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By Any Media Necessary: Mapping Youth and Participatory Politics

Finding Your Story

Finding Your Story was the first webinar of the Storytelling and Digital-Age Civics series, held on January 14, 2014. Host Derek Williams was joined by MAPP team member Sangita Shresthova, Jason Russell (Invisible Children), Carol Zou (Yarnbombing LA), Monica Mendoza (Youthspeaks), Matt Howard (Iraq Veterans Against the War) and Erick Huerta (DREAMers) to explore how to identify and frame stories that engage with community.

The participants discussed the following questions during the webinar:

Walk us through a story you’ve developed that has helped to inform or inspire the work you do. How did you and your collaborators come up with this story? What factors helped you to see its value for your group? What are some of the roles that story has played in promoting your cause?
How do you define what is or isn’t a story?
There are always a million ways to communicate your project’s core message. Why did you choose the story or set of stories that you’re betting on the have the greatest impact? What was the impact that you sought?
How did you identify your target audience and how much does audience matter in your creative process? How did that decision affect the story’s form and substance? How narrowly defined is your target audience--how do you create a personal connection with a broad public about an issue they may not know or care a lot about? (e.g., undocumented immigrants, military veterans)
In your storytelling, how do you balance showing scale of the problem and having an individual personal narrative people can connect to?
Is there a recipe for a successful story? What features do the most powerful digital age civics stories share?
What anticipated critiques did you think about as you framed your story?
We wanted to have you respond to some key critiques that have been leveled against storytelling as a political tool (let’s take these one at a time): Some argue that activism should be governed by facts and arguments, not stories and that stories do not sustain long-term structural change. How do you respond to these critiques?

During the hour-long discussion panelists tackled all of the above questions, but the direct thread through the entire conversation was why focus on story in the first place? According to Monica Mendoza from Youthspeaks, “stories are what attracts people to issues” and are “the backbone to a lot of social movements.” For DREAM activist Erick Huerta, he uses the internet as a “message in a bottle,” with story as the message, to reach undocumented youth and other Dreamers. However the panelists pointed out that one of the challenges is that once your story is uploaded to the internet you no longer have complete control of the message. Invisible Children co-founder Jason Russell responded to some critiques of his organization’s largely white American audience, pointing out that stories are based on experience: “You write and create what you know and what you experience, and that creation or that story is a direct reflection of the audience that’s going to hear you.”

Don’t have time to watch the full webinar? The MAPP team also published highlights from this series on Henry Jenkins’ blog, and key moments from Webinars 1 & 2 and Webinars 3 & 4.

Looking for an overview of the series as a whole? MAPP Project Director Sangita Shresthova also published “Learn to Listen. Really Listen: ‘Storytelling and Digital Age Civics’ Series Artists and Activists Share Seven Key Insights” on Digital IS.

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Storytelling & Digital-Age Civics: Finding Your Story - 1/14/2014