ABSTRACT
This themed issue speaks to the political significance and power of stories and epistemological privileges, and the impact and influence of identity, technology, and culture in our storied communication. The digital focus of the last 20 years continually impacts how we tell and disseminate stories, how we make and record observations (research), and how we teach and reach audiences (publication). Featured essays foreground the ways we can use our voices, stories, histories, and scholarship to make sense of contexts, moments, and experiences that are sometimes unspeakable, but other times ineffable, as well as ways narrative and ethnography can be joined with other methods to amplify the personal and generalizable. Contributors approach the study of communication through emergent media including virtual reality, game studies, digital storytelling, podcasts, photovoice, film, and the study of sound.
Part of what was missing in our literature could be called “the human stories” of communication … which was clearly a rhetorical byproduct of the distanced, so-called objective, positivist-endorsed method of acquiring information from people.—H. L. Goodall, Jr.Footnote1
In the world of communication, the distinction between the personal and the cultural becomes blurred. Most of our communicative acts express the personal and the cultural, the particular and the general, the unique and the universal.—Arthur P. Bochner and Carolyn EllisFootnote2
… cyber or digital autoethnography is concerned with self in cyberspace and the digital ecology as well as how media technologies simultaneously disembody and reembody our experiences.—Ahmet AtayFootnote3
The dominant way of knowing in the academy is that of empirical observation and critical analysis from a distanced perspective: “knowing that,” and “knowing about.” This is a view from above the object of inquiry: knowledge that is anchored in paradigm and secured in print. This propositional knowledge is shadowed by another way of knowing that is grounded in active, intimate, hands-on participation and personal connection: “knowing how,” and “knowing who.” This is a view from ground level, in the thick of things.—Dwight ConquergoodFootnote4
Communication scholars first embraced personal narrative and reflexivity as interdisciplinary cornerstones of ethnographies and creative communication research in the early 1990s. The approach offered an alternative to traditional social scientific writing for researchers who were committed to epistemologies of lived experience and difference.Footnote7 Conquergood's performative and ethnographic “knowing how” and “knowing who” offered thick description for people who were queer, disabled, of color, class disadvantaged, or otherwise marginalized.Footnote8 This commitment to documenting stories and/as communication was pioneered by scholars who understood the inextricability of the personal and the political. The articles in this themed issue highlight emergent forms of storytelling in digital/new media and embrace the ways technology creates space for otherwise absent identities and experiences, makes research available to everyday people in discernable contexts, and offers accessibility for those who experience restriction due to class, disability, and/or language barriers.Footnote9
The work in this collection responds to Conquergood's call to tell stories and situate epistemological knowledges from the ground up, from the “thick of things” to resituate and reimagine communication scholarship as a project of hybridity. Featured essays forward the kind of revolutionary research Conquergood championed, engaging the possibilities of an unknown future that will undoubtedly shift but always make space for communicative storytelling. Atay's call for cyber or digital autoethnography responds to the emergence of virtual ethnography in the 2000s, which challenged traditional ways of studying culture to include computer-mediated communication and digital technologies.Footnote10 Virtual ethnography began to account for the ways culture is redefined through technology, which informs how we are immersed in online and actual communities, how we collect and analyze stories in those communities, and what it means to do research in digital spaces. Atay asserts that new media technologies offer new ways to tell stories that are experiential, multidimensional, culturally curated, and digitally mediated. Communication research that is future focused can capitalize on new technologies and innovations, particularly in storytelling. Many of the essays in this themed issue contain embedded audio and video links and/or photographs to document their research process, while others rely on thick description and explanation. Each project includes immersive engagement, engaged storytelling, and/or technology as a way of researching (about) communication.
According to the New Media Institute's website, new media is “a catchall term used to define all that is related to the internet and the interplay between technology, images and sound.”Footnote11 As a field, new media helps define communication, and therefore communication as a discipline must adapt and embrace decolonizing methodologies that are digital, sound-centric, and embodied. In the field, community-centered and other-oriented projects can be grounded in communication without being bound by it. Digital methods are interdisciplinary and therefore more legible and accessible, creating an opportunity to expand and not limit storytelling. By centering visual, aural, and oral communication to respond to the limits of language with the possibilities of embodied engagement and empathy, contributors story communication in unique and overlapping ways—using personal stories and visual and creative methods including visual storytelling, digital storytelling, short film, virtual reality, photovoice, and gaming.
