Power to the People: Responsible Facilitation in Co-Creative Story-Making

Power to the People: Responsible Facilitation in Co-Creative Story-Making describes and applies a tool for recording and analyzing the co-productive creation process of digital storytelling (DST) workshops to be used by project facilitators for the purposes of reflection and for developing an ethics of responsibly in story-making practices. It provides a method for analyzing digital storytelling practices that focuses on the rhetorical, dialogic, co-productive, creative story-making space rather than the finished stories or the technologies. Looking through a new media lens, this dissertation aligns the DST genre and practice in relation to alternative media broadly, and tactical media specifically, to understand DST as a resource for storytellers. This dissertation situates DST as a co-creative media process created among participants, individual storytellers, facilitators, institutions, and the audience, and discusses the inter-relationships within the workshop setting as well as in those found in the dissemination of the final digital stories. The author discusses the relationships among the storytellers and the facilitators, the other workshop participants, and the viewing audience, examining this final relationship in terms of face-to-face and digital interactions. This dissertation provides a reflexive look at the responsibility of the facilitator in co-creative digital storytelling endeavors and makes use of diverse international case studies in addition to an analysis of the author\u27s own facilitated project, Exploring Our Information Diets, as examples. The author argues that co-creative storymaking facilitators should interpret their roles within the collaborative creation process to ensure that responsible facilitation practices based in witnessing guide the storytelling process, and create an environment that treats participants as subjects with the ability to respond to the world