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STORYTELLING, EMOTIONS AND 
EMPATHY 
Daniela Gachago 
Cape Peninsula University of Technology
Context / background 
Aim: 
Reflect on journey to become teachers 
Raise awareness of social issues in education 
Engage with / facilitate diverse classrooms 
Create digital stories as teaching materials
Transformation in HE 
 Transformation in 
Higher Education has 
led to racially 
integrated classrooms 
 Social and cultural 
integration are lagging 
behind (Jansen 2010, 
Soudien 2012)
Talking difference, talking race 
 South African classrooms are ticking time bombs 
 Desire / necessity to talk / engage with these issues 
 ‘In a country that is oversensitive to race talk, few 
young people or adults feel comfortable talking about 
race, especially when they have to speak about 
personal experience ‘ (Jansen 2010: 10)
Pedagogy of discomfort 
 Stipulates that for both 
educators and students to 
develop a deeper 
understanding for their own 
and their shared past, it is 
necessary to move outside 
their comfort zone, to start to 
unpack their understanding 
of norms and differences 
(Boler 1999, Boler and Zembylas 2003).
Cognitive and emotional labour 
 To engage in critical inquiry often means 
asking students to radically re-evaluate their 
world views. This process can incur feelings 
of anger, grief, disappointment, and 
resistance, but the process also offers 
students new windows on the world: to 
develop the capacity for critical inquiry 
regarding the production and construction of 
differences gives people a tool that will be 
useful over their lifetime. In short, this 
pedagogy of discomfort requires not only 
cognitive but emotional labor. (Boler and Zembylas 
2003: 110)
Pedagogy of possibility 
 Result of pedagogy of discomfort: negative 
emotional labour such as vulnerability, anger, 
suffering. 
 Emotional labour can produce favourable 
results, including self-discovery, hope, passion 
an a sense of community.
PHD focus 
 2013 Train-The-Trainer workshop 
 9 students
Everybody 
has a story to 
tell 
Give 
marginalised, 
silent people a 
Image from Flickr by whateverything voice
Story circle 
 “Stories move in circles. They don’t move in 
straight lines. So it helps if you listen in circles. 
There are stories inside stories and stories 
between stories, and finding your way through 
them is as easy and as hard as finding your 
way home. And part of the finding is getting 
lost. And when you’re lost, you start to look 
around and listen.” 
(Lambert 2010, v).
Critical texts and dialogue 
 Dialogue is focused conversation, engaged in 
intentionally with the goal of increasing understanding, 
addressing problems, and questioning thoughts or 
actions. It engages the heart as well as the mind. It is 
different from ordinary, everyday conversation, in that 
dialogue has a focus and a purpose. Dialogue is 
different from debate, which offers two points of view 
with the goal of proving the legitimacy or correctness 
of one of the viewpoints over the other. Dialogue, 
unlike debate or even discussion, is as interested 
in the relationship(s) between the participants as 
it is in the topic or theme being explored. 
Ultimately, real dialogue presupposes an openness to 
modify deeply held convictions (Romney 1996: 1)
Counter-storytelling 
 ‘challenge social and racial injustice by 
listening to and learning from experiences of 
racism and resistance, despair and hope at the 
margins of society’ (Yosso 2006: 171).
PHD in School of Education at 
UCT 
What is the potential of a digital storytelling workshop as a 
process and a product to facilitate an engagement across 
difference within a post-conflict pedagogical framework? 
1. What do the small stories told in these dialogical spaces tell us 
about how students construct notions of difference, how they 
position themselves towards each other and towards hegemonic 
discourses? 
2. To what extent do the storytelling spaces during the workshop as 
part of the digital storytelling process facilitate an engagement 
across difference and in particular what is the potential of this 
process to elicit empathy and witnessing from the audience? 
3. What do the digital stories as product of the workshop tell us 
about how students position and re-position themselves in terms 
of difference and what is the potential of this process to elicit 
empathy and witnessing from the audience?
Studies on digital storytelling and 
difference 
 Lots of engagement around digital storytelling 
and difference 
 Less focus on difference & critical theory 
 Only two references on digital storytelling & 
counter-storytelling 
 Rolon-Dow (2011): Race(ing) stories: digital 
storytelling as a tool for critical race scholarship 
 Vaseduvan (2006): Making Known Differently: 
engaging visual modalities as spaces to author 
new selves
Very positive reception 
 Potential of non-experts to create complex 
multimedia products (Hull and Katz 2006) 
 Sharability / publishability 
 Giving marginalised voices a forum 
 Breaking of culture of silence (Thumbran 
2010)
Own research 
 It is interesting to note that the students who 
participated in the digital storytelling approach 
came away with a deeper understanding of 
one another’s ethnic, racial and socio-economic 
backgrounds. The knowledge 
about other students enhanced the 
understanding and respect for one another in 
the class. The situation gave a practical 
example of what and how they would handle 
diverse classrooms when they begin their 
teaching career next year. (Condy et al 2012)
 The study has showed the extent to which 
students essentialise race, identify along racial 
background lines and construct identities in 
opposition to each other, confirming findings of 
previous research (Leibovitz et al., 2010, Pattman, 
2010; Rohleder et al., 2008; Bozalek, 2011). 
However, it has also showed how indirect 
knowledge (as Jansen (2009) calls it) that is 
passed on from generation to generation and still 
impacts on students‟ social engagements can 
come to the surface through these disruptive 
moments of sharing and listening openly to each 
other‟s stories, and may constitute a first step 
to transform students‟ engagements with one 
another. (Gachago et al 2014)
Narrow genre 
 ‘as a cultural form it is marked by a fairly 
predictable, if not uniform, range of ways to 
represent the self’ (Burgess 2006, 209) 
 Poletti argues ‘that the specific narrative strategies 
of the digital storytelling form present significant 
barriers against digital storytelling being used as a 
means of redefining or challenging existing 
meanings attached to life experience, given its 
emphasis on narrative accessibility, closure, and 
coherence of theme (Poletti 2011).
