Handbook of Communication for Development and Social Change by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811520143
Publisher: Springer Singapore

40.3.3 Emancipatory

Transformative storywork is an epistemological approach that promotes processes of knowledge creation that work in solidarity with marginalized group’s own agency. The approach draws from critical race, decolonizing, feminist, and queer arguments that challenge the privileging of certain groups’ social position and in turn ways of seeing and knowing over others. This approach is instantiated through techniques and methods that evolve and change with the group, individual, context, and issues of concern, guided by principles set out here.

Our values and principles affect how we do research and what we value in the results of our research. This means that the objective of transformative storywork as inquiry is emancipatory; it is not simply an exercise in understanding social experience, but rather it works toward transformative social change. Through reflexive, critical, and dialogic learning, transformative storywork aims to effect change at personal, collective, and societal levels. As such, the approach draws on some of the same principles and mechanisms that underpin participatory action research (Fine 2016; Greenwood and Levin 1998; Heron 1996). Importantly however, transformative storywork establishes the power of the storying process in challenging of power inequalities; this happens through the recognition of self and other beyond the categories and labels we are constructed within, enabling representation of who we are and who we as a society can be.

Transformative storywork aims to act as catalyst for social change. This is not to claim that emancipation will be realized through the work but rather that the processes, spaces, and knowledge created through the approach offer a contribution toward wider social and political projects addressing forces of domination such as (neo)-coloniality, (hetero)-patriarchy, and white supremacy. The storywork creates a space for the participants to explore these issues in their own lives. Our efforts as researchers and facilitators within the processes are to support storytellers to expand the possibilities of how they can use their story and the insights they have drawn from the process, to contribute to wider social change.

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