Storytelling Spaces as Political Arenas

I decided to display my thesis work on a website because existing literature affirms that digital storytelling spaces can operate as political arenas to inspire community action and even policy change. In Altered Lives: assessing the effectiveness of digital storytelling as a form of communication design by Bronwen Gray, Alan Young, and Tania Blomfield, they discuss the effectiveness of a digital platform called Altered Lives, consisting of first-hand stories to destigmatize what it means to be HIV+ (Gray et al. 2015, p. 635-649) . My thesis seeks to include stories that are part of a history that make up who we are as individuals and where we can go on our journey for a more just education system. Bronwen et. al define digital storytelling as combining “the art of telling stories with a variety of multimedia techniques including images, audio and video” (p. 635-6) They cite British photographer Daniel Meadows who says that digital storytelling platforms are “‘short, personal multimedia tales told from the heart,’ without the influence of media or other experts' ability to perpetuate hegemonic ways of knowing the world” (p.636). Typically, within the realm of studies on education pedagogy, the information is presented in a solely textual format that includes jargon that is not accessible to people outside of academia. A website reduces inaccessibility by creating other epistemological approaches to learning that aren’t just text-based.  This provides many ways of learning, which “work independently and collectively to impart messages to audience”(p.636). As stated by Gray et. al, “Storytelling is to act as a form of political activism as it has the capacity to mediate the perceptions of others challenging dominant value systems that seek to exclude” (636-638).  The audience will mainly be non-Indigenous educators interested in understanding the “justice framework” and reflection in their relational pedagogical practice. The website audience will be “able to relate it to their own narrative, through the power of shared archetypal knowledge and wisdom” (638-642)  because they will be engaging with personal narratives from the interviewees and me. It is a much more interactive and personal way of learning. 

Authors Camelia Crisan and Dumitru Bortun discuss how digital stories can uplift specific causes in Chapter 13’s Exploring the Potential of Digital Stories as Tools for Advocacy in  Digital Storytelling: Form and Content (Borton and Crisan 2017, 158). The narrator can become the “interpretative advocate for the case” uploaded and made visible to the public domain. “Digital stories can be tools in calling to action because they elicit emotions, they reveal the journey of their narrator, they are examples for us and show how, given similar circumstances, we could all follow the path laid out before us by the author” (p.157).  Antio Lopez’s The Media Ecosystems: What Ecology Can Teach Us About Responsible Media Practice discusses ways in which creating content can go against the system. “One strategy is to displace trauma through our media by allowing them to capture our voices and essence. And when we feel that loss, we ask the media to recycle it back to us through greater stimulation”(Lopez 2012). The journey that the viewer embarks on through the digital realm is both curated by the narrator, but also the viewer who has the choice to interpret as they wish “as engagement is a subjective feeling” (Borton and Crisan 2017, pg.158).

Crisan and Bortun measured the success of two virtual campaigns by master’s degree students. Success would be measured by whether students felt inclined to believe and act after viewing the digital story space through participation. “Participation is a concrete action, it may be that participation is easier to measure; feelings of engagement must be elicited, whereas participation can be observed,” according to Crisan and Bortun (p.158-9). They found that participants (viewers) felt a stronger connection to the cause than the organization. As cited in their study, it was the individual stories presented through various narrators’ personal experiences “rather than advocacy for the activity of a particular organization” (p. 156). When understanding why their participants chose one cause over the other, how the medium was presented  -- “the media and message particularities came into discussion: the length of the story, the voice of the narrator…The way the message was presented in the story, the mediation over mediatisation,” (p. 156-8) ultimately impacted the students in the study. Students felt that there needed to be a common theme with a “motto” or “tagline” within each campaign and a thread of several stories woven together for any public policy change to be obtainable. While the study found that digital storytelling can successfully engage an audience for a particular cause, there needs to be a substantial amount of stories provided for the potential to influence public policy. “This would, in turn, provide the evidence on which one would then explore the potential to influence public policy to produce…structural change...”(p.157) The limitations of my project are my interview size. While the audience will have access to the full interviews and transcriptions, my sample size is small, which is why my project focuses on mindset and practice shift rather than any concrete, measurable policy change.