Sentimentality in DST 
 ‘Somewhat paradoxically from a critical 
perspective, it is the very qualities that mark 
digital stories as uncool, conservative, and 
ideologically suspect – ‘stock’ tropes, 
nostalgia, even sentimentality – that give them 
the power of social connectivity, while the 
sense of authentic self-expression that 
they convey lowers the barriers to 
empathy.‘ 
(Burgess 2006:10)
Finally… 
 The seven story elements, as guides for 
participating in digital storytelling (and the 
‘stuff’ its participants consume), coax life 
narratives in such a way as to encourage 
individuals to shape their heterogeneous 
experiences into stories of personal 
reflection on these dominant themes.  (Poletti 2011).
 The power of personal storytelling lies in its 
potential to allow affective connection between 
storyteller and storylistener (Amy Shuman 2005) 
 Are some stories more capable than other to 
elicit empathy? (Frank 2010) 
 What kind of empathy do they elicit? (Boler 1999)
Theoretical framework 
 Affective turn - Sara Ahmed 
(2004) 
 What do emotions do? 
 Emotions as relational / social 
practices 
 Attached to bodies 
 ‘comfort is the effect of bodies 
being able to ‘sink’ into spaces, 
that have already taken their 
shape. Discomfort is not simply a 
choice or decision – ‘I felt 
uncomfortable about this or that’ 
– but an effect of bodies 
inhabiting spaces that do not take 
or ‘extend’ their shape.’ (Ahmed 
2004: 152)
The ‘Other’ 
 Iris Marion Young (1997) 
 Asymmetrical Reciprocity: we cant 
put ourselves in somebody else’s 
shoes 
 A temporal dimension, by which she 
refers to the kind of experiences that 
we have made in life, that make us 
unique and which cannot allow us to 
know the other or understand the 
other’s standpoint in life 
 And our social position in life, which is 
linked to issues of power and 
oppression and does not allow a 
symmetric reciprocity with the other
Amy Shuman and the limits of 
empathy 
 Both the personal and the 
collective story can be 
legitimizing categories 
that provide meaning and 
pattern to life, but 
traversing the terrain 
between the personal and 
the collective can be 
fraught with obstacles to 
understanding. (2004: 55)
Empathy 
 ‘Empathy preserves a distance between those 
who understand and those who experience 
trauma: witnessing troubles that distance, and 
while it does not necessarily close the 
distance, it transforms the distance enough for 
the witness to be part of the constituency of 
sufferer… empathy can produce alienation’ 
(Shuman 2004: 144, emphasis added).
Sentimentality 
 The ordinary becomes precious, and as we 
know well, the precious is the most dangerous 
of representations; it is always precariously 
close to the trivial, just as its counterpart, the 
extraordinary, is precariously close to scandal. 
The ethnography of suffering requires a 
critique of empathy, an understanding of 
representation that represents emotion as 
neither trivial nor scandalous’ (Shuman 2004: 150)
Destabilising empathy 
 when a personal story travels beyond the 
original story setting and is used as an 
allegory for a collective experience 
 entitlement claims are made that challenge 
sentimentalizing allegories which in turn 
undermine empathy – as she argues often as 
alibis for failure of empathy (personal narrative 
to similar to collective)
Narrative inquiry 
 Arthur W. Frank 2010: 
 Letting stories breathe: A socio-narratology 
(2010) 
 Dialogical Narrative Analysis 
(DNA) 
 Stories seen as actors / stories 
do… 
 Having certain capabilities 
 Focus on relationship between 
story, storyteller and storylistener: 
‘The storyteller gives breath to 
the story, but the story is already 
there, waiting.’
5 Questions of DNA 
 Resources: What narrative resources can storyteller 
draw from? What resources shape how the story is 
being told and comprehended? How are resources 
distributed? 
 Circulation: To whom is the story told, who can 
understand story and who can’t? 
 Affiliation: Who does the story render external or 
other to that group? 
 Identity: What identity is performed/constructed, what 
are possibilities to change? Or remain the same? 
What identity is claimed, rejected, experimented with? 
 What is at stake: Who is holding her/his own? Who is 
made more vulnerable by the story?
How did I chose my stories? 
 Frank (2010: 43): ‘the analyst’s cultivated 
capacity to hear, from the total collection of 
stories, those that call out as needing to be 
written about.’ 
 ‘Narrative analysis gives increased audibility to 
some stories, recasts how other stories are 
understood, and necessarily neglects many 
stories.’ (50)
Lauren’s and Noni’s story
Capabilities of stories 
 Stories choose us 
 Stories make us uncomfortable 
 Stories go under our skin 
 Stories move us 
 Stories trouble power dynamics 
 Stories are out of control 
 Stories connect the personal and the political 
 Stories open spaces for wonder and respect
Stories connect us 
 Daniela: What were the reactions of people or how did you 
perceived them? 
 Lauren: Shocked! But also like they felt with me, there was no 
judgement and I knew I expected judgement. I was ready to 
like put it all out and then when people just looked like they 
had empathy and they didn’t pity me, you know? They just felt 
with me in the moment that made me like ready to just share 
more! 
 Daniela: Why do you think they didn’t judge you? 
 Lauren: I don’t know I think because we clarified that it’s a 
space that was safe to say anything and just to be yourself 
…and the people in our group fortunately where people who 
are very open and diverse and …well I don’t know if they all 
were, but they are now at least you know …and I think they 
would have felt silly to judge me because it was a space 
where we all just kind of connected with each other - 
even for a moment you know?
