Enhancing Women’s Participation in Turkey through Digital Storytelling

Burcu Şimşek

doi:10.5334/csci.45

Abstract

Abstract This paper explores the process of introducing Digital Storytelling (DST) workshop practice to Turkey through a project called “Digital Stories from Amargi Women”, which was part of my Ph.D. research in the Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Australia. In the resulting dissertation, I examined the potential of Digital Storytelling workshop practice as a means to promote agency and self-expression in a feminist activist organization (such as Amargi Women), focusing in particular on whether or not Digital Storytelling can be used as a change agent – as a tool for challenging the idea of a single public sphere in ways that make it more inclusive of women’s participation. In order to explore the issue in depth, my thesis engaged with feminist scholarship’s critiques of the public/private dichotomy, as well as the concept of gender. The conducted workshops, the resulting digital stories, and in-depth interviews were analyzed to seek connections between these topics and narrative identity. The results indicated that the participating women defined new activist usages for digital stories, as well as their overall activated networking habits in the DST workshop settings. Digital Stories from Amargi Women became the first Digital Storytelling project that aimed to enable women’s participation in Turkey through facilitating a co-creative environment where the participants could share their stories and learn digital skills that they could make use of after the workshops.

Highlights

Research Assistant, Faculty of Communication, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey.Journal of Cultural Science http://cultural-science.org/journalVol 5, No 2(2012): New work in the cultural sciencesDigital storytelling (DST) practice has been around in many countries for a number of years and has been used for different purposes with people of different age groups and from diverse backgrounds
Digital Stories from Amargi Women, the project I conducted in 2010 became the first Digital Storytelling (DST) workshop that was designed uniquely for the Turkish context in order to enhance women‟s participation
Coming from a feminist linguistics background, I became very interested in the potential of DST practice to collect and circulate women‟s narratives in a context where the dynamics of gender relations are intriguing – such as in Turkey – and decided to make this the topic of my Ph.D. research

Summary

Introduction

Research Assistant, Faculty of Communication, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey. Digital storytelling (DST) practice has been around in many countries for a number of years and has been used for different purposes with people of different age groups and from diverse backgrounds. Digital Stories from Amargi Women, the project I conducted in 2010 became the first DST workshop that was designed uniquely for the Turkish context in order to enhance women‟s participation. Research on DST workshops in a feminist setting help raising other questions about the dynamics of the practice and their contribution to public/private sphere discussions both in Turkey and in the region Until this project, there had been only one Digital Storytelling workshop in Turkey, which was run by the British Council as a part of a larger European project aiming to collect the stories of young refugees living in different countries. It contains information about the digital story movement in Turkey in both Turkish and English This website was designed by the Desktop Publishing Unit in the Faculty of Communication at Hacettepe University. I primarily focus on the most important outcomes of this research focusing on some important theoretical discussions

A digital form for the circulation and connection of women’s narratives

Fieldwork and methodology

Connecting women’s voices through digital stories

Concluding remarks