The performativity of digital stories in contexts of systemic inequality

Abstract

Digital storytelling has entered Higher Education over recent years as a tool to engage diverse classrooms, harnessing the power of personal storytelling to establish affective connections across difference. This article reports on a digital storytelling project in the context of South African teacher education, where students reflected on a social issue in Education, as a means to understand systemic inequalities governing our classrooms. Moving beyond Butler's notion of performativity, towards an understanding of how both human and non-human matter can shape subjectivities as suggested by new materialist feminist authors such as Barad this study will explore how one student, her story and the audience are entangled in and across space and time. I will show how digital storytellers are both composer and composed: how within the digital story process, stories create the possibility for storytellers to experiment with new subjectivities that could become real with time and repeated performance but how these stories also act upon the storyteller based on the context the story is told in. I will also reflect on how our entanglements foreground the importance of an ethical and responsible engagement with the power of stories in the context of socially just pedagogies.

SLA Doctoral Students' Collaborative Digital Storytelling Experiences and Perceptions

“…Education majors have also employed digital stories to explore and express their identities (Vitanova, 2016). Identityrelated topics in digital storytelling studies have included sharing personal counterstories (Gachago, 2016;Gachago, Cronje, et al, 2014), shame related to socioeconomic class (Van Galen, 2014, and reflection on social (in)justice and racial prejudice (Matias & Grosland, 2016). Digital storytelling studies involving reflection on practice have focused on subjects such as challenging practica experiences (Ng & Nicholas, 2015;Radford & Aitken, 2014) and practica which engaged education majors in identifying and assisting struggling learners (Dreyer, 2017).…”

Mobilizing Interference as Methodology and Metaphor in Disability Arts Inquiry

“…Furthermore, sachse expressed how the work no longer captured their subjectivity or perspectives on disability—a phenomenon that has been theorized in other video-based research (see Gachago, 2016). sachse now believed that the video both override difference (in their video’s claim, “I am just like you”), and reproduced and even reified voyeuristic looking relations that fetishize embodied difference (in their appearing naked), the very relations they were trying to subvert.…”

“…First-person videos carry the potential to fix subjects and storylines in time and place (Gachago, 2016), and the characteristics of the genre mean that makers can easily share their work publicly via on-line platforms, which can amplify or intensify the adverse effects of that fixing by turning living into static stories. According to Barad (2007), we never leave our pasts behind.…”

“…The video (along with the digital platform), through its own agency, continues without its creator, through its voices, images, and narratives in the digital world. Stories are there and not there—alive in the audience’s imagination, with or without the video-makers’ knowledge or control (Gachago, 2016). The video-making research apparatus, like many arts-based approaches, blurs boundaries between private and public; through this blurring, we can understand interference, as metaphor and methodology, acting through, within, and beyond the stories that makers and researchers tell.…”

Travelling into the other's world: South African pre-service teacher education students' construction of difference, belonging and identity

“…This article draws from a larger study, which aimed to explore the potential of digital storytelling as a tool to transform students' engagement across difference, by sharing personal stories but also creating a space for such difficult conversations. We have reflected on the potential and limitations of digital storytelling -both as a process and a productas a socially just pedagogy elsewhere (see for example Gachago 2016;Gachago et al 2015;Gachago 2015).…”