Digital Storytelling as Epistemic Resistance: Asian American Youth Reimagining Narrative and Belonging

• In Event: Global Perspectives on Digital Storytelling for Identity, Justice, and Community

Abstract

While Asian American students are often perceived as high-achieving yet socially passive (Poon, 2014; Shah, 2019), research grounded in AsianCrit (Museus & Iftikar, 2013) highlights their experiences of racialization, cultural erasure, and the need for counter-spaces (Chang et al., 2005; Chao et al., 2023). Stemming from the Critical Race Theory, this study draws upon the AsianCrit tenet of “story, theory, and praxis” to foreground Asian American experiences as a way of advancing alternative epistemologies that challenge dominant knowledge systems.
Digital storytelling (DST) combines traditional narrative with digital media to support identity exploration and community engagement (Lambert, 2013). In this study, DST enables Asian American students to explore learning and civic participation.
My research question is “How do three Asian American students assert their narrative agency through digital storytelling?”, through which I aim to explore Asian American students’ imagination, negotiation, and critiques.
This study draws on data from a 5-day digital mathematics storytelling camp for students aged 8–14 in the Spring 2025. My analysis focused on one group of four students—three Asian Americans and one white. Data sources include post-interviews, story design sheets, storyboard drafts, generative AI prompts, and their final digital stories. Group discussions were transcribed and analyzed inductiely using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) and inductive coding (Saldaña, 2009), with codes like “resistance” and “reconstruction” refined through three analytic cycles.
By using DST, Asian American students used humor and imagination to critique or assert agency, challenged normative story logics, and built community on their own terms.
In our discussion, one of the participants, an Asian American girl named Alice introduced Blaze, a fire fox immune to fire and able to heat things up. But Blaze’s power was challenged by other students in the campSome questioned how Blaze generated fireballs, why he resembled an Internet search engine, and whether his fire could burn forever or survive water. Through negotiation, they reimagined Blaze as a demon whose fire interacts with holy water. With faux-anger, Alice ended up laughing and questioned the logic of the existence of another character, a “walking talking churro”. The students all laughed, enjoyed the joy in the story construction, which showed their narrative agency. In the post-interview, Alice expressed that she enjoyed building stories with others. More importantly, beyond entertainment, these moments challenged conventional ideas about narrative logic and authorship. Through playful teasing, the Asian American students pushed back against stereotypes and resisted assimilation into dominant narratives. While their story worlds may seem absurd in real life, they reflected a deeper assertion of voice and agency. In doing so, they created a communal space where their knowledge was valued, and collaborative meaning-making could flourish.
These Asian Americans are not quiet or marginal; their discourse challenges the “model minority” stereotype by foregrounding humor and resistance. They claim space to question and narrate their way into visibility and belonging. Through playful counter-storytelling, they reframe what matters in narrative construction: joy, community, and cultural self-definition. In doing so, they expand what digital storytelling can mean as a justice-oriented practice that engages one to fully enact their many identities.

Author

• Fuyi Feng, The Ohio State University