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 the 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 be of value to professionals in the field of Digital Storytelling and will also appeal to students and scholars interested in Chinese youth culture, educational mobility, media citizenship, digital literacy, and Chinese migration.

About the Author

He Zhang is a lecturer at the School of Journalism and Communication at 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 Chinese media and popular culture. She is also the co-editor of Linguistic Diversity and Discrimination: Autoethnographies from Women in Academia (Routledge, 2023).

Reviews

"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

"He Zhang's and Qian Gong's well written exposition of their engaging and revealing digital storytelling work with migrant Chinese students, demonstrates only too well the value of making and sharing-in-the-flesh considered narratives, both as 'tools for conviviality' (Illich) and as another way of 'being in the truth' (Hoggart)."

Daniel Meadows PhD, creative director, BBC Capture Wales (2001-2006)

"Delivering rich understanding of experiences of migration in China and Australia, this important study details how radical workshop-based digital storytelling remains impactful, as practice and as research, at a time when privately owned corporations offer myriad possibilities for self-representation, but not often for reflection, listening and creativity, off and online."

Nancy Thumim, University of Leeds, UK

Book Information
ISBN 9781032800851
Author He Zhang
Format Hardback
Page Count 150
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 453g