The Work of Stories in the World

What is the work of digital stories in the world?

In recent years, story-based methods have gone mainstream as social scientists, health scientists, pedagogues, and those in the business world have begun to recognize the centrality of narrative to knowing and meaning-making. As part of this trend, digital storytelling (DS) has become an established method within the qualitative lexicon. To date, however, existing research on and about DS has not yet systematically tracked how digital stories work as tools for KmB and advocacy. This gap in research is surprising given the growing recognition of stories as powerful objects in cultural, economic, and political spaces, and given the urgent need to find new ways to move collectively in the face of rising neo-fascism, structural inequities, and the climate crisis.

Our research will advance scholarship from an intersectional perspective in relation to critical DS methods/theories in fields of Critical Disability Studies, Indigenous Studies, Indigenous language revitalization, Trans and Queer Studies, Critical Education, Media and Communication Studies, Arts Education, Critical Digital Research and Pedagogy, feminist/critical technoscience, slow scholarship, and social justice, among others.