Stories make us see the ‘other’ 
 Christine: Because I am comfortable being 
white and I am comfortable speaking English I 
am comfortable with my whiteness and I only 
realised when Noni was talking about it how 
white people unconsciously make black 
people feel. I had to leave the room to go to the 
bathroom had a good cry in the bathroom and 
then splash my face with cold water and then 
come back to class. And that’s why my nose was 
blocked when I did my recording because that 
was the day I did my recording but at the same 
time I was thinking about Noni’s discomfort.
Stories make us see our 
sameness 
 Christine: I would actually almost want to give Noni the 
credit, she made me realise that we are all the same, we 
are all the same, we all feel the same. And again told me, 
in my mind, I was thinking: But you can make the difference! 
You can be the one to take the first step! Because this 
workshop showed us, that article actually showed me, where 
my weakness is. And it’s noted, I am not hesitant. It’s not that 
I don’t trust black people. It’s just that I have never thought 
of them as being intimate, somebody to be intimate with 
on a very close terms with. That’s, that’s about it. I can’t 
say, I can’t say, that I don’t want black people in my life but 
the course made me more aware that they have feelings. And 
then maybe there’s something that stops them from 
approaching me. But maybe they can see something in me 
that stops them from approaching me and making the first 
contact. It should come from me - you know? I can make it 
happen.
Stories make us see shared 
experience 
 I was thinking about my father who was a poor white 
who was not welcome in wealthy people’s homes. Even in 
his own family extended family, a boy was given a chocolate 
wrapper and was thinking there was a piece of chocolate in it. 
He found nothing, only a little strips of melted chocolates 
which he is still licked in the street and afterwards he realised 
what he had done or what. He was: It’s like, I don’t know 
how to explain it, it’s like such total rejection and that’s what 
went through my mind for the whole of that day. I was out of 
it, all of it for the whole of that day. I was just thinking about 
the things we do to reject other people. Some people do it 
explicitly and some people don’t…What do we do as whites 
to make people feel like they’re nothing? 
 Daniela: And you’ve never thought about this before? 
 Christine : No! I’ve never thought of the black/white issues 
never!
Stories move people 
 Thando: I was telling her [Lauren] about the story, her 
story… and then she said to me: You know what? The 
day I was telling my story you cried and then I 
noticed… and then she said: I knew those tears were 
not for nothing! I said: Hell no, you saw me very well 
(laughing)… yeah because I was living a lie and then I 
thought, if Lauren can be so, so brave about her 
sexuality, revealing about her sexuality in class and 
with her family, why I can’t I do it? Because I know 
one thing about me and my family…because of my 
education status I am more powerful than them. And I 
was thinking: if I reveal my sexuality and then they 
say: We disown you, I don’t care! I can survive on my 
own. And then from there I think the other day I 
sent my sister an sms. And then I told her about 
this sexuality of mine.
 Daniela: You have said a lot of tough emotions 
[came up] is it? 
 Lauren: Yeah it is so overwhelming... (laughs) 
 Daniela: Would have expected something like 
that? 
 Lauren: No! Not at all not at all! People that I 
would never have guessed have been emailing 
me and messaging me the whole morning I have 
been talking to this one guy … 
 Daniela: In your class ? 
 Lauren: In our class yeahh, he has been emailing 
me like, telling me, he doesn’t know what to do 
with his feelings emm yeah …
Stories make us uncomfortable 
 Daniela: So which of these stories affected you the 
most? 
 Christine: Lauren! Because I am homophobic… 
 Daniela: So listening to Lauren’s story what does that 
make you ...? 
 Christine: Ohhh, inside I was like screaming. I think 
[name of student] was the one who told me quite a 
long time ago that she’s like this. But I didn’t believe a 
thing until I heard it out of the horse’s mouth. Oh my 
god and then she asked me to read her story and then 
she said: Did you know this about me? And I just 
swallowed this big lump and I said: No, it’s the first 
time I hear of it. And I had to like: Ohhhhhh, keep it in 
this morning.
 Daniela: Ok emm so what were the most uncomfortable 
moments for you in that process? 
 Lauren: Emm when Noni showed those photos of where she 
comes from. I felt not guilty but in a sense guilty, because I 
mean, I can’t help that am white. But I don’t know the way 
that they have lived, it’s not their fault either but that’s just 
how they live… so it was this kind of confusion of how has 
this happened? How do some people have to live like that 
and I lived so comfortably? And it made me made guilty in 
a sense, even though I am not in control of the fact that I 
was born as I am you know? And I just felt angrier as 
well because it was like, I could see that the other black 
people in the room where going: That’s where we live 
too, you know, it’s not a big deal! And the white people 
going: Ooooh shame! Like that it’s horrible you know 
and it made me feel so uncomfortable in that moment.
Stories make us defensive 
 Sadika: I felt like: Well, everybody has their own opinion. And I just 
feel like: Yes, that happened. But it happened a long time ago. And 
it’s like, the generation that implemented Apartheid has died out. 
And people are living the way they’re living because of themselves. 
They also have to remember, they vote for the same president 
every year and that president has made no change. Yes, they have 
the power and the money to make the most change in the country, 
yet it isn’t. So why do why do people get the blame because of the 
past when we’ve had we’ve been democratic for almost 10 years? 
For more than 10 years! I also understand where she’s coming 
from, I truly understand, but I think African people are not the 
only people who suffer. Like coloured people also suffered and I 
mean if you go to other areas in Mitchells Plain… I don’t live in that 
area but if you go further in you’ll see, you have gangsters and 
people, coloured people, also live in shacks. They’re also waiting for 
the same opportunities as others. But I think the story just focuses 
on their race. I understand why - because she is who she is, but I 
think she should have broaden it because more than one race 
suffered.
