Digital Storytelling as a Method of Feminist Listening in Research Practice and Activism

This paper considers digital stories as a mode capable of representing the world experienced by survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV). We use as our case study data collected from young women and mothers who were fleeing violence during the Covid-19 pandemic. Our data collection used critical community-engaged mixed-methods including interviews and the creation of digital stories. The digital stories created by participants combine fragments of sound, stock images, personal photos, moving images, text, animation, court documents, testimonies, intertextual references, citations, popular culture, news clips, and more. We reposition these digital feminist activities as postdigital given the personal and embodied realities of IPV. The DST method builds upon a feminist practice of re-visioning. For Rich (1972), re-visioning is ‘an act of survival’ (p. 18) that requires finding ‘language and images for a consciousness we are just coming into’ (p. 19). In this instance, we use DST methods to re-vision research practices towards postdigital sensibilities in order to reassert survivor-led practices that form the roots of IPV-justice and knowledge campaigns.