Following the impulse of creative writing instruction, the featured essays are connected through the desire to offer nuanced stories that “show” more than they “tell” and center experiences of history, identity, visibility, positionality, oppression, and discrimination. Like their scholarly predecessors, these stories also offer cultural critique and intentional self-reflexivity as touchstones of moral (auto)ethnographic storytelling. The articles in this issue are connected through themes of erasure and visibility, ethics and accountability, critiques of whiteness, intersectional identity, representation, digital technology, community, political implications, sound/story, and embodiment. Unlike earlier generations of (auto)ethnography, contributors to this themed issue include media forms other than text. These multimedia works seek to create more equitable and accessible scholarship, and more ethical and social justice centered research.
Some of the projects look at the affordances of new digital forms of storytelling (e.g., video games and virtual reality tours). Other projects make direct use of those forms to critique and revise narratives (e.g., representations of Black masculinity, campaigns to humanize poverty, how audio archives document the shared experiences of women of color, how photographs tell the story of our bodies and how voice can be articulated through material means).
Looking (and sounding) forward: storied futures
Borrowing from the epigraphs framing the introduction, communication as a discipline has evolved and become more inclusive, creating opportunities for more participatory, collaborative, and arts-based methodologies. Digital research methods can be used to pose and answer questions about communication. While the acceptance of creative and arts-based methods is still emergent and may never replace “traditional” methods, the essays herein imagine methodological futures that are technology- and social justice driven. (Auto)ethnography and critical storytelling blur with digital technology in ways that will allow future researchers to be fully engaged and immersed in their research, not only as participant observers, but as self-observing, self-aware participants who are in collaboration with community and who understand that the contexts and contours of culture allow the benefit of subjectivity. Emergent media and storytelling devices will continually influence not just how we do research, but also how we tell research stories.
Stories, like technology, assume active participation and/or engagement with an audience. If a tweet is a story (or storied excerpt and representation) of an experience that can be shared, archived, commented on, reposted, and hashtagged, then the audience becomes not only a passive participant who reads and disseminates a story, but also an active agent who coconstructs it. I believe research and storied research has the same reach. Whether by watching, listening, imagining, or remembering, we are continually invited into the stories of others and new communicative methods of self-representation. Technology invites us all to be storytellers, sharers, and witnesses in new ways, crossing international and intercultural boundaries, and research genres.
It is not lost on me that most of the scholarship contained in this themed issue will be restricted behind a paywall, but the digital stories that accompany the analyses are available for public consumption and consideration. From video games and virtual reality tours to short films and podcasts, these visually voiced and aurally conceived ethnographic and autoethnographic projects offer opportunities for critical scholarship to escape the confines of the academy—reaching into communities, informing popular culture, and impacting the public sphere by shaping and introducing conversations about power, identity, and voice. This themed issue asks not just how communication and technology can empower us to tell stories but who gets to tell their own story.Footnote12 It also asks what is possible when digital technologies are used for purposes of social justice.
Stories and/in communication
I initially conceived of this themed issue as an opportunity to review and reimagine how technology-driven tools for storytelling, and therefore communication, are central to the ways we engage the world and each other. I was interested in compiling emergent scholarship about the inextricable relationship between stories and communication, stories (with)in communication, and stories as communication while simultaneously considering how new methods and modalities, particularly those that center embodiment and/or interactive digital engagement, make the creation and dissemination of stories more accessible to the public.Footnote13 While not entirely or exclusively a communication project, digital technology of the 21st century invites communicative analysis because communication has always influenced and been influenced by technology. Communication scholars are uniquely positioned to help explain why communication, which is both inherently narrativized and consequential, is best theorized through lived experience.
