Creating brave spaces at the intersection of womanist biblical scholarship and the pedagogy of digital storytelling

This paper is my attempt to stretch beyond white normativity – but I write it conscious of the perils of trying to do so when I am fully situated in the midst of that discourse. I am a middle class white, cisgender, straight, Roman Catholic, tenured professor – and each of these labels signals elements of the intersecting systems of oppression in which I am implicated. I am also a woman, and perhaps because of that situatedness have long been compelled by the writings of womanist scholars, whom I experienced as writing about intersectionality long before Kimberly Crenshaw used that term. In this paper I argue that reading the bible1 with womanist lenses in the midst of a world dominated by digital media requires at least two kinds of learning stances: strong anchoring in the various traditions which hold these texts as sacred, and flexible “sticky” ways of finding meaning that are life-giving. Womanist approaches to biblical texts can provide both: anchors into the deep wells of meaning Christians find in the bible, as well as flexible frames for sense- making with its texts. I believe that digital storytelling offers a pedagogical approach particularly well suited to inviting this kind of multilayered and agile pivoting of standpoints, and it holds potential for helping even scholars such as myself stretch beyond white normativity. I hope you will read this paper generously, taking in my argument as a possible example, not as a definitive prescription