This paper examines the ethical responsibilities and challenges faced by designer-researchers when engaging in storytelling practices within marginalized contexts, with a focus on academic dissemination and public representation of narratives from prison environments.

The work addressed here was developed in the context of the Casa Circondariale di Milano San Vittore “Francesco di Cataldo”, a detention facility in the heart of Milan. Here Imagis Lab, a research group belonging to the Department of Design at Politecnico di Milano, holds, among other activities, Storylab, a weekly storytelling workshop taking place in the Young Adult Sector. Based on previous research experiences within the same group, Storylab aims to leverage the storymaking process to empower participants. Therefore, it focuses on building stories, whether fictional or real, inspired by participants' personal life experiences and imagination. One of the main goals of the conducted activities is to build a bridge between the inside and the outside world, so the narratives developed during the workshop are also intended to be reworked for dissemination. Such dissemination is to be understood both in the academic sphere and in the form of exhibitions and multimedia content to communicate and re-tell the reality of detention and detained people to the general public.

In engaging with this kind of work, the designer-researcher is faced with a series of ethical challenges. When collecting stories it is crucial to understand the processes that involve the narrator and the tools necessary for their development, especially considering how identity-building can be a driving force in storytelling. It is therefore a problem of identity and narrative agency, of the control that the narrator, in this case, the detained person, can exert over the narrative. Taking motion from the intertwinement of agency, storytelling, and identity, this paper aims to discuss the ethical challenges, limits, and design potentialities that emerge for the designers-researchers, especially as the narratives collected are re-packaged and re-told by the designers. The paper identifies specific 'problematic cores', that is, questions of narrative agency and the ethics of representation, that designers must address to ensure ethical integrity. Examining these issues offers insights into the limits and potential of storytelling practices in socially engaged design research.

Keywords: Ethics, narrative agency, storytelling.