“I’m Silent, This Song Is Yours”: Aesthetic Conflict and the Struggle to Learn Through Digital Storytelling

• In Event: Aesthetic Objects, Art Practices, and Curricular Inquiry

Abstract

This paper explores the pedagogical significance of visual forms, and specifically multimedia or digital storytelling, for learning from experiences that cannot yet be spoken or put into words. It draws on qualitative data from a five-year community-based research project with newcomer women and girls in Toronto, all of whom participated in digital storytelling workshops offered through various social service agencies as part of broader community-leadership development efforts.

My analysis of participants’ digital stories and interviews draws upon the work of psychoanalysts Marion Milner (1971, 1993) and Donald Meltzer and Meg Harris Williams (1988) who describe the experience of ‘aesthetic conflict’ and the struggle to hold and communicate ideas symbolically, in art and in dreamlike formulations, in advance of their capacity for verbal formulation. The ‘aesthetic conflict’ describes the subject’s struggle to learn from experience through the use of aesthetic objects and to know their experience through the discovery of symbols that can express what may be inexpressible in words (Williams, 2007).

In this paper, I attend specifically to participants’ choices about how to represent their experiences through the use of image, sound, and text. For example, in some cases participants found that working with visual media allowed them to represent and communicate aspects of their experience that they were unable to express in words or that they felt had been unknown to them in advance. For the participant from whom I’ve borrowed the title of this paper, the creation of a visual narrative offered an opportunity both to remain silent and to represent the difficult and traumatic story of a violent childhood in Afghanistan, and also to articulate, for the first time, its complicated resonances in the present as she tries to negotiate a new life in Canada.

Drawing on these and other examples from participants’ digital stories and narrative interviews, I consider how a theory of ‘aesthetic conflict’ allows for a more complex theory of learning, which is characterized by loss, desire, conflict, and the generative tensions between what we know and cannot yet express, and what we may express but do not yet know. Remaining mindful that the possibilities for expression made available through visual media are also always circumscribed or shaped by the social and organizational fields within which stories are told, I also argue that the aesthetic experiments made available in digital storytelling, which provide a means for complex self-representation, may offer participants a method for resisting those discourses that would reduce them to their precarious status.

Author

• Chloe Brushwood Rose, York University