 Christine: She asked me to walk down to the 
Main Road with her for snacks and I thought: 
Wohhh! This is unusual - she doesn’t 
approach me for anything. But so far we’ve 
had long talks about the GEP file we’ve have 
to do for Janet. And now she asked me to go 
down to the Main Road with her. She’s just a 
normal girl. While I know she’s gay - I don’t 
see she’s gay.
First conclusions 
 ‘Empathy is one kind of obligation, sometimes 
creating a possibility for understanding across 
differences, sometimes involving sentimentality, 
sometimes romanticising tragedy as inspiration, 
but in any case deeply compromising the 
relationship between tellers and listeners’ (Shuman 
2004: 20)
 People become the stories they tell (Frank 
2010) 
 Stories are out of control 
 Have the potential but usually do not 
trouble power dynamics 
 They can render us vulnerable or help us 
hide our vulnerability (Butler 2004, 2009) 
 Difficulty of negotiate the personal and the 
political
 ‘One is undone, in the face of the other, by the 
touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the 
prospect of the touch, by the memory of the 
feel. We are touched by stories we tell.’ (Butler 
2004: 24)
Critical emotional reflexivity 
 ….a process of using emotions as catalysts, to 
allow the questioning of beliefs and 
assumptions, exposing privilege and comfort 
zones, with the aim for learners to find new 
ways of being with the ‘Other’, and ultimately 
leading to transformed ‘relationships, 
practices, and enactments that benefit 
teaching and learning for peace, mutual 
understanding, and reconciliation’ 
(Zembylas 2011: 2)
Noni: I don’t know if I agree too much but for me I thought it would have brought us closer than we 
are I mean I don’t know if we can all be honest it has as much as we talked to each other every now 
and then it hasn’t been personal relationships (emmm) as we I thought it will be after that intense 
week and I still talk more to these guys and I believe am gonna correct me if am wrong you guys still 
talk to the people you talk to in the group (emm) so I would say just a tiny bit because or may be not I 
don’t know. 
Faith: But may be that was just your expected outcome (emmm) may be that wasn’t... 
Noni: From the intensity of the week that’s what I thought it would do emm that’s what am saying may 
be I live in dream land. 
Christine: No I feel there has been more of a connection I don’t know if its just me but I have tried to 
…. 
Faith : Not in terms of actual personal relationship 
Lauren: That’s also like we’ve been here for four years I mean we have our friends you know we have 
our friendship groups just because it might be a race thing or something it doesn’t mean that we’re 
not building relationships with other people we just stuck to our original friend groups and that’s 
emmm 
Faith : And I think its also your definition of a friend (emm) like we can’t all have five hundred 
friends like real genuine friends (emmm) and I don’t know if that’s what you are talking about 
on ehhh. 
Noni: Emmmm
Open questions 
 Difficulties / impossibility (?) to step out of 
somebody’s emotional habitus/practices / pull of 
comfort zones 
 Difficult to recognise the ‘other’ as ‘other’ in 
Young’s sense 
 Temptations to make someone the same / 
connect / look for similarities in experience 
 How can we love the other that is distant? 
 Maria Lugones’(1987:5-7): can students learn to 
‘love each other by learning to travel to each 
other’s “worlds”’? 
 What to do with silences?
 Awareness of topologies and capabilities of 
stories 
 ‘Naming types of narratives can help people 
think about what story they are telling what 
story they want to tell. Naming narrative types 
can authorize the telling of particular stories, 
and it also can liberate people from stories 
they no longer want to tell.’ (Frank 2010: 118)
Dialogue is not ‘academic intervention’. In fact, dialogue is not a 
theoretical exercise at all. There may be room for these things 
but they are called something else—debate, discussion, 
argument—NOT dialogue. 
What is dialogue then? 
Above all, dialogue involves uncertainty. It is an investigation 
of something you do not know with one or more persons who 
also do/es not know. Dialogue is therefore a risk: rather than 
pounding yourself on the chest because you are so intensely 
extraordinary, or, wanting to pound someone else on the head 
because they are so agonisingly ordinary, dialogue rarely goes 
according to plan. Dialogue is three D’s; Delicate, Difficult and 
Desirable. 
(Minna Salami aka MsAfropolitan, Nov 10th 2014)
 We must not see any person as an 
abstraction. Instead, we must see in 
every person a universe with its own 
secrets, with its own treasures, with its 
own sources of anguish and with some 
measure of triumph. - Elie Wiesel
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Acknowledgement 
 Facilitators of 2013 ISP Digital Storytelling 
project 
 NRF staff development grant 
 NRF CPUT Digital Storytelling Project

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Storytelling, emotions and empathy

  • 1. STORYTELLING, EMOTIONS AND EMPATHY Daniela Gachago Cape Peninsula University of Technology
  • 2. Context / background Aim: Reflect on journey to become teachers Raise awareness of social issues in education Engage with / facilitate diverse classrooms Create digital stories as teaching materials
  • 3. Transformation in HE  Transformation in Higher Education has led to racially integrated classrooms  Social and cultural integration are lagging behind (Jansen 2010, Soudien 2012)
  • 4. Talking difference, talking race  South African classrooms are ticking time bombs  Desire / necessity to talk / engage with these issues  ‘In a country that is oversensitive to race talk, few young people or adults feel comfortable talking about race, especially when they have to speak about personal experience ‘ (Jansen 2010: 10)
  • 5. Pedagogy of discomfort  Stipulates that for both educators and students to develop a deeper understanding for their own and their shared past, it is necessary to move outside their comfort zone, to start to unpack their understanding of norms and differences (Boler 1999, Boler and Zembylas 2003).
