Exploring Guaranteed Income and Student Well-being: Digital Storytelling from LA BOOST Community College Students

• In Event: Guaranteed Income: Understanding Unconditional Cash and Partnerships For Educational Research with Community Colleges

Abstract

The emergence of digital storytelling as a field in higher education may seem like a natural evolution, given its capacity to transform narrative, media, and culture across disciplines (McLellan, 2007). This emergence that has been timely and necessary, given its power to center marginalized voices (Aguilera & Lopex, 2020). Digital storytelling offers a compelling response to the limitations of interview-based research, particularly its extractive and colonizing tendencies (Cunsolow Willox et al., 2013). Drawing on critical digital frameworks, this presentation highlights the ethical, educational, and political implications of student participatory narratives.
Additionally, while community colleges are often positioned as drivers of economic development, few explicitly articulate a mission to support well-being of low-income or economically disadvantaged students (Williams & Nourie-Manuele, 2018). This paper invites session participants to consider how storytelling can support institutional reflection and advocacy, particularly in aligning mission statements with commitments to anti-poverty efforts and equity-centered research.
This paper presents digital autobiographical and co-constructed narratives created by community college students who participated in the LA BOOST guaranteed income initiative as recipients of GI. Developed in collaboration with CGIR research staff, these narratives foreground students’ lived experiences, personal and educational aspirations. This paper challenges deficit-based assumptions associated with community college students drawin upon critical and decolonial lenses, to explore digital storytelling as a site for knowledge production, resistance, and inquiry into economic mobility, well-being, and self-representation.

Author

• Monique Y. Perry, University of Pennsylvania