Re/imagining transformative storytelling by women in a digital era: Traversing multiple spaces in Sri Lanka and Malawi

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Possibilities and Problematics for Gender Equity across Digital Technologies

Proposal

Objective or Purposes
Envisioning Education in a Digital Society is the theme of the CIES Annual Conference in Chicago, 2025. This theme encourages educators to reflect deeply upon their best practices. It prompts us to consider how we can enhance digital educational access for all students, including those from underserved communities, and how we can incorporate multimodal pathways digitally centering student engagement while protecting educational integrity. Today’s technological advancements offer ways for students to inquire, express, and experience learning at an advanced pace from multiple spaces utilizing multiple digital platforms. In spaces of higher education, especially for women in underserved communities, there is an urgent need for us to explore ways in which gaps in educational access can be narrowed or closed.

Under the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (2015), all people have the right to education, personal health, and well-being (Article 25), among many others. Yet, many women around the world live in communities that are underserved and marginalized in the areas of education, health, and well-being. Rural women in many countries of Asia, Africa, and Indigenous populations, in particular, fall into this category of marginality (Ali Alhazmi; de Silva, 2016). In most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, primary school completion remains far below the projected United Nations Millennium Development Goals of 2015. In such dire situations educationally, then, it is no wonder there is a critical inequality in higher education attainment, especially for women.
Furthermore, this inequality is exacerbated by the fact that there are inequalities by gender and household income that affect the education of women and girls (Sarma, Licht, & Kalugalagedera, 2018; Lloyd & Hewett, 2009). In Malawi, for example, tertiary education falls well below the global average and is complicated by multidimensional poverty and inequality (Sichone-Phiri & Zangewa, 2024). This is in part because, in Malawi, gender binaries are strong and are sustained through institutional and cultural practices, “gender comes to sustain a social structure in which women and the feminine stay in a subservient position” (Kamwendo, 2024, p. 2). Although several institutions, including the University of Malawi, have introduced gender-sensitive education policies, the literature suggests that more constructive efforts must be utilized nationwide to redress gender gaps in higher education and reduce gender power dynamics that keep women from attaining their continued higher educational aspirations. Building on the concepts of Amartya Sen’s Capabilities Approach (Sen, 1992), this participatory project draws from the experiences of women from Malawi and Sri Lanka. This study foregrounds digital storytelling as the central methodology of participants’ stories they will share with the audiences.

Methods
This study utilizes digital storytelling, a participatory art-based and visual methodology that enables participants to be the key instrument in framing their narratives (Gubrium & Harper, 2016). As a workshop-based methodology, participants produce “short audio-visual vignettes” or digital stories that are two to three minutes long based on the images and/or video clips they generate to share their experience (Gladstone & Stasiulis, 2019). In this transnational study, we use digital storytelling to examine how women from rural communities transition into school systems, the challenges and oppressions that affect(ed) their educational journey, and the freedoms and agency they possess in their post-secondary education. To participate, participants had to be: 1) Female graduates from rural settings who are 18 years of age and older; 2) Graduated from a public institution of higher education, 3) Must have completed their bachelor’s degree within the last 24 months from January 2024. We collected visual narratives through Zoom conversations and their own digital productions. To analyze these narratives, we employed different forms of analysis, including thematic and visual analyses (Gubrium & Harper, 2016; Ross, 2016; Bhattacharya, 2017; Saldana, 2021).

Data Sources, Evidence, Objects, or Materials
This study gained IRB approval from the IRB Committee of our current institution in the spring of 2024. All participants were accommodated with an Informed Consent Form to sign, given two weeks before the interviews so they had time to think and ask questions before signing. Focusing on the digital modes of inquiry, the IRB included details of interview questions, the researchers’ proposed recording, videotaping, and photographing of the interviewees and constructing their individual digital stories.

Findings
Preliminary findings indicate challenges and barriers that exist for rural women in accessing equitable educational pathways. Furthermore, the lack of social networks in higher education spaces makes it difficult for these women from underserved communities to navigate the programmatic and institutional complexities. This is primarily because these women are often first-generation students in higher education with no immediate support structures. Another important finding is that in most cases, these women are also burned with family care work, financial contributions, and pressure to start their own families.

Scholarly Significance
Our research focuses on underserved communities, specifically exploring how women from rural communities navigate the societal challenges and oppressions that affect their educational journeys. By integrating digital storytelling with Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach, our research offers both a theoretical and methodological contribution to the broader field of comparative and international education by engaging with onto-epistemologies that elevate women’s voices and agency through visual and textual narratives. Furthermore, our approach also places emphasis on the co-creation of knowledge as well as emphasizing the importance of Indigenous knowledge. In the context of educational research, these foci provide the opportunity for a redefinition of how stories are told and who tells those stories, especially among historically marginalized communities. Our research also raises awareness, particularly among educational researchers to be intentional and aware of the differences individuals bring to participatory research, thus guiding scholars on how to consider participants’ ontological realities when conducting research in transnational contexts.

Authors

• Renuka de Silva, University of North Dakota

• Pempho Chinkondenji, University of North Dakota