Digital Storytelling in Health and Social Policy ─ Listening to Marginalised Voices

As digital life stories continue to assume more and more significance across a range of institutions and practices, so too does their potential to bring into focus once marginalised and neglected voices. Breaking new ground by reframing online multimedia life stories as a resource for social policy making and professional learning in health and human services, this book challenges policymakers, professionals, and researchers to reimagine how they learn about and respond to people’s daily lives and experiences.

The book develops theoretical, methodological, and practical resources for listening to digital stories through a series of carefully selected international case studies from across disability and public health settings. The case studies explore and illuminate different ways that digital stories have – and have not – been listened to in the past. The authors expose the great potential as well as complexity of using digital stories to shape individual services alongside broader public health initiatives that promote healthy environments. Together, the case studies highlight that processes of listening to, learning from, and making use of digital stories involve unavoidable processes of re-interpretation, re-contextualisation, and translation which have significant ethical and political implications for storytellers, listeners and society. In mapping and theorising the movement of stories into new contexts of policy and practice, the book offers a critical lens on the widely-celebrated democratising potential of digital storytelling and its capacity to amplify marginalised voices.

Digital Stories in Health and Social Policy develops an authoritative and original re-conceptualisation of digital life stories for listening to marginalized voices and will be important reading for researchers and practitioners from a range of backgrounds, including social policy, digital media, communication, education, disability and public health.

Nicole Matthews is Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Media Music Communication and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, Australia

Naomi Sunderland is a Senior Research Fellow at the Griffith Health Institute and The Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre, Griffith University, Australia