  • 6. Cognitive and emotional labour  To engage in critical inquiry often means asking students to radically re-evaluate their world views. This process can incur feelings of anger, grief, disappointment, and resistance, but the process also offers students new windows on the world: to develop the capacity for critical inquiry regarding the production and construction of differences gives people a tool that will be useful over their lifetime. In short, this pedagogy of discomfort requires not only cognitive but emotional labor. (Boler and Zembylas 2003: 110)
  • 7. Pedagogy of possibility  Result of pedagogy of discomfort: negative emotional labour such as vulnerability, anger, suffering.  Emotional labour can produce favourable results, including self-discovery, hope, passion an a sense of community.
  • 8. PHD focus  2013 Train-The-Trainer workshop  9 students
  • 9.
  • 10. Everybody has a story to tell Give marginalised, silent people a Image from Flickr by whateverything voice
  • 11. Story circle  “Stories move in circles. They don’t move in straight lines. So it helps if you listen in circles. There are stories inside stories and stories between stories, and finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your way home. And part of the finding is getting lost. And when you’re lost, you start to look around and listen.” (Lambert 2010, v).
  • 12.
  • 13. Critical texts and dialogue  Dialogue is focused conversation, engaged in intentionally with the goal of increasing understanding, addressing problems, and questioning thoughts or actions. It engages the heart as well as the mind. It is different from ordinary, everyday conversation, in that dialogue has a focus and a purpose. Dialogue is different from debate, which offers two points of view with the goal of proving the legitimacy or correctness of one of the viewpoints over the other. Dialogue, unlike debate or even discussion, is as interested in the relationship(s) between the participants as it is in the topic or theme being explored. Ultimately, real dialogue presupposes an openness to modify deeply held convictions (Romney 1996: 1)
  • 14. Counter-storytelling  ‘challenge social and racial injustice by listening to and learning from experiences of racism and resistance, despair and hope at the margins of society’ (Yosso 2006: 171).
  • 15.
  • 16. PHD in School of Education at UCT What is the potential of a digital storytelling workshop as a process and a product to facilitate an engagement across difference within a post-conflict pedagogical framework? 1. What do the small stories told in these dialogical spaces tell us about how students construct notions of difference, how they position themselves towards each other and towards hegemonic discourses? 2. To what extent do the storytelling spaces during the workshop as part of the digital storytelling process facilitate an engagement across difference and in particular what is the potential of this process to elicit empathy and witnessing from the audience? 3. What do the digital stories as product of the workshop tell us about how students position and re-position themselves in terms of difference and what is the potential of this process to elicit empathy and witnessing from the audience?
  • 17. Studies on digital storytelling and difference  Lots of engagement around digital storytelling and difference  Less focus on difference & critical theory  Only two references on digital storytelling & counter-storytelling  Rolon-Dow (2011): Race(ing) stories: digital storytelling as a tool for critical race scholarship  Vaseduvan (2006): Making Known Differently: engaging visual modalities as spaces to author new selves
  • 18. Very positive reception  Potential of non-experts to create complex multimedia products (Hull and Katz 2006)  Sharability / publishability  Giving marginalised voices a forum  Breaking of culture of silence (Thumbran 2010)
  • 19. Own research  It is interesting to note that the students who participated in the digital storytelling approach came away with a deeper understanding of one another’s ethnic, racial and socio-economic backgrounds. The knowledge about other students enhanced the understanding and respect for one another in the class. The situation gave a practical example of what and how they would handle diverse classrooms when they begin their teaching career next year. (Condy et al 2012)
  • 20.  The study has showed the extent to which students essentialise race, identify along racial background lines and construct identities in opposition to each other, confirming findings of previous research (Leibovitz et al., 2010, Pattman, 2010; Rohleder et al., 2008; Bozalek, 2011). However, it has also showed how indirect knowledge (as Jansen (2009) calls it) that is passed on from generation to generation and still impacts on students‟ social engagements can come to the surface through these disruptive moments of sharing and listening openly to each other‟s stories, and may constitute a first step to transform students‟ engagements with one another. (Gachago et al 2014)
  • 21. Narrow genre  ‘as a cultural form it is marked by a fairly predictable, if not uniform, range of ways to represent the self’ (Burgess 2006, 209)  Poletti argues ‘that the specific narrative strategies of the digital storytelling form present significant barriers against digital storytelling being used as a means of redefining or challenging existing meanings attached to life experience, given its emphasis on narrative accessibility, closure, and coherence of theme (Poletti 2011).
  • 22. Sentimentality in DST  ‘Somewhat paradoxically from a critical perspective, it is the very qualities that mark digital stories as uncool, conservative, and ideologically suspect – ‘stock’ tropes, nostalgia, even sentimentality – that give them the power of social connectivity, while the sense of authentic self-expression that they convey lowers the barriers to empathy.‘ (Burgess 2006:10)
  • 23. Finally…  The seven story elements, as guides for participating in digital storytelling (and the ‘stuff’ its participants consume), coax life narratives in such a way as to encourage individuals to shape their heterogeneous experiences into stories of personal reflection on these dominant themes.  (Poletti 2011).
  • 24.  The power of personal storytelling lies in its potential to allow affective connection between storyteller and storylistener (Amy Shuman 2005)  Are some stories more capable than other to elicit empathy? (Frank 2010)  What kind of empathy do they elicit? (Boler 1999)
  • 25. Theoretical framework  Affective turn - Sara Ahmed (2004)  What do emotions do?  Emotions as relational / social practices  Attached to bodies  ‘comfort is the effect of bodies being able to ‘sink’ into spaces, that have already taken their shape. Discomfort is not simply a choice or decision – ‘I felt uncomfortable about this or that’ – but an effect of bodies inhabiting spaces that do not take or ‘extend’ their shape.’ (Ahmed 2004: 152)
  • 26. The ‘Other’  Iris Marion Young (1997)  Asymmetrical Reciprocity: we cant put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes  A temporal dimension, by which she refers to the kind of experiences that we have made in life, that make us unique and which cannot allow us to know the other or understand the other’s standpoint in life  And our social position in life, which is linked to issues of power and oppression and does not allow a symmetric reciprocity with the other
  • 27. Amy Shuman and the limits of empathy  Both the personal and the collective story can be legitimizing categories that provide meaning and pattern to life, but traversing the terrain between the personal and the collective can be fraught with obstacles to understanding. (2004: 55)
  • 28. Empathy  ‘Empathy preserves a distance between those who understand and those who experience trauma: witnessing troubles that distance, and while it does not necessarily close the distance, it transforms the distance enough for the witness to be part of the constituency of sufferer… empathy can produce alienation’ (Shuman 2004: 144, emphasis added).
