Fostering Agency in Refugees through Digital Storytelling
Joan Didion once said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” referring to the importance of narratives that incorporate all spectrums of the human experience. Sharing and listening are essential components of every narration and storytelling, and this sharing is achievable with Digital Storytelling.
Simona Bonini Baldini researched, in “Digital Storytelling with Refugees: Analysis of Communication Setting from the Capability Approach Perspective,” the theoretical link between digital communication tools and the concept of human development, beginning with examining the utilization of a Digital Storytelling Workshop with a group of refugees and asylum seekers.
Digital Storytelling (DST) workshops can be understood in numerous ways. However, the workshop’s primary focus is to uplift socially underprivileged individuals and highlight the narrator’s own lives and experiences conveyed in their voice. The connection between human development and digital communication is based on the recognition that, for refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants overall, connection to digital technologies should be regarded as a resource that can enable comprehension of oneself, others, and one’s role as an active agent in their larger society.
DST workshops were discussed in this study through the lens of Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach, a contextual application. This approach helps us understand the development and “well-being as thriving” in communication processes by distinguishing between methods and objects, as well as capabilities and results or achieved functioning.
This Digital Storytelling is characterized by the narrator recognizing themselves as one who can speak, act, and identify themselves through their autobiographical account and the integrity of expression in their personal experience. This participatory research fosters a better understanding of a subject while improving narrative skills and digital literacy. Although research has shown the benefits and drawbacks of Digital Storytelling, the key to success is encouraging participation and viewing narrating and listening as aspects of the more extensive process of allowing someone to be an active agent of their story and life.
Clowns without Borders, the organization with whom my group and I collaborate, perform in war zones, refugee camps, disaster zones, and refugee camps to promote resilience through laughter and play. The organization expressed the desire to develop a story-sharing protocol that demonstrates not just the healing and joy that takes place in this space but also the relevance and effect of this work. Our group’s protocol considers the principles and consequences of this Digital Storytelling approach, not only by sharing the stories of the communities but the influence of the laughter on the individual by allowing the audience to share pieces of their own experiences.
The media’s portrayal of refugees or asylum seekers is primarily based on metaphors of victims. However, this implementation of Digital Storytelling, as understood by Baldini, is a strategy to produce a retaliation of this representation in research and media while endorsing the power of one’s voice and experience.
Bonini Baldini, S. (2019, August 29). Digital storytelling with refugees: Analysis of communication setti. Revue française des sciences de l’information et de la communication., from https://journals.openedition.org/rfsic/7022
