This document discusses how digital stories can promote inclusion and civic engagement. It argues that personal identity is shaped by how one is recognized by others, and lack of recognition can damage self-image. Several examples are given of immigrant and minority groups organizing through shared stories to resist oppression, including Mexican American pecan shellers who went on strike in 1938 and elderly Filipinos who fought eviction from affordable housing in 1977. The document outlines benefits of digital stories for communities, such as giving voice to underrepresented groups, enabling activism, driving citizen journalism, and promoting public health by reframing personal issues as social problems.

1. Inclusion and Engagement:
Digital Stories as Passports to Citizenship

5. The demands for recognition [by immigrants or cultural minorities]
is given urgency by the supposed links between recognition and
identity, where this latter term designates something like a person's
understanding of who they are, of their fundamental defining
characteristics as a human being. The thesis is that our identity is
partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the
'misrecognition' of others, and so a person or group of people can
suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around
them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or
contemptible picture of themselves. ….misrecognition shows not
just a lack of due respect. It can inflict a grievous wound, saddling its
victims with a crippling self-hatred. Due recognition is not just a
courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need.
Charles Taylor
The Politics of Recognition

6. Pecan Sheller’s Strike, 1938
12,000 mostly Latina workers stage
3 month Strike against poor wages and
working conditions, changes the political
climate of South Texas to favor Latino
civic and electoral participation

8. International Hotel 1977
Thousands of people resist eviction of elderly Filipinos
TeatroCampesino’s Los Vendidos
Theater for migrant farmworkers

10. What Stories Can Do
• Support community development, giving voice to
the full range of youth and youth groups that weave
social fabric and build community life.
• Enable democratic activism, youth stories play a
critical role in helping to engage a larger public in
social agencies, think of the role of youth and their
stories in the Arab Spring
• Drive citizen journalism, allowing youth to bring
policy questions to life and enabling them to see
themselves as part of history.
• Support a real national conversation, using stories
in social networks to raise and address urgent
issues.
• Heal trauma, young people that are survivors of
personal or social trauma, learn to reframe
memories as bridges to empowerment and tools for
promoting human rights.
• Promote public health, where youth stories of
environmental and behavioral problems serve to
reframe private troubles as public issues that can be
addressed.

12. Confidence
Daga Abdulla

14. Visit http://www.digitalstorytelling2013.hacettepe.edu.tr/

15. Thank You Very Much
joe@storycenter.org
Slides at http://www.slideshare.net/jellojoe/joe-lambert-eutunes-presentation
Copy of Speech at http://www.slideshare.net/
jellojoe/inclusion-and-engagement-eutunes-joe-lambert
www.storycenter.org