rss_2.0Sciendo RSS Feed for Cultural Sciencehttps://sciendo.com/journal/CSJhttps://www.sciendo.comhttps://sciendo-parsed.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/6471a5fe215d2f6c89dabe45/cover-image.jpghttps://sciendo.com/journal/CSJ140216https://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.93ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.932016-12-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.94ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.942016-12-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.96ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.962016-12-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.95ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.952016-12-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.92ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.922016-12-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.89ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.892016-12-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.97ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.972016-12-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.90ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.902016-12-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.91ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.912016-12-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.78ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.782015-10-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.82<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>The research reported in this paper examines how two different groups, primary schoolchildren and elderly people, could close the generation gap through a digital storytelling-based interaction framework that can result in learning for the younger and intergenerational communication. Yesteryear jobs have been chosen as the theme of this research, based on the premise that, as computers and automated systems increasingly take the jobs humans once held, entire professions become extinct, and some of these endangered professions, from a milkman to an iceman, could become better known to primary school children through storytelling from elderly people. In this respect, the research reported in this paper has combined digital storytelling with techniques as traditional as theatrical games, in order to create a blended framework for intergenerational interactions. The research project was realized in the 15th Primary School of Piraeus, in Athens, Greece during academic years 2011-12 and 2012-13. It has involved a 6-month empirical study and embraced skills such as literature reading, story and song listening, painting, creating digital stories as well as improvising through theatrical games. The evaluation tools for the outcomes of this project comprised a questionnaire, participant observation, informal interviews and a video rubric for evaluating the digital creations of schoolchildren.</p></abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.822015-10-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.80<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>Literature argues that for post-conflict pedagogies to facilitate student engagement across difference it requires emotional engagement with the subject. However, how to achieve such emotional engagement, without falling into the trap of sentimentality, is an area that is under-researched. This paper reflects on conversations with South African students in a final year pre-service teacher-training programme, who developed digital stories as a vehicle for student engagement across difference. Applying ‘critical emotional reflexivity’ (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_csci.80_ref_040">Zembylas 2011</xref>) as an analytical framework, we found that students described the digital storytelling process as opening up different ways of being with/for the ‘Other’ and allowing them to start questioning cherished beliefs and assumptions about the ‘Other’. However, they had difficulties in placing themselves in a bigger historical and sociocultural context. Furthermore, the specific set-up of the project made it difficult to track lasting social change within students, the fourth element of Zembylas’ theoretical framework. Findings also confirmed the potential of digital stories to lead to sentimentality and ‘passive empathy’ (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_csci.80_ref_004">Boler 1999</xref>), characterised by pity from the part of the privileged observer and resentment from the subjugated storyteller. We recommend adding a historical-political analysis of previous students’ stories to the digital storytelling process in order to help students deconstruct positions premised on the existence of clearly differentiated identities and to consciously create spaces where a reflection on the emotions students encountered while sharing and listening to their stories can be facilitated.</p></abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.802015-10-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.86<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>Life storytelling projects have become an important means through which public service media institutions such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation are seeking to foster audience participation and involve particular cohorts in the creation and distribution of broadcast content. This paper contributes to the wider conversation on audience participation within public service media intuitions (PSMs), and focuses on the opportunities and challenges that arise within life storytelling projects that are facilitated by these institutions, and that aim to ‘give voice’ to members of ‘the audience’. In particular, it focuses on two of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s current life storytelling projects: ABC Open and Heywire.</p></abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.862015-10-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.87ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.872015-10-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.85<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>This paper introduces Milia (AppleTree), an open online platform for social interactive digital storytelling, which has been developed by the Laboratory of New Technologies in Communication, Education and the Mass Media, with the support of the University Research Institute of Applied Communication (URIAC) of the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies of the University of Athens. The Milia platform aims to support the representation, presentation and collaborative creation of any sort of stories in digital format. Applications of the platform can be found in storytelling per se, in education, in publishing and, more generally, in the creation and publication of collaborative digital works. The first part of the paper is focused on a state of the art review for digital storytelling platforms and discussion of some major challenges that these platforms are attempting to face. This review is followed by a second part, which discusses the technical features and functional capabilities of the Milia platform in detail, and a third part, which reports on applications of the platform that have already been realized and digital stories that are already available online. The paper is concluded with a discussion of limitations and directions of future work for the Milia platform.</p></abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.852015-10-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.81<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>Digital Storytelling is over 20 years old, its roots in citizen activism, its techniques evolving from radical theatre and media arts and its primary driver an unwavering commitment to enabling people to find and share their stories, as well as to the valuing of each and every one of those stories. This paper builds upon a presentation given at “Digital Storytelling in a Time of Crisis”, an international Digital Storytelling conference that took place in Athens in May 2014. It sets out to map some of the territory around Digital Storytelling and older people – ageing and the old (specifically the <italic>costs</italic> associated with a growing older population) being the ‘crises’ in question. The paper discusses questions concerning the benefits of Digital Storytelling with older people – both active older people and those who have dependency needs associated with ageing, such as dementia. The questions focus on the measurement of value, both in terms of participation in Digital Storytelling as a process and in the stories themselves. The paper is also self-reflective, as the writer embarks upon the formal route of PhD research, questioning the assumed benefits of the practice that has dominated the last eight years of over thirty years as a teacher and avid promoter of participatory media as a means to effect positive change. The paper is in 6 parts: (1) The Ageing Agenda; (2) Why Am I Doing This?; (3) What are the Benefits of Digital Storytelling with Older People? (4) The Pros and Cons of Digital Storytelling Projects (5) Extending Creative Practice and Silver Stories – Two Transnational Projects Linking Digital Storytelling and Older people – a sustainable model? (6) Ever Decreasing (Story) Circles.