Digital Storytelling

4. Marty Otañez (University of Colorado Denver) and Andrés Guerrero (Colorado School of Public Health): Digital Storytelling and the Hepatitis C Virus Project

Abstract: Digital storytelling is an elixir for researchers and community members who wish to make their work more relevant for broader audiences. It is used to increase project participants’ control of their lived experiences that researchers seek to collect and represent, helping to redefine traditional notions of academic work as a knowledge production enterprise controlled by university representatives. Storytellers engage in collaborative activities with project leaders in a workshop format or one-on-one approach to humanize people’s experiences, and in the process storytellers develop basic proficiency in story sharing and video-making and receive a DVD copy of their video. In this chapter, an anthropologist (Otañez) and health worker (Guerrero), who partnered in a viral hepatitis project, seek to boost the power of digital storytelling as a research method and a co-creative media technique that crosses boundaries in academic work. 

5. Darcy Alexandra (Dublin Institute of Technology): Encounters of political listening: Interrogating asylum policy through co-creative documentary practice

Abstract: Encounters of political listening occur among research practitioners and other stakeholders, and across the research site throughout audio-visual production and into distribution. Attention to these encounters can serve as a means to think through the inherent complexities of participatory knowledge production through media practice, and to evaluate the presence of listening in our research practice. Building on the recent scholarship on listening, this chapter draws from research with asylum seekers and refugees in Ireland that advanced a longitudinal and inquiry-based approach to digital storytelling.

Photo Credit: Samuel Collins