Communication studies’ turn toward storytelling began in the late 20th century with Walter R. Fisher's Human Communication as Narration, in which he argued that all human communication is storied and should be evaluated on narrative-based assessments.Footnote14 Arthur P. Bochner and Carolyn Ellis, alongside other pioneers such as H. L. (Bud) Goodall Jr. and Nick Trujillo, followed, signaling the emergence of autoethnography (then also referred to as narrative ethnography, personal ethnography, or new ethnography).Footnote15 The introduction of a more humanistic approach to the study of communication encouraged ethnographic researchers to be self-reflexive (self) investigators and not disembodied spectators of culture.
Storied communication in/as research has personal, political, and polysemic value. Because “communication has an autoethnographic dimension,”Footnote16 and our experiences and representations of those experiences are often storied, communication involves self-presentation and personal awareness—an understanding of the importance of identity and standpoint, and a reckoning with reflexivity. Stories shape politics and have political value, particularly as they relate to citizenship and belonging, representations of disenfranchisement, and dismantling the normalization of patriarchal whiteness by decentering cisheteronormativity. Politics are also at play when we deconstruct the hierarchy of who does research and who is researched. Critical (auto)ethnography turns this tension on its head, not by reversing the role of researcher and researched, but by collapsing them into one embodied experience.Footnote17 Storytellers understand the relationship between stories and politics to be embedded in the ways power is defined and constituted, and who has access to it. Storytellers as researchers harness the political power of stories to contextualize history, offer cultural critique, promote social awareness, and seek social justice.Footnote18
Stories are ubiquitous. The polysemy of storytelling in studies of communication is made manifest through not only the varying entry points and departures represented in this themed issue, but also the mundane and extraordinary events of everyday life.Footnote19 From historians to professors to journalists to people in therapyFootnote20—we are all always telling our versions of a story to various ends. Polysemy refers to the multiple meanings and interpretations that inform what a story is and what a story means. For example, stories are pervasive—we hear hundreds of stories every day. The significance of stories often shifts depending on the questions and contexts that inform them, and their audience(s).
Preview of contributions
This themed issue speaks to the political significance and power of stories and epistemological privileges, and the impact and influence of identity, technology, and culture in our storied communication. The digital focus of the last 20 years continually impacts how we tell and disseminate stories, how we make and record observations (research), and how we teach and reach audiences (publication). This themed issue includes essays that foreground the ways we can use our voices, stories, histories, and scholarship to make sense of contexts, moments, and experiences that are sometimes unspeakable, but other times ineffable, as well as ways narrative and ethnography can be joined with other methods to amplify the personal and generalizable.
In the opening essay, “Immersive Storytelling and Affective Ethnography in Virtual Reality,” Maud Ceuterick and Chris Ingraham discuss virtual reality as the most exclusive and expensive storytelling medium. Primed for the privileged, they reflect on virtual reality's virtues and shortcomings by storying their separate immersive experiences viewing an Emmy-nominated virtual reality film, Traveling While Black. As reflective researchers, they discuss accessibility, not in terms of marginalized folk having access to the technology, but of privileged folk having access to the contextual realities and interior experiences of marginalized people they would otherwise not have access to. While all virtual reality creates temporary ethnographic encounters, Ceuterick and Ingraham state immersive nonfiction virtual reality can instead evoke ethnographies of encounter, which Lieba Faier and Lisa Rofel define as “engagements across difference” that “retain a commitment to demonstrating how unequal cultural histories and forms of difference have material and political effects.”Footnote21 Ceuterick and Ingraham also consider and critique the role of empathy induced by the storyline.
In “Becoming the Other,” Rebecca Leach and Marco Dehnert use an intersectional approach to game studies to argue that video games with nuanced storylines can offer players the opportunity to experiment with different identities and empathize with experiences of discrimination. They suggest that the parasocial relationship that emerges in gaming, and the intimacy and opportunity for full immersion, can make players more aware of the implications of race and racism, gender and sexism, and the hypersexualization of feminized characters in the medium. While their analysis is based on critical engagement that is not solely for entertainment, they discuss Detroit: Become Human as a unique choose-your-own-adventure game with nuanced identity representations that allow users to resist stereotypes through their story choices.