  • 29. Sentimentality  The ordinary becomes precious, and as we know well, the precious is the most dangerous of representations; it is always precariously close to the trivial, just as its counterpart, the extraordinary, is precariously close to scandal. The ethnography of suffering requires a critique of empathy, an understanding of representation that represents emotion as neither trivial nor scandalous’ (Shuman 2004: 150)
  • 30. Destabilising empathy  when a personal story travels beyond the original story setting and is used as an allegory for a collective experience  entitlement claims are made that challenge sentimentalizing allegories which in turn undermine empathy – as she argues often as alibis for failure of empathy (personal narrative to similar to collective)
  • 31. Narrative inquiry  Arthur W. Frank 2010:  Letting stories breathe: A socio-narratology (2010)  Dialogical Narrative Analysis (DNA)  Stories seen as actors / stories do…  Having certain capabilities  Focus on relationship between story, storyteller and storylistener: ‘The storyteller gives breath to the story, but the story is already there, waiting.’
  • 32. 5 Questions of DNA  Resources: What narrative resources can storyteller draw from? What resources shape how the story is being told and comprehended? How are resources distributed?  Circulation: To whom is the story told, who can understand story and who can’t?  Affiliation: Who does the story render external or other to that group?  Identity: What identity is performed/constructed, what are possibilities to change? Or remain the same? What identity is claimed, rejected, experimented with?  What is at stake: Who is holding her/his own? Who is made more vulnerable by the story?
  • 33. How did I chose my stories?  Frank (2010: 43): ‘the analyst’s cultivated capacity to hear, from the total collection of stories, those that call out as needing to be written about.’  ‘Narrative analysis gives increased audibility to some stories, recasts how other stories are understood, and necessarily neglects many stories.’ (50)
  • 35. Capabilities of stories  Stories choose us  Stories make us uncomfortable  Stories go under our skin  Stories move us  Stories trouble power dynamics  Stories are out of control  Stories connect the personal and the political  Stories open spaces for wonder and respect
  • 36. Stories connect us  Daniela: What were the reactions of people or how did you perceived them?  Lauren: Shocked! But also like they felt with me, there was no judgement and I knew I expected judgement. I was ready to like put it all out and then when people just looked like they had empathy and they didn’t pity me, you know? They just felt with me in the moment that made me like ready to just share more!  Daniela: Why do you think they didn’t judge you?  Lauren: I don’t know I think because we clarified that it’s a space that was safe to say anything and just to be yourself …and the people in our group fortunately where people who are very open and diverse and …well I don’t know if they all were, but they are now at least you know …and I think they would have felt silly to judge me because it was a space where we all just kind of connected with each other - even for a moment you know?
  • 37. Stories make us see the ‘other’  Christine: Because I am comfortable being white and I am comfortable speaking English I am comfortable with my whiteness and I only realised when Noni was talking about it how white people unconsciously make black people feel. I had to leave the room to go to the bathroom had a good cry in the bathroom and then splash my face with cold water and then come back to class. And that’s why my nose was blocked when I did my recording because that was the day I did my recording but at the same time I was thinking about Noni’s discomfort.
  • 38. Stories make us see our sameness  Christine: I would actually almost want to give Noni the credit, she made me realise that we are all the same, we are all the same, we all feel the same. And again told me, in my mind, I was thinking: But you can make the difference! You can be the one to take the first step! Because this workshop showed us, that article actually showed me, where my weakness is. And it’s noted, I am not hesitant. It’s not that I don’t trust black people. It’s just that I have never thought of them as being intimate, somebody to be intimate with on a very close terms with. That’s, that’s about it. I can’t say, I can’t say, that I don’t want black people in my life but the course made me more aware that they have feelings. And then maybe there’s something that stops them from approaching me. But maybe they can see something in me that stops them from approaching me and making the first contact. It should come from me - you know? I can make it happen.
  • 39. Stories make us see shared experience  I was thinking about my father who was a poor white who was not welcome in wealthy people’s homes. Even in his own family extended family, a boy was given a chocolate wrapper and was thinking there was a piece of chocolate in it. He found nothing, only a little strips of melted chocolates which he is still licked in the street and afterwards he realised what he had done or what. He was: It’s like, I don’t know how to explain it, it’s like such total rejection and that’s what went through my mind for the whole of that day. I was out of it, all of it for the whole of that day. I was just thinking about the things we do to reject other people. Some people do it explicitly and some people don’t…What do we do as whites to make people feel like they’re nothing?  Daniela: And you’ve never thought about this before?  Christine : No! I’ve never thought of the black/white issues never!
  • 40. Stories move people  Thando: I was telling her [Lauren] about the story, her story… and then she said to me: You know what? The day I was telling my story you cried and then I noticed… and then she said: I knew those tears were not for nothing! I said: Hell no, you saw me very well (laughing)… yeah because I was living a lie and then I thought, if Lauren can be so, so brave about her sexuality, revealing about her sexuality in class and with her family, why I can’t I do it? Because I know one thing about me and my family…because of my education status I am more powerful than them. And I was thinking: if I reveal my sexuality and then they say: We disown you, I don’t care! I can survive on my own. And then from there I think the other day I sent my sister an sms. And then I told her about this sexuality of mine.
