Abstract
Many community-based organizations use digital storytelling as a strategy for community development, aiming to cultivate increased social agency and community leadership in participants through practices of storytelling and media production. Reporting on a three-year study of digital storytelling with newcomer women in Toronto, and drawing on Winnicott’s theories of creative living, this paper suggests that the successes of such social justice projects might be better understood if we consider the ways in which the capacity for social engagement is cultivated through experiences of emotional risk-taking and psychological creativity, and made possible by the holding environment offered to participants.
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Notes
This research was generously funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am indebted to my fellow researchers on this grant – Dr. Paula Salvio (University of New Hampshire) and Dr. Bronwen Low (McGill University) – for their intellectual inspiration and collaboration.
The Center for Digital Storytelling was founded in the Bay Area the early 1990s by Dana Atchley and Joe Lambert, who are widely regarded as having coined the term “digital storytelling” and developed and disseminated the model of the Digital Storytelling Workshop on which the digital storytelling project studied here is based (Lambert, 2006, www.storycenter.org).
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Brushwood Rose, C. The subjective spaces of social engagement: Cultivating creative living through community-based digital storytelling. Psychoanal Cult Soc 21, 386–402 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2015.56
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2015.56