Paper short abstract:

We offer critical reflections on intergenerational activist digital storytelling research exploring why/how diverse activists work for change and story their resistance throughout their lives. Showing some of the stories, we explore how this project might build relationships of/as resistance.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation will offer critical reflections on a multi-year digital storytelling research project, called Stories of Resistance, Resurgence, and Resilience in Nogojiwanong, based at Trent University, in Michi Saagiig Anishinaabeg territory. At the confluence of queer, decolonial, and feminist approaches to research and pedagogy, the project aims to build relationships of/as resistance, while documenting an oral history of activisms and activist connections in place. Through a series of intergenerational participatory digital storytelling workshops, academics, students, and activists come together across four generations to share and record their stories of working for change. Participants engage in circle conversations, ceremony, song, and small group storytelling interviews, building relationships, recording stories, taking photos, and collaboratively producing short media capsules of these exchanges. These capsules are shared widely and archived for future generations. This project explicitly aims to explore and document the lesser-told stories of non-famous activists and to unsettle dominant perceptions of "activism" as limited to processes of "un-making" (dismantling, resisting, exposing) oppressions through protest or rally. Instead, we invite activists of different ages, backgrounds, abilities and genders to also consider activist ways of "making" (through creative work, land-based practices, and ceremony) different, fairer, more sustainable futures. This presentation will offer critical reflections on the process, possibilities, limitations, and emerging themes from the first three rounds of workshops. It will also provide an opportunity to watch and discuss excerpts of the digital stories produced - hearing from a series of storytellers about their (un)makings.

Links: www.agingactivisms.org

video of storyteller Tasha Beeds https://vimeo.com/322243300/aba152e781