ABSTRACT
The avenues through which communities and community organisations raise awareness and create a broader understanding about the issues they face have shifted rapidly in the past ten years. Digital technology provides individuals and groups who rarely have their voices heard or their experiences accurately represented in the public sphere with new methods to agitate for change and recognition. The same technology has supplied researchers with innovative ways to collect and share stories gathered from marginalised communities. Stories can be created quickly, and shared widely through the use of a range of open-source storytelling software. Data collected from and about lived experiences of communities can be represented creatively through digital technology, and concepts such as transmedia storytelling have increased the modes and styles through which such stories are shared. This chapter explores the links between storytelling and social change, the intervention of digital technology into this tradition, and the subsequent opportunities to contextualise and amplify community-based activism and research. Two projects will be discussed (‘Hollow’ and the campaign by the Forgotten Australians) to explore the ways in which each project utilised these methods or approaches, and in turn illustrate the possibilities of amplified storytelling. There is a long tradition in community arts, community development and social research that posits personal narratives as the building blocks for public understanding (see Davis, 2002; McAdams, 2001; Stivers, 1993). Harter, Japp and Beck (2005) maintained ‘narrative is a fundamental way of giving meaning to experience’ (p. 3). In the past 20 years, and particularly since the advent of Web 2.0, digital technology has dramatically changed the ways in which stories are crafted, spread and experienced by audiences. In the area of social activism and qualitative research, it is possible to see an emerging intersection between the availability of digital technology and recognition of the stories of marginalised groups. The ‘narrative turn’ that has occurred across many academic fields has influenced profoundly the ways in which researchers choose not only to
gather data, but also the methods through which they represent data (see Hyvärinen, 2010, p. 75; Polkinghorne, 1988).
