Abstract
From 2021-2024, we collected data from young women and mothers who were fleeing violence during the Covid-19 pandemic. A subset of 5 participants opted in to create digital narratives as an additional method for sharing their experiences of finding and accessing safety, housing, and related support services while navigating a radically altered landscape due to stay-at-home orders and service reductions that exacerbated preexisting inequities and barriers. In this paper, we will discuss the use of digital tools to provide survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) more accessible means and opportunities to tell their stories maximizing both the restorative potential of storytelling and providing rich data for addressing structural violence.
IPV survivors exhibit creativity, resourcefulness, and variety in their solutions to housing instability and meeting other essential needs. These intricacies, variations, successes, and challenges have not been well documented in the literature, but better understanding of these survival practices is essential to informing policy and ensuring survivors with intersectional identities are appropriately supported. The digital story-telling method is ‘knowledge producing’ and the nature of that knowledge is ‘multiperspectival’ (Rice and Mundel 2018, p. 213). As a mode of Arts-Based Research, digital narratives require thinking about the different shapes knowledge can take and recognizing multiple ways of knowing including sensory, kinaesthetic, and imaginary (Leavy, 2015, p.20). The form does not prioritize verbal or textual communication styles based in dominant cultures. It is a more inclusive and accessible way for people with diverse languages, educational and cultural backgrounds, neurological and cognitive abilities, and ages to share what they know from their lived experiences. Thus, arts-based digital research methods have the potential to make connections that might otherwise be out of reach (p. 21). We will discuss the ways the digital stories created by IPV survivors position the intimate as a powerful mode of resistance to systems of structural violence.
IPV survivors exhibit creativity, resourcefulness, and variety in their solutions to housing instability and meeting other essential needs. These intricacies, variations, successes, and challenges have not been well documented in the literature, but better understanding of these survival practices is essential to informing policy and ensuring survivors with intersectional identities are appropriately supported. The digital story-telling method is ‘knowledge producing’ and the nature of that knowledge is ‘multiperspectival’ (Rice and Mundel 2018, p. 213). As a mode of Arts-Based Research, digital narratives require thinking about the different shapes knowledge can take and recognizing multiple ways of knowing including sensory, kinaesthetic, and imaginary (Leavy, 2015, p.20). The form does not prioritize verbal or textual communication styles based in dominant cultures. It is a more inclusive and accessible way for people with diverse languages, educational and cultural backgrounds, neurological and cognitive abilities, and ages to share what they know from their lived experiences. Thus, arts-based digital research methods have the potential to make connections that might otherwise be out of reach (p. 21). We will discuss the ways the digital stories created by IPV survivors position the intimate as a powerful mode of resistance to systems of structural violence.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | (In-Press) |
| Journal | Postdigital Science and Education |
| Volume | (In-Press) |
| Publication status | Submitted - 25 Feb 2025 |
Funding
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Canadian Institutes for Health Research |