</p></abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.812015-10-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.83<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>This paper is based upon a paper delivered at the ‘Create, Act, Change’: The 5th International Digital Storytelling Conference in May 2013, in Ankara, Turkey <fn id="j_csci.83_fn_002" symbol="2"><p><ext-link ext-link-type="uri" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="http://www.digitalstorytelling2013.hacettepe.edu.tr/documents/program_web.pdf">http://www.digitalstorytelling2013.hacettepe.edu.tr/documents/program_web.pdf</ext-link></p></fn>. It aims to put forward a connection between digital storytelling and the sociology of emotions. For this purpose, it briefly gives a picture of the field of sociology of emotions. The paper sets out to offer some self-reflection, because the aim of this piece is closely related to the academic interests of the writer. Following the path of self-reflection, it introduces common points between digital storytelling and the sociology of emotions.</p></abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.832015-10-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.88<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>By using ethnographic research techniques, we can ask questions in order to understandsome 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: <italic>integrated research processes; power and hierarchy relationships;</italic> and <italic>conveying the voice of subjects</italic>. The discussion of this article results from two academic experiences: One of them is my ethnographic field research experience for my doctoral dissertation; <fn id="j_csci.88_fn_001" symbol="1"><p>When I was writing my doctoral dissertation, entitled <italic>The Experience of Asylum Seeking in Turkey within the Context of Intercultural Communication</italic>, I conducted field research between 20 July and 20 December 2011, when I investigated how asylum-seeking in Turkey is experienced in daily life within the context of intercultural communication. In my field study, which lasted for five months in Gaziantep, one of the provinces that is located on the south-eastern part of Turkey, I adopted and put to use the participant observation, informal interview and in-depth interview techniques. I experienced a number of difficulties in conducting a field research with a sensitive (disadvantaged) group of people such as the asylum seekers.</p></fn> the other is the digital storytelling workshop entitled <italic>When I was in the field: Digital Stories from Young Academic Women</italic> . <fn id="j_csci.88_fn_002" symbol="2"><p>We conducted this workshop within the body of Hacettepe University, Faculty of Communication, between 25 March and 16 April 2013. I was one of the facilitators of the workshop. We had two purposes. The first was to share stories about our field research experiences as woman academicians. We wanted to understand if gender differentiates the field research experiences. The second was to use DST (digital storytelling) as an ethnographic research technique. We wanted to discuss the problems of ethnographic research techniques that we encounter in the field and see if DST has a potential that allows us to ask new questions.</p></fn> First, I discuss the weaknesses of current ethnographic research techniques and, second, I focus on how digital storytelling workshops can help to reduce these weaknesses. Finally, in conclusion, I touch on the discussions – carried out in the workshop mentioned above – regarding the opportunities and difficulties of using the digital stories and the workshop process as one of the ethnographic research techniques.</p></abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.882015-10-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.84<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>In this paper, I interrogate our understanding of social change in the telling of self-representational digital stories, stories that speak from the perspective of the storyteller and which centre on the “I”. There is a growing audible criticism of the value of these digital stories if distribution and outreach of such stories do not reach both wider and critical audiences. As a digital storytelling practitioner, I examine these criticisms and draw attention first to our understanding of storytelling, and second to our understanding of audiences within an ancient oral tradition of humankind. There is no doubt that the digital in digital storytelling allows for a global arena of possibilities. However, it is these very same global possibilities within the digital that have possibly forced a cursory value on storytelling by the most important audience among audiences—the marginalised "I" who struggles for political, social and economic attention. The existential self is severely talked down to for not going beyond that one digital story or those few friends and family members. In these instances, that potential to transform “power over” into “power with” and “power within” the storytellers quickly disintegrates. What happens instead is an expansion of the pool of judges of narratives, a predominant and more overt phenomenon in the field of human rights. What form the final narrative takes in any digital storytelling project is often shaped by the interests of these “mediators” who turn “judges of narratives” when they mould and package these stories to be more palatable to their specific audiences and consumption needs. The storyteller's sense of existential peril is in this way prolonged. These untoward developments beg us to ask the question, “what change then are self-representational digital stories meant to bring about?”</p> <p>Change is too often seen as synonymous to "cause and effect". Drawing from interviews conducted with those who organise and conduct digital storytelling workshops within a human rights framework around the world, as well as those who have strived for social change through storytelling in Malaysia, I contend that there is no such causality. The "change" is in fact dialogic and in constant flux—between self and other, self and non-self and in being for self and the other—in that storyteller's struggle of regaining control over situations and circumstances she or he had little or no control over. For what is implied in self-representational stories is that the intended audience of such a digital story inherently must include and bring meaning to the “I”, the storyteller.</p></abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.842015-10-31T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.79<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>What sort of story can you tell with just a pot, a cup, a coffee pot, a jar, a chopping board, an onion and a knife? Would the stories told among a group of seven PhD candidate women reveal the burden of writing a PhD dissertation relating the process to cooking? We, eight women, came together to run an event for the March 8^th, International Women’s Day in 2014 and talked about what we had been experiencing during the period of writing master’s and PhD dissertations through the help of some ordinary life kitchen objects. We called this digital storytelling workshop, “I have food on the stove”, getting our inspiration from a very common phrase used by women during their everyday life conversations in Turkey. This workshop enabled me to think about what kind of roles both kitchen and objects have in our lives and how telling stories help women to deal with hard times.</p></abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.5334/csci.792015-10-31T00:00:00.000+00:00en-us-1