This document discusses digital storytelling through affective and posthuman lenses. It provides an overview of key concepts and theories related to emotions and digital stories, including affective resonances between storyteller and audience. The document also discusses posthuman perspectives, such as how digital stories may be understood as cyborgian or performative. Key scholars discussed include Ahmed, Barad, Braidotti, Deleuze, Guattari, and Haraway. The document suggests digital stories can be analyzed diffractively to understand power relations and subjectivities. Examples of digital story analyses and applications to education are provided.

1. HOW DOES THIS WORK? AN
AFFECTIVE, DIFFRACTIVE
STORYTELLING ANALYSIS
Daniela Gachago and Siddique Motala
Cape Peninsula University of Technology

2. READING DIGITAL STORIES
THROUGH AN AFFECTIVE
LENS
Daniela Gachago
Cape Peninsula University of Technology

3. Digital stories and emotions
 The emotions driving the storyteller
 Within Western patriarchal culture, emotions are
a primary site of social control; emotions are also
a site of political resistance and can mobilize
social movements of liberation (Boler 1999, x)
 The emotional content of the stories
establishing affective connections between
storyteller and audience
For the storyteller, the digital story is
a means of ‘becoming real’ to others,
on the basis of shared experience
and affective resonances. Many of
the stories are, quite literally,

4. Digital stories and emotions
 Orchestration of multiple
modes of digital stories
 Emotions are translated in the
script, carried in the voice-over of
the storyteller, who ‘peels back
the protective layers and finds
the voice that conveys their
emotional honesty’, expressed
through images and the sound
track of a digital story, which is
typically soft and slow, and which
underscores the emotional
content of the story (Lambert
2010, p. 19)

5. Affective Turn
 Intensification of interest in ‘emotions, feelings,
and affect (and their differences)’ as objects of
academic research (Cvetkovich 2012)

7. Moments of pedagogic affect
 Moments characterised by explosive
emotions, which are usually not allowed
or desired in the classroom context, but
which I see as an expression and
embodiment of my participants’ affective
investment in certain beliefs and values
 This momentary pause had in effect
licensed what could be viewed as a
racist response accompanied by greater
uneasiness by others who had not yet
spoken, shifting in their chairs and
looking askance. (Watkins, 2015: 11)

8. Affective knowing
 These feelings don’t themselves constitute
understanding. Seen in the context of a matrix of
implicit understanding shot through with propositional
knowledge, though, we can see how affect might be
important to the epistemic situation. If the purpose of
the class was as it was titled “Theorizing Whiteness”,
it matters if having a feeling, like guilt about
whiteness, attaches to panic about discussing the
topic evoking this feeling. Depending on one’s
political perspective, the feelings, including the ways
they might show up through embodied understanding
and including the previously unspeakable knowledge
they might disclose, can enable or block the process
of coming to a conceptual understanding’
(Shotwell 2011, p.xix)

9. Sara Ahmed
 The Cultural Politics of Emotions
Focus on what emotions do
 Emotions seen as culturally,
socially, politically constructed

10.  Emotions are what move us, and how we are moved
involves interpretations of sensations and feelings not
only in the sense that we interpret what we feel, but also
in that what we feel might be dependent on past interpretations
that are not necessarily made by us, but that come before us.
Focusing on emotions as mediated rather than
immediate reminds us that knowledge cannot be separated
from the bodily world of feeling and sensation; knowledge is
bound up with what makes us sweat, shudder, tremble,
all those feelings that are crucially felt on the bodily
surface, the skin surface where we touch and are
touched by the world. (p.171, my emphasis added)

11. Performativity of digital stories?
 Butler is interested in ‘real speech acts’ and
how through repetition these speech acts
constitute subjectivities
 Possibility of disrupting/troubling how we do
gender, sexuality, race, class etc…
 What about digital storytelling?
 Mediated, constructed
 Representation of subjectivities, not the real thing
 Digital subjectivities
 Still performative in Butler’s sense?
 Can a performance that troubles gender, sex,
race in a digital story impact on the storyteller’s
subjectivity?

12. Digital Stories as cyborgian?
 Donna
Haraway
1991
 Part human /
part machine
 ‘a cybernetic
organism, a
hybrid of
machine and
organism, a
creature of
social reality
as well as
creature of
fiction’
(p.149)

13. Cyborg performance / pedagogy
 Thus, "cyborg pedagogy" serves as a complex
metaphor that represents the body/technology
hybrid while it exposes the cyborg's dialectical
pedagogy of inscription and resistance.
(Garoian & Gaudelius 2008: 334)
 "cyborgs are simultaneously entities and
metaphors, living being and narrative
constructions" (Hayles, 114)

14. Performance art
 Performance art enables us to use the cyborg
metaphor to create personal narratives of
identity as both a strategy of resistance and
as a means through which to construct new
ideas, images, and myths about ourselves
living in a technological world. In doing so, the
performance of the self as cyborg represents
an overt political act of resistance in the digital
age. (Garoian & Gaudelius 2008: 337)

