) Technical Advisor and team leader. I am passionate about participatory knowledge translation, conducted with and for diverse actors and lived experience experts. I support teams to inclusively generate and use diverse forms of evidence to adapt and improve the effectiveness and responsiveness of SRHR interventions. I work to support those whose voices have been historically marginalised to use creative and mixed methods to tell their stories, thereby helping health systems shed important light on pathways toward client-centred and -responsive systems. I have led technical strategy and mixed methods research for a wide array of programmes, including flagship voluntary family planning programs across Africa and South Asia. I especially enjoy working with young people on issues of sexual and reproductive health, for example by supporting them to design and own evidence-based, adaptive implementation processes.