Power to the People: Responsible Facilitation in Co-Creative Story-Making describes
and applies a tool for recording and analyzing the co-productive creation process of Digital
Storytelling (DST) workshops to be used by project facilitators for the purposes of reflection and
for developing an ethics of responsibility in story-making practices. It provides a method for
analyzing digital storytelling practices that focuses on the rhetorical, dialogic, co-productive,
creative story-making space rather than the finished stories or the technologies. Looking through
a new media lens, this dissertation aligns the DST genre and practice in relationship to
alternative media broadly, and tactical media specifically, to understand DST as a resource for
storytellers.
This dissertation situates DST as a co-productive/co-creative media process created
among participants, individual storytellers, facilitators, institutions, and the audience, and
discusses the relational power structures within the workshop setting as well as in those found in
the dissemination of the final digital stories. The author discusses the relationships among the
storytellers and the facilitators, the other workshop participants, and the viewing audience,
examining this final relationship in terms of face-to-face and digital interaction. This dissertation
provides a reflexive look at the responsibility of the facilitator in co-creative digital storytelling
endeavors and makes use of diverse international case studies in addition to an analysis of the
author’s own facilitated project, “Exploring Our Information Diets,” as examples. The author
argues that DST facilitators should interpret their roles within the collaborative creation process
to ensure that responsible facilitation practices based in “witnessing” guide the storytelling
process, and create an environment that treats participants as subjects with the ability to respond
to the world.
Outline of Studies:
Major: Texts and Technology
Educational Career:
B.A., Susquehanna University, 2010
M.F.A., University of Central Florida, 2013
Committee in Charge:
Dr. Melody Bowdon
Dr. H. Brooke Hessler
Dr. Shelley Park
Dr. J. Blake Scott
Congratulations, Amanda!