15. JenniCAM 1996 (Jimroglou 1999)
 Mediated, co-constructed form
 Me and not me
 Space for experimentation
 Neither fully human nor fully machine
 Blurring boundaries between
private/public, real/fiction
 Object and composer /composer and
composed

16. Lauren Angelone’s study on female
PHD students blogging practices
 What subject positions are
made available to and/or
(co)constructed by these
women in graduate school
through blogging? How do
these subject positions
imagine different livable
spaces of the feminine through
the use of technology?
 Clone of ‘real’ subjectivity

17.  The internet is allowing for a proliferation of
mediated clones surfacing, replicating and
being nurtured in the new materiality of the
web. (p.167)

18. READING DIGITAL STORIES
THROUGH A POSTHUMAN
LENS
Siddique Motala
Cape Peninsula University of Technology

19. Critical posthumanism in geomatics education
Land surveying
Remote sensing
Geographic Information System
(GIS)
Photogrammetry
Cartography Geodesy

20. Posthuman Cartography

21. Posthuman Cartography
"a theoretically based and politically informed
reading of the present" (Braidotti 2013b, p.164)

22. Rules of critical posthuman
methodology
“cartography accuracy, with the corollary of
ethical accountability;
trans-disciplinarity;
the importance of combining critique with
creative figurations;
the principle of non-linearity;
the powers of memory and the imagination; and
the strategy of de-familiarization”
(Braidotti 2013b, p.163).

23. Aerial photography for photogrammetric mapping

25. 3-D laser scanning model of Bet Giorgis, Ethiopia (Zamani Project 2015)

27. Triangulation

29. Agential realism
“an epistemological-ontological-ethical
framework that provides an understanding of the
role of human and nonhuman, material and
discursive, and natural and cultural factors in
scientific and other social-material practices, …
Indeed, the new philosophical framework that I
propose entails rethinking of fundamental
concepts that support such binary thinking,
including the notions of matter, discourse,
causality, agency, power, identity, embodiment,
objectivity, space, and time”(Barad 2007, p.26).

30. Diffraction
“whereas the metaphor of reflection reflects the themes
of mirroring and sameness, diffraction is marked by
patterns of difference” (Barad 2007, p.71).
“moves us away from habitual normative readings and
accounts grounded in discursive readings that often fail
to account for material intra-actions” (Jackson & Mazzei
2012, p.114).

31. Politics of location
“situated and accountable knowledge practices”
(Braidotti 2013b, p.51)

32. Power/knowledge
“These genealogies, or “cartographies” in our
vocabulary, are non-dualist approaches to theory
formation that allow for absolute
deterritorializing”(Van der Tuin & Dolphijn 2012)
“This impossible ‘no’ to a structure, which one
critiques, yet inhabits intimately, is the
deconstructive philosophical position” (Spivak 1993)
“structures themselves are not as stable as they
appear, yet they do define and regulate people’s
ways of living” (Jackson & Mazzei 2012)

33. Rock art sites in Southern Africa,
and therianthropic figures

34. Posthuman Mapping
“various kinds of data produced by a multiplicity of desiring
agents in various power-producing fields”(Lenz Taguchi &
Palmer 2014, p.764).
“experimenting with how to move
between things in ways that nullify
beginnings and endings”
(Alvermann 2000, p.116)

35. Problems with a
map

36. Problems with a map
“open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it
is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant
modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to
any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual,
group, or social formation” (Deleuze & Guattari
1987, p.12)

37. Examples
 Globalisation, gender politics:
 Braidotti, R., 2006. Transpositions: on nomadic ethics, Cambridge: Polity Press.
 Postsecular discourse, link to feminism:
 Braidotti, R., 2009. In Spite of the Times: The Postsecular Turn in Feminism. Theory , Culture
& Society, 25(6), pp.1–24.
 Educational studies:
 Larson, M.L. & Phillips, D.K., 2013. Searching for Methodology : Feminist Relational
Materialism and the Teacher - Student Writing Conference. Reconceptualizing Educational
Research Methodology, 4(1), pp.19–34.
 Edwards, R., 2010. The end of lifelong learning : A post ­ human condition ? Studies in the
Education of Adults, 42(1), pp.5–17.
 Petersen, K.S., 2014. Interviews as intraviews : A hand puppet approach to studying
processes of inclusion and exclusion among children in kindergarten. Reconceptualizing
Educational Research Methodology, 5(1), pp.32–45.
 Lenz Taguchi, H. & Palmer, A., 2014. Reading a Deleuzio-Guattarian Cartography of Young
Girls’ “School-Related” Ill-/Well-Being. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), pp.764–771.
 Dogs:
 Haraway, D., 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness,
Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