In “Applying the Culture-Centered Approach to Visual Storytelling Methods,” Phoebe Elers, Steve Elers, Mohan J. Dutta, and Richard Torres assert that while digital technologies such as digital storytelling make research more accessible to marginalized communities, they can also contribute to silencing them. They illustrate this phenomenon by analyzing a video public service campaign they cocreated with research participants. While they endorse visual storytelling methods alongside reflexive sensemaking as an ethical alternative to traditional ethnography, they suggest that adopting a culture-centered approach alone alongside digital methods will not buffer unintended othering. While digital storytelling, which intends to amplify the voices of all participants,Footnote22 is a more democratic, collaborative, and ethical model, they argue that participants can only become equitable partners in research and knowledge production if power dynamics are exposed and resisted.
Ethical and intentional community engagement is a theme that also applies to Anjuli Joshi Brekke, Ralina Joseph, and Naheed Gina Aaftaab's essay, “I Address Race because Race Addresses Me.” They preserve and reference the spoken voices of participants from their audio digital storytelling project to discuss how women of color are empowered through sharing their stories with other women of color. The podcasts produced through their radical listening digital media project made it possible to create recordings that serve as “digital receipts”—testimonies of trauma turned into evidentiary record, mapping and time-stamping moments that will remain accessible to an audience. Reflecting on the intimacy of conversations between women of color and the vulnerability of those conversations becoming public, they highlight the benefits of interactive interviewing as a way of eliciting stories, the necessity of researcher reflexivity in the research process, and the risks of releasing storied research (because personal stories cannot be rescinded once they are made public).
In “Anatomy of the Before and After,” Phillip E. Wagner recommends photovoice as a progressive, egalitarian, arts-based research method for telling visual stories that are more reliant on aesthetics than sound. To illustrate, he focuses on the visibility of obesity and the obscurity of thinness as he traces his weight-loss journey using autoethnography and a visual research methodology known as photovoice. Wagner reflects on his embodied and weighted experience, from childhood to adulthood, through photographs, reflections, memories, and stories.
In the short film and accompanying artist statement, Unveiling Our Scars, Marquese L. McFerguson expands autoethnography with visual imagery and voiceover to make sense of Black heterosexual romantic relationships. He focuses on the ways masculinity and Blackness are embodied and therefore performed, mapped on the body of the actor, and shaped by the poetic words of the author. The film relies on nonverbal communication and choreography to express the visual vulnerability and emotions captured in McFerguson's corresponding poem, which is orated. By anchoring the stories of his past romantic relationships in communication scholarship on Black masculinity and representation, McFerguson tells a story that resists cultural stereotypes of Black manhood. The film serves as a conduit of visible aurality, showing a range of representations to humanize Black men.
In the final essay, “Queerness, Sounded,” Sophie Jones and Shinsuke Eguchi engage notions of queer and quare autoethnography to reflect on their experiences of difference through sound. They call for a critique of cisheteronormative whiteness by challenging the ways identity is shaped by sound and language, troubling spoken and written word, and what they call “embodied knowledge(s) of sound” to talk through their shared and separate experiences of marginalization. They ask what is made possible when we shift our visual orientation of identity and understanding to aural and oral conceptualizations of identity—marking queerness, Asianness, and otherness through sound and flesh.
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By collaborating and coconstructing narratives, we can (re)center and/or (re)consider the stories of the marginalized, articulate and amplify experiences, build alliances, rearticulate representations, confront trauma, expose exploitation, resist cultural homogenization, and imagine a better, more just world. Technology is a constant reminder of change and what is possible, and stories are universal, unending, and ongoing reservoirs of possibility. What's your story?
Acknowledgements
This themed issue would not be possible without the advice and assistance of Kathleen McConnell and Sohinee Roy; the timely and generous feedback of anonymous reviewers; and the vision and dedication of its talented contributors.
Notes
1 H. L. Goodall Jr., Writing the New Ethnography (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2000), 63.
2 Arthur P. Bochner and Carolyn Ellis, “Communication as Autoethnography,” in Communication as … Perspectives on Theory, ed. Gregory J. Shepherd, Jeffrey St. John, and Ted Striphas (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005), 113.
3 Ahmet Atay, “What Is Cyber or Digital Autoethnography?” International Review of Qualitative Research 13, no. 3 (2020): 271.
