Strategic Pedagogies of Re-Presentation: Ethical Dimensions of Creating and Using Digital Stories in a Community-Engaged Education Reform Effort

• In Event: 60.059 - Ethical and Epistemic Intersections in Collaborative Community-Based Research: Challenges for Field Building

Abstract

Strategic pedagogies of re-presentation: Ethical dimensions of creating and using digital stories in a community-engaged education reform effort

A key component of collaborative community-engaged methodologies is attentiveness to the processes of representing and sharing data with the communities from which the data is generated. In this paper, I examine the ethical dilemmas in the creation and use of digital stories as artistic re-presentations in a community-based collaborative educational reform effort. I break from the idea of a ‘representation’ as a bound knowledge product, and frame digital stories as ‘re-presentations’. Following the ‘archival turn’ in literary theory, I hyphenate re-presentation to highlight the digital story as a site that orders meaning and to bring out the act of ‘reading’ the digital story as a social and historical process of knowledge production.

My theoretical interpretation is grounded in the digital stories produced by a Freire-influenced community-based education reform effort (“The Project”), located in a predominantly Latino rural agricultural town in California. In a parent literacy program sponsored by the Project and the school district, digital stories were created as codifications (“coded existential situations”; see Freire, 1970, especially Chapter 3) to re-present the everyday situations of the participants. In de-coding the stories, people critically examine themselves and their situatedness within the larger social, cultural, historical, economic, and political structures that constitute their everyday lives. Through a pedagogy of directed questioning, participants clarify their capacity to affect their surrounding culture and create history, recognizing that “limit-situations” are conditioned perspectives that can be overcome by “limit-acts” (Freire, 1970).

In this paper, I focus on some dangers that inhere in codifications, and the possibilities that a critical decolonial feminist pedagogy offers for overcoming these dangers. I begin my analysis by situating digital stories as archives; as such, they can be understood as “epistemological experiments,” sites of knowledge production, and repositories of constructed social and cultural belief systems (Stoler, 2002, p. 87). Archives are material artifacts of a time and a place that can also be ‘read’ ethnographically, as textual and artifactual elements in the process of reading history (Richard, 1993; Stoler, 2002; Arondekar, 2009). I examine how the digital stories from the Project contain counter-narrative possibilities, but also follow traditional archival logics and thus run the risk of reproducing dominant ideologies. My analysis therefore raises the question, who bears the hermeneutical weight of the digital stories and what pedagogical strategies can mitigate the analytic costs of these representations?

I argue that the potential analytical costs of re-presenting the digital stories from the Project are particularly heightened by the subject positions of the speakers who tell their stories; the racialized, brown immigrant bodies who are called upon to carry the interpretative labor and demonstrate the structural contexts of injustice and oppression that shape their experiences (see Franco, 2010). In laying out the complex ethical dimensions of both the creation and deployment of the digital stories within the context of the Project, I argue for a critical attention and analysis to the way in which data is re-presented through critical decolonial feminist pedagogies.

Author

• Linnea Kristina Beckett, University of California - Santa Cruz