[o]ften their very last asset is their story. It is often valuable, because it acts like a canary in the coalmine. If told in the right way, and placed with the right audiences, these stories can illuminate things we need to know about ourselves and things we need to shift as a society.
The storytelling process, as a social transaction, engages people in communicative relationships. Through identification and co-creation of story, the storyteller and reader/listener create an affective bond and a sense of solidarity: told and re-told ‘my story’ becomes ‘our story’.
(2002, 19)
A global shift has occurred around how societies design and deliver human services for marginalised cohorts, which is centred on creating with end users rather than for end users (Bason 2010). This requires a fundamental change in how we recognise and value the voices and experiences of individuals and groups who are rarely heard. Story and narratives are acknowledged as powerful tools for changing dominant perceptions of marginalised groups, and personal narratives are important mechanisms for creating social change and promoting social inclusion. They can do this by building empathy and creating understanding across difference (Gottschall 2012; Jackson 2013; Simmons 2006). Well-crafted and strategically shared stories can encourage shifts in attitudes across diverse groups in society, illuminate meaning out of patterns, reveal the universal in the individual and create an alternative vision for future actions (Davidson 2017). Community-centred and community-led storytelling is generally understood as a useful means through which under-represented communities can advocate for change, but a deep understanding of the intersections between the unique properties of stories and the affordances of various methods through which to communicate effectively with targeted audiences has yet to be developed. In Australia, we have witnessed the potential for storytelling and personal narratives to shift the national consciousness and direct new policy settings in the cases of the Stolen Generation, the Royal Commission into Institutionalised Childhood Sexual Abuse (and more recently into the Financial and Residential Aged Care sectors) and drawing attention to the day-to-day challenges of drought-affected remote communities (Adkins and Hancox 2014; Vivienne and Burgess 2013). Many of the facts about the abuses of power, the neglect and lack of assistance associated with each of these issues were well known, sometimes for decades, but it was not until the stories of survivors and their families made it into the public consciousness was there widespread demand for justice and change.
The 2017 Australian Government Productivity Commission report into improving human services and policy found that understanding the population and the services they need is essential to making sound decisions. Population analysis, coupled with on-the-ground evidence drawn from service providers and others with local experience or an understanding of particular cohorts, needs to be used to build a more detailed picture of the needs of people experiencing hardship, along with considering co-design processes to improve the chance of successful outcomes (20–21). This process of co-creating equitable policy and futures with those most affected must involve stories and storytelling, not only data and information gathering. For profoundly marginalised groups, being asked to share or receive information through formal processes used widely by government and non-government organisations can be seen as suspicious, intrusive or inappropriate in language or format. Many organisa-tional forms of gathering and sharing information, such as focus groups, surveys and interviews, inadvertently silence already marginalised voices. They are also imbued with inherent barriers like English language proficiency, confidence and tacit knowledge. Unfortunately, these methods are often the key means of designing services or developing policy. A number of the projects presented over the course of this book dismantle these existing frameworks and reconfigure ways of gathering and sharing information based on the needs and experiences of the creators and end users. This is delivered in conjunction with an inclusive and holistic approach using new media, in an effort to identify the most accessible and meaningful methods of communication. Arts-based engagement methods are recognised as an important set of approaches through which to promote social inclusion and justice. It uses a process of engaging marginalised individuals in creating and sharing stories designed to initiate social change (Boydell et al. 2012).
Stories by rather than about marginalised groups also enable us to see ‘differ-ent and sometimes contradictory layers of meaning, to bring them into useful dialogue with each other, and to understand more about individual and social change’ (Andrews, Squire, and Tamboukou 2013, 2). In Narratives, Health and Healing, Harter, Japp, and Beck (2008, 3) maintain that ‘narrative is a fundamental way of giving meaning to experience’. It is also capable of giving voice and meaning to the experiences of groups and communities who have previously only been represented through research, in the media or government policy by others rather than determining their own forms of representation. The belief that stories have an important role to play in social change has an abiding place in many organisations and social movements.
Polkinghorne (1988, 18) suggested that ‘narrative is a meaning making structure that organizes events and human actions into a whole, thereby attributing significance to individual actions and events according to their effect on the whole’ and, as such, it privileges plot structure as a central feature. This emphasis is generally considered integral to narrative and suggests a need for a linear and coherent order of events for a story to be effective in communicating with an audience. However, stories and narratives have multiple purposes, and in some instances, a story can be represented through various media and in abstract ways to convey the experiences of the storytellers and to engage the audience in a way that ‘stimulates the audience’s creative participation and identification and invites them to supply what is unspecified yet required’ (Davis 2002, 16).
Transmedia storytelling allows for the creation of a series of individual stories in an effort to reflect the multiplicity of voices and heterogeneous experiences in any environment. Narrative research and praxis focus on ‘more holistic research processes while sharing mutual responsibilities to enhance understanding of local phenomenon and explore the transformative possibilities for improving local context’ (Blodgett et al. 2011, 523). Stories used in this way do not promise widespread understanding and resolution of social issues or inequality simply because a narrative has been created and shared by those directly affected. Rather, they signal that there is more to be done and more to be understood, and these changes need to be established from within those local contexts. Andrews, Squire, and Tamboukou (2013, 4) describe poststructural-ist, postmodern, psychoanalytic and deconstructionist approaches to narrative research as having assumed that multiple, disunified subjectivities were involved in the production and understanding of narratives, rather than singular, agentic storytellers and hearers. They also assert the practice was preoccupied with the social formations shaping language and subjectivity. In this tradition, the storyteller does not tell the story, so much as they are told by it.
Whenever we talk about storytelling, particularly in a Western context, we are also touching on issues of authorship. Transmedia storytelling presents a range of sometimes conflicting approaches to authorship, but, most importantly to the arguments and examples in this book, it allows for diffusion and horizontal concepts of authorship, along with ‘a dynamic and participatory process, where the lines between the author and the audience are blurred’ (Spanoudakis et al. 2015, 108). Before exploring these possibilities further, it is also important to understand that this approach is far less common than is sometimes touted in the rhetoric around transmedia. The possibility of some level of community authorship is certainly intrinsic to transmedia storytelling, but its practice is far rarer. Mostly, transmedia stories have been designed to allow as much participation and engagement as is deemed necessary and this is tightly controlled by the creators. Interaction, participation and engagement are complex and problematic terms and have been co-opted to describe activities from the most basic actions to move through a story to genuine collaboration and co-creation. This chapter explores how creators and audiences relate to one another in transmedia storytelling, the capabilities designed into the story to facilitate this relationship, and why it is important. Srivastava expands on the way transmedia storytelling ...