  • 41.  Daniela: You have said a lot of tough emotions [came up] is it?  Lauren: Yeah it is so overwhelming... (laughs)  Daniela: Would have expected something like that?  Lauren: No! Not at all not at all! People that I would never have guessed have been emailing me and messaging me the whole morning I have been talking to this one guy …  Daniela: In your class ?  Lauren: In our class yeahh, he has been emailing me like, telling me, he doesn’t know what to do with his feelings emm yeah …
  • 42. Stories make us uncomfortable  Daniela: So which of these stories affected you the most?  Christine: Lauren! Because I am homophobic…  Daniela: So listening to Lauren’s story what does that make you ...?  Christine: Ohhh, inside I was like screaming. I think [name of student] was the one who told me quite a long time ago that she’s like this. But I didn’t believe a thing until I heard it out of the horse’s mouth. Oh my god and then she asked me to read her story and then she said: Did you know this about me? And I just swallowed this big lump and I said: No, it’s the first time I hear of it. And I had to like: Ohhhhhh, keep it in this morning.
  • 43.  Daniela: Ok emm so what were the most uncomfortable moments for you in that process?  Lauren: Emm when Noni showed those photos of where she comes from. I felt not guilty but in a sense guilty, because I mean, I can’t help that am white. But I don’t know the way that they have lived, it’s not their fault either but that’s just how they live… so it was this kind of confusion of how has this happened? How do some people have to live like that and I lived so comfortably? And it made me made guilty in a sense, even though I am not in control of the fact that I was born as I am you know? And I just felt angrier as well because it was like, I could see that the other black people in the room where going: That’s where we live too, you know, it’s not a big deal! And the white people going: Ooooh shame! Like that it’s horrible you know and it made me feel so uncomfortable in that moment.
  • 44. Stories make us defensive  Sadika: I felt like: Well, everybody has their own opinion. And I just feel like: Yes, that happened. But it happened a long time ago. And it’s like, the generation that implemented Apartheid has died out. And people are living the way they’re living because of themselves. They also have to remember, they vote for the same president every year and that president has made no change. Yes, they have the power and the money to make the most change in the country, yet it isn’t. So why do why do people get the blame because of the past when we’ve had we’ve been democratic for almost 10 years? For more than 10 years! I also understand where she’s coming from, I truly understand, but I think African people are not the only people who suffer. Like coloured people also suffered and I mean if you go to other areas in Mitchells Plain… I don’t live in that area but if you go further in you’ll see, you have gangsters and people, coloured people, also live in shacks. They’re also waiting for the same opportunities as others. But I think the story just focuses on their race. I understand why - because she is who she is, but I think she should have broaden it because more than one race suffered.
  • 45.  Christine: She asked me to walk down to the Main Road with her for snacks and I thought: Wohhh! This is unusual - she doesn’t approach me for anything. But so far we’ve had long talks about the GEP file we’ve have to do for Janet. And now she asked me to go down to the Main Road with her. She’s just a normal girl. While I know she’s gay - I don’t see she’s gay.
  • 46. First conclusions  ‘Empathy is one kind of obligation, sometimes creating a possibility for understanding across differences, sometimes involving sentimentality, sometimes romanticising tragedy as inspiration, but in any case deeply compromising the relationship between tellers and listeners’ (Shuman 2004: 20)
  • 47.  People become the stories they tell (Frank 2010)  Stories are out of control  Have the potential but usually do not trouble power dynamics  They can render us vulnerable or help us hide our vulnerability (Butler 2004, 2009)  Difficulty of negotiate the personal and the political
  • 48.  ‘One is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. We are touched by stories we tell.’ (Butler 2004: 24)
  • 49. Critical emotional reflexivity  ….a process of using emotions as catalysts, to allow the questioning of beliefs and assumptions, exposing privilege and comfort zones, with the aim for learners to find new ways of being with the ‘Other’, and ultimately leading to transformed ‘relationships, practices, and enactments that benefit teaching and learning for peace, mutual understanding, and reconciliation’ (Zembylas 2011: 2)
  • 50. Noni: I don’t know if I agree too much but for me I thought it would have brought us closer than we are I mean I don’t know if we can all be honest it has as much as we talked to each other every now and then it hasn’t been personal relationships (emmm) as we I thought it will be after that intense week and I still talk more to these guys and I believe am gonna correct me if am wrong you guys still talk to the people you talk to in the group (emm) so I would say just a tiny bit because or may be not I don’t know. Faith: But may be that was just your expected outcome (emmm) may be that wasn’t... Noni: From the intensity of the week that’s what I thought it would do emm that’s what am saying may be I live in dream land. Christine: No I feel there has been more of a connection I don’t know if its just me but I have tried to …. Faith : Not in terms of actual personal relationship Lauren: That’s also like we’ve been here for four years I mean we have our friends you know we have our friendship groups just because it might be a race thing or something it doesn’t mean that we’re not building relationships with other people we just stuck to our original friend groups and that’s emmm Faith : And I think its also your definition of a friend (emm) like we can’t all have five hundred friends like real genuine friends (emmm) and I don’t know if that’s what you are talking about on ehhh. Noni: Emmmm
  • 51. Open questions  Difficulties / impossibility (?) to step out of somebody’s emotional habitus/practices / pull of comfort zones  Difficult to recognise the ‘other’ as ‘other’ in Young’s sense  Temptations to make someone the same / connect / look for similarities in experience  How can we love the other that is distant?  Maria Lugones’(1987:5-7): can students learn to ‘love each other by learning to travel to each other’s “worlds”’?  What to do with silences?