4 Dwight Conquergood, “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research,” TDR: The Drama Review 46, no. 2 (2002): 146.
5 Conquergood, “Performance Studies.”
6 Atay, “What Is Cyber or Digital Autoethnography?” See also Tasha R. Dunn and W. Benjamin Myers, “Contemporary Autoethnography Is Digital Autoethnography: A Proposal for Maintaining Methodological Relevance in Changing Times,” Journal of Autoethnography 1, no. 1 (2020): 43–59.
7 Goodall, Writing the New Ethnography; Bochner and Ellis, “Communication as Autoethnography.”
8 Conquergood, “Performance Studies.” See, for example: Robin M. Boylorn, “As Seen on TV: An Autoethnographic Reflection on Race and Reality Television,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25, no. 4 (2008): 413–33; Robin M. Boylorn and Mark P. Orbe, eds., Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2021); Aisha Durham, Marquese McFerguson, Sasha Sanders, and Anjuliet Woodruffe, “The Future of Autoethnography Is Black,” Journal of Autoethnography 1, no. 3 (2020): 289–96; Shinsuke Eguchi, “Queer Intercultural Relationality: An Autoethnography of Asian–Black (Dis)Connections in White Gay America,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 8, no. 1 (2015): 27–43; Rachel Alicia Griffin, “I AM an Angry Black Woman: Black Feminist Autoethnography, Voice, and Resistance,” Women's Studies in Communication 35, no. 2 (2012): 138–57; Amber L. Johnson and Benny LeMaster, eds., Gender Futurity, Intersectional Autoethnography: Embodied Theorizing from the Margins (London: Routledge, 2020).
9 Robin M. Boylorn, Veralyn Williams, and Rachel Raimist, eds., “The Storyteller Project: Digital Storytelling for Women of Color,” special issue, Liminalities 15, no 4. (2019); H. L. Goodall Jr., Writing Qualitative Inquiry: Self, Stories, and Academic Life (Thousand Oaks, CA: Left Coast Press, 2008); Atay, “What Is Cyber or Digital Autoethnography?”
10 Christine Hine, Virtual Ethnography (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000); Dunn and Myers, “Contemporary Autoethnography Is Digital Autoethnography.”
11 “What Is New Media?” New Media Institute, 2018, https://www.newmedia.org/what-is-new-media.
12 Conquergood, “Performance Studies.”
13 Tony E. Adams and Robin M. Boylorn, “Public Ethnography,” in The Oxford Handbook of Methods for Public Scholarship, ed. Patricia Leavy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 269–88; Tony E. Adams, Carolyn Ellis, and Stacy Holman Jones, “Autoethnography,” in The International Encyclopedia of Communication Research Methods, ed. Jörg Matthes (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/9781118901731.iecrm0011; Atay, “What Is Cyber or Digital Autoethnography?”
14 Walter R. Fisher, Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value, and Action (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989).
15 See Bochner and Ellis, “Communication as Autoethnography”; Andrew F. Herrmann and Kate Di Fate, eds., “Introduction to the Special Issue: The New Ethnography: Goodall, Trujillo, and the Necessity of Storytelling,” special issue, Storytelling, Self, Society: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Storytelling Studies 10, no. 1 (2014): 299–306; Goodall, Writing the New Ethnography.
16 Bochner and Ellis, “Communication as Autoethnography,” 112.
17 Boylorn and Orbe, Critical Autoethnography.
18 Cassidy D. Ellis and Bernadette Marie Calafell, “Toward Praxis: Interrogating Social Justice within Autoethnography,” Journal of Autoethnography 1, no. 2 (2020): 203–207.
19 Michael LeVan, “Listening Below: Two Variations on Fugitive Sound,” Review of Communication 20, no. 4 (2020): 388–94.
20 Bryan Alexander, The New Digital Storytelling: Creating Narratives with New Media, rev. ed. (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2017).
21 Lieba Faier and Lisa Rofel, “Ethnographies of Encounter,” Annual Review of Anthropology 43 (2014): 363–64.
22 Alexander, The New Digital Storytelling.