38. Student story: The unlikely Rhino
poacher by Bongani
https://youtu.be/MMgtDYLTfK4

39.  Ahmed, S., 2004. The cultural politics of emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
 Alvermann, D.E., 2000. Researching Libraries, Literacies, and Lives: A Rhizoanalysis. In E. St. Pierre & W. Pillow,
eds. Working the Ruins: Feminist Poststructural Theory and Methods in Education. pp. 114–129.
 Angelone, L.A., 2011. Theorizing Subjectivity, Agency and Learning for Women in New Digital Spaces. Unpublished PHD
thesis. The Ohio State University.
 Barad, K., 2007. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, Durham: Duke
University Press.
 Boler, M., 1999. Feeling power: Emotions and Education, New York: Routledge.
 Braidotti, R., 2009. In Spite of the Times: The Postsecular Turn in Feminism. Theory , Culture & Society, 25(6), pp.1–
24.
 Braidotti, R., 2013. The Posthuman, Cambridge: Polity Press.
 Braidotti, R., 2006. Transpositions: on nomadic ethics, Cambridge: Polity Press.
 Burgess, J., 2006. Hearing ordinary voices: cultural studies, vernacular creativity and digital storytelling. Continuum:
Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 20(2), pp.201–214.
 Cvetkovich, A., 2012. Depression is ordinary: Public feelings and Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother. Feminist
Theory, 13(2), pp.131–146. Available at: http://fty.sagepub.com/cgi/doi/10.1177/1464700112442641 [Accessed
May 27, 2013].
 Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F., 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
 Edwards, R., 2010. The end of lifelong learning : A post ­ human condition ? Studies in the Education of Adults, 42(1),
pp.5–17.
 Haraway, D., 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm
Press.
 Haraway, D.J., 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth
Century. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, pp. 149–181.
Biography

40. • Hemmings, C., 2012. Affective solidarity: Feminist reflexivity and political transformation. Feminist Theory, 13(2), pp.147–161.
Available at: http://fty.sagepub.com/cgi/doi/10.1177/1464700112442643 [Accessed May 27, 2013].
• Jackson, A.Y. & Mazzei, L.A., 2012. Thinking with theory in qualitative research, Oxon: Routledge.
• Jimroglou, K.M., 1999. A camera with a view. Information, Communication & Society, 2(4), pp.439–453.
• Kovach, M., 2009. Indigenous methodologies: characteristics, conversations and contexts, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Kuntz, A.M. & Presnall, M.M., 2012. Wandering the Tactical: From Interview to Intraview. Qualitative Inquiry, 18(9), pp.732–
744.
• Lambert, J., 2010. Digital storytelling cookbook, Berkeley, CA: Center for Digital Storytelling.
• Larson, M.L. & Phillips, D.K., 2013. Searching for Methodology : Feminist Relational Materialism and the Teacher - Student
Writing Conference. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 4(1), pp.19–34.
• Lenz Taguchi, H., 2012. A diffractive and Deleuzian approach to analysing interview data. Feminist Theory, 13(3), pp.265–281.
• Lenz Taguchi, H. & Palmer, A., 2014. Reading a Deleuzio-Guattarian Cartography of Young Girls’ “School-Related” Ill-/Well-
Being. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), pp.764–771.
• MacLure, M., 2013. Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-qualitative methodology.
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26, pp.658–667. Available at:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09518398.2013.788755.
• Petersen, K.S., 2014. Interviews as intraviews : A hand puppet approach to studying processes of inclusion and exclusion
among children in kindergarten. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 5(1), pp.32–45.
• Ruiz, M.I.R., 2012. Black States of Desire: Josephine Baker, identity and the sexual black body. Revista de Estudios
Norteamericanos, 16, pp.125–139.
• Ruther, H. et al., 2001. The recording of Bet Giorgis, a 12th century Rock-Hewn church in Ethiopia. International Archives of
Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 34(5).
• Shotwell, A., 2011. Knowing Otherwise, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University.
• Spivak, G., 1993. Outside in the Teaching Machine, New York: Routledge.
• Van der Tuin, I. & Dolphijn, R., 2012. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press.
• Watkins, M., 2015. Gauging the Affective: Becoming Attuned to Its Impact in Education. In M. Zembylas & P. Schutz, eds.
Methodological advances in research on emotion in education. New York: Springer, pp. 1–14.

41. Affective turn questions
 What emotions drove the storyteller to tell the story?
 How were emotions used in this movie? To what impact?
 What does the story do to the storyteller? What subject positions
are made available to and/or (co)constructed by the storyteller?
 What emotions come up when you watched the movie?
 What were the most emotional moments for you?
 Why? Where do these emotions come from?
 What is the impact of these emotions?
 How do you bodily respond to the move? How do you respond
cognitively?
 Link emotions/social change / solidarity? What does this movie
make you do?
 Who is made the ‘Other’ in this story?
 Who does this story connect?

42. Posthuman questions
 What apparatuses are enacted in the studied phenomena?
 What are the discursive and material forces intra-acting within the
phenomena being studied? What emerges through this intra-action?
 How are the past and the present enfolded in this moment of intra-activity?
 What knowledge and meaning as phenomena is produced? What are the
consequences of exclusions and what possibilities do they create?
 What material consequences, the way we teach, relate and care … are
produced based upon this data analysis?
 How do we emerge differently (changed, transformed) as researchers,
teachers … through this data re-telling?
 How does it work?
 What dualisms emerge?
 What are the in-between spaces that emerge?
 What is excluded?
 Are there any outliers (something that troubles the traditional way of
researching this)?
 What differences can be observed?