  • 52.  Awareness of topologies and capabilities of stories  ‘Naming types of narratives can help people think about what story they are telling what story they want to tell. Naming narrative types can authorize the telling of particular stories, and it also can liberate people from stories they no longer want to tell.’ (Frank 2010: 118)
  • 53. Dialogue is not ‘academic intervention’. In fact, dialogue is not a theoretical exercise at all. There may be room for these things but they are called something else—debate, discussion, argument—NOT dialogue. What is dialogue then? Above all, dialogue involves uncertainty. It is an investigation of something you do not know with one or more persons who also do/es not know. Dialogue is therefore a risk: rather than pounding yourself on the chest because you are so intensely extraordinary, or, wanting to pound someone else on the head because they are so agonisingly ordinary, dialogue rarely goes according to plan. Dialogue is three D’s; Delicate, Difficult and Desirable. (Minna Salami aka MsAfropolitan, Nov 10th 2014)
  • 54.  We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish and with some measure of triumph. - Elie Wiesel
  • 55. References  Alexandra, D. (2008). Digital storytelling as transformative practice: Critical analysis and creative expression in the representation of migration in Ireland. Journal of Media Practice, 9(2), 101–112.  Baldry, A., & Thibault, P. J. (2006). Multimodal Transcription and Text Analysis. United Kingdom: Equinox.  Burgess, J. (2006). Hearing ordinary voices: cultural studies, vernacular creativity and digital storytelling. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 20(2), 201–214.  Boler, M., & Zembylas, M. (2003). Discomforting Truths: The Emotional Terrain of Understanding Difference. In P. Trifonas (Ed.), Pedagogies of difference: Rethinking education for social change (pp. 110-136). New York: RoutledgeFalmer.  Bozalek, V. (2011). Acknowledging privilege through encounters with difference: Participatory Learning and Action techniques for decolonising methodologies in Southern contexts. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 14(6), 469-484.  Brushwood Rose, C (2009). The (Im) possibilities of Self Representation: Exploring the Limits of Storytelling in the Digital Stories of Women and Girls. Changing English, 16(2), 211–220. 4  Brushwood Rose, C. & Low, B. (2014). Exploring the “craftedness” of multimedia narratives: from creation to interpretation. Visual Studies, 29(1), 30–39.  Condy, J., Chigona, A., Gachago, D., & Ivala, E. (2012). Preservice students’ perceptions and experiences of digital storytelling in diverse classrooms. Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology (TOJET), 11(3), 278–285.  Frank, A. W. (2010). Letting stories breath: a socio-narratology. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.  Gachago, D., Ivala, E., Condy, J., & Chigona, A. (2013). Journeys across Difference: Pre- Service Teacher Education Students’ Perceptions of a Pedagogy of Discomfort in a Digital Storytelling Project in South Africa Daniela Gachago 1 , Eunice Ivala, Janet Condy and Agnes Chigona. Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning, 1(1), 22–52. doi:10.14426/cristal.v1i1.4  Hemson, C., Moletsane, R., & Muthukrishna, N. (2001). Transforming Racist Conditioning. Perspectives in Education, 19(2), 85-97.  Hull, G. A., & Katz, M.-L. (2006). Crafting an Agentive Self : Case Studies of Digital Crafting Storytelling.
  • 56.  Jansen, J. (2010). Over the rainbow - race and reconciliation on university campuses in South Africa. Discourse, 38(1).  Jewitt, C., & Oyama, R. (2001). Visual meaning: a social semiotic approach. In T. Van Leeuwen & C. Jewitt (Eds.), Handbook of visual analysis (pp. 134–156). London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, Singapore: Sage Publication.  Kress, G., & Van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal discourse - the modes and media of contemporary communication. London and New: Bloombury Academic.  Kress, G., & Leeuwen, T. van. (2006). Reading Images. Communication Research. New York: Routledge.  Lambert, J. (2010). Digital storytelling cookbook. Elements. Berkeley, CA: Center for Digital Storytelling.  Nelson, M. E., Hull, G. A., & Roche-Smith, J. (2008). Challenges of Multimedia Self-Presentation: Taking, and Mistaking, the Show on the Road. Written Communication, 25(4), 415–440.  Pattman, R. (2010). Investigating “race” and social cohesion at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. South African Journal of Higher Education, 24(6), 953-971.  Poletti, A. (2011). Coaxing an intimate public: Life narrative in digital storytelling. Continuum, 25(1), 73– 83. doi:10.1080/10304312.2010.506672  Rolon-Dow, R. (2011). Race(ing) stories: digital storytelling as a tool for critical race scholarship. Race Ethnicity and Education, 14(2), 159–173. doi:10.1080/13613324.2010.519975  Soudien, C. (2012). Realising the dream. Cape Town: HSRC Press. Retrieved from http://www.hsrcpress.ac.za/product.php?productid=2291&freedownload=1  Stein, P. (2004). Representation, rights and resources: Multimodal pedagogies in the language and literacy classroom. In B. Norton & K. Toohey (Eds.), Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning (pp. 95–115). Cambridge, New York, Melbourne and Madrid: Cambridge University Press.  Thumbran, J. K. (2010). Digital Storytelling and the Facilitation of Social Justice in Contexts of Social Injustice. Tilburg Univeristy.  Vasudevan, L. (2006). Making Known Differently: engaging visual modalities as spaces to author new selves. E-Learning, 3(2), 207. doi:10.2304/elea.2006.3.2.207
  • 57. Acknowledgement  Facilitators of 2013 ISP Digital Storytelling project  NRF staff development grant  NRF CPUT Digital Storytelling Project

Hinweis der Redaktion

  1. What are digital stories?
  2. Literal account vs conceptual narrative