This book presents the first major initiative to introduce workshop-based Digital Storytelling to digitally dynamic and engaged youth, both in China and internationally.
Conceived nearly three decades ago, the participatory and creative practice of Digital Storytelling has been embraced by public institutions, advocates and researchers as a media democratisation intervention that empowers non-professionals to actively contribute to media. Drawing on data from ten workshops conducted with Chinese young migrants in Australia and China, this work investigates the extent to which Chinese youth's participation in Digital Storytelling constitutes media citizenship in both home and destination societies. The findings show that their digital self-expressions construct 'alternative stories' that resist dominant discourses of place, mobility, education and language. This book provides nuanced insights into the experiences of young educational migrants through bottom-up autobiographical narratives. As the first major study of its kind after decades of China's reform era, it sheds light on Chinese society from a unique perspective on the interrelationships between state-mandated subjectivity, personal aspirations and digitally mediated narrativity.
The title will appeal to professionals in the field of digital storytelling and also students and scholars interested in Chinese youth culture, educational mobility, media citizenship, digital literacy and Chinese migration.
1. Introduction: Digital Storytelling, Mobility and Media Citizenship 2. Conceptualising Digital Storytelling as Practice and Method 3. Designing the Research 4. Narrating Transnationality by Chinese Young People in Australia 5. Reskilling through Self-representation: Empowering Chinese International Students through Digital Storytelling 6. The First Trial of the Digital Storytelling Workshop for Young Migrants in China 7. Autobiographical Storytelling as Counter-Narrative to the Myth of “the South” 8. Is It Worth It?: Youth Mobility and the Consumption of International Higher Education by the Chinese Middle Class 9. Conclusion
Biography
He Zhang is a lecturer at the School of Journalism and Communication of Northwest University in China. She earned her PhD in Media Studies from Curtin University, Australia. Her areas of interest include participatory practices, youth mobilities, and intercultural communication.
Qian Gong is a senior lecturer at Curtin University, Australia. She researches on Chinese media and popular culture. She is also the co-editor of Linguistic Diversity and Discrimination: Autoethnographies from Women in Academia (Routledge, 2023).
"In this judicious and readable study, Zhang and Gong explain where Digital Storytelling comes from, why it matters, and how to do it. They introduce it to China, reinventing it as a powerful pedagogical tool for the algorithmic era, because everyone is an outsider sometimes."
John Hartley, University of Sydney, Australia
