Recent Trends in Using Life Stories for Social and Political Activism

Lenart-Cheng, Helga; Walker, Darija

doi:10.1353/bio.2011.0005

Cited by 14 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…In another example, DST can be used as an advocacy tool to contribute to policy processes. For policy makers, stories outline individuals' and communities' needs and priorities; for communities, engagement in consultations and decision-making can be more meaningful through recorded storytelling (Lénárt-Cheng and Walker, 2011). DST thus offered a creative means of engaging with the women in this study on an individual basis, and became an effective means of 'collecting' or gathering narratives that usually remain in the private sphere, and sharing them with significant others.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital Storytelling as a Social Work Tool: Learning from Ethnographic Research with Women from Refugee Backgrounds

Lenette¹,

Cox²,

Brough³

2013

British Journal of Social Work

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By using ethnographic research techniques, we can ask questions in order to understand some issues in the social sciences such as experience, the unique, the ordinary, daily life, emotions etc. However, it is possible to query the proficiency of current ethnographic techniques to design dialogic research and to convey the experiences of the 'subjects' of the field research. Techniques such as in-depth interviews, informal interviews and even the focus group depend on the dichotomy of the researcher who asks questions and the subject who responds to them. However, designing dialogic field research requires refusing those dichotomies, which can be considered to be inherited from a positivist understanding of science. In this article I discuss the potential of any digital storytelling workshop as an ethnographic research technique, with regard to three issues that seem problematic in current ethnographic techniques: integrated research processes; power and hierarchy relationships; and conveying the voice of subjects. The discussion of this article results from two academic experiences: One of them is my ethnographic field research experience for my doctoral dissertation; 1 the other is the digital storytelling workshop entitled When I was in the field: Digital Stories from Young Academic Women. 2 First, I

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital Storytelling as a Social Work Tool: Learning from Ethnographic Research with Women from Refugee Backgrounds

Lenette¹,

Cox²,

Brough³

2013

British Journal of Social Work

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“…Previous work on storytelling and e-advocacy argued that organizers continue to play a fundamental role in ensuring that the narratives that result from these emerging participatory techniques are both coherent and effective (Vromen and Coleman, 2013). Similarly, others pointed out that there is likely a tradeoff between maintaining the spontaneity of crowd-sourced personal stories and their efficacy in influencing policy-making processes (Lenart-Cheng and Walker, 2011: 150–151). Yet, the #SpartacusStories case study analyzed here showed that it is possible to generate a coherent counter-narrative by taking a relatively hands off approach to story-based online campaigns.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The first British advocacy group to launch a campaign featuring personal life stories was a digital network of disabled bloggers turned activists called The Broken of Britain. Having kept personal blogs for several years already, these young disabled individuals joined forces in 2010 and capitalized on the growing popularity of lifestyle blogs (Lenart-Cheng and Walker, 2011) to launch a new type of disability advocacy that used a range of innovative techniques (Trevisan, 2016). Among these, The Broken of Britain’s organizers invited other disabled Internet users to share their personal stories publicly on Twitter using the #MyDLA (short for ‘My Disability Living Allowance’) hashtag at critical moments during the welfare reform legislative process in 2011.…”

Section: Austerity As a Catalyst For Storytellingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crowd-sourced advocacy: Promoting disability rights through online storytelling

Trevisan

2017

Public Relations Inquiry

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This article sheds light on the emergent advocacy technique of building policy counter-narratives by crowd-sourcing, organizing, and disseminating personal life stories online. Focusing on the case of disability rights groups in the United Kingdom, this article uses qualitative in-depth content analysis to examine 107 blog posts containing personal disability stories published in 2012–2013 by two anti-austerity groups. Although each of these groups managed its blogs differently, with one carefully curating stories and the other publishing crowd-sourced narratives without any form of editing, they generated virtually identical counter-narratives. These accounts challenged the dominant news narrative that presented disability welfare claimants as ‘cheats’ and ‘scroungers’. They did so by retaining the overarching structure of the dominant narrative – which functioned as the de facto coordinating mechanism for the crowd-sourced counter-narrative – and replacing its content with three alternative arguments drawn from personal life stories. The implications of this new advocacy technique for disabled people and other marginalized groups are discussed. This includes considerations about the development of a form of story-based advocacy that is both effective and respectful of the people who ‘lend’ their lived experiences for advocacy purposes. This article concludes by highlighting the need for research to investigate whether the new voices that emerge through these processes are ‘being heard’ and can successfully re-frame public discourse about sensitive policy issues.

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“…‘In my effort to record my own life and a moment of gay history,’ he writes, ‘I seemed to have grasped something essential about growing up gay in America’ (Kantrowitz, 1996, 199). In 1976 he wrote in order to motivate gay readers to come out and join the gay movement, and to do that he personalizes history (Lénárt-Cheng and Walker, 2011).…”

Section: The Sexual Politics Of Militant Memoirsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They also offer social movement scholars unique insights into the subjectivity of social actors, especially participants in past social movements. Thus, not only sociologists, but also historians and even rhetoricians have analysed how memoirs, autobiographies, and life-stories have been produced as part of an effort to generate further mobilization in a given social movement (Lénárt-Cheng and Walker, 2011; Perkins, 2000; Taylor, 2009; Watson, 1999). This coincides with a more general trend in social movement sociology that approaches narratives as strategic tools for social movements (Benford, 2002; Polletta, 2006).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political memoirs and intimate confessions: Analysing four US gay liberation/gay rights militants’ memoirs

Marche

2017

Sexualities

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The US gay liberation and gay rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s are a contested historical and sociological terrain. We analyse the narrative reconstruction of militant identities in the memoirs of four gay movement militants-Martin Duberman, Amy Hoffman, Karla Jay, Arnie Kantrowitz. The article focuses on the way authors account for the interplay between their self-discovery through sexuality and through militancy. We endeavour to fully appreciate the interaction of the personal and the social in order to gauge the degree to which confessions about sexuality take on a meaning that escapes authors' control, or whether that meaning is a reflection of the authors' agency. After a brief summary of how the authors tell about their sexual history, the article analyses the four authors' distinctly different genders, generations, and political options as pertinent variables for comparison among the memoirs.

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Recent Trends in Using Life Stories for Social and Political Activism

Cited by 14 publications

References 3 publications

Digital Storytelling as a Social Work Tool: Learning from Ethnographic Research with Women from Refugee Backgrounds

Digital Storytelling as a Social Work Tool: Learning from Ethnographic Research with Women from Refugee Backgrounds

Crowd-sourced advocacy: Promoting disability rights through online storytelling

Political memoirs and intimate confessions: Analysing four US gay liberation/gay rights militants’ memoirs

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