Digital Storytelling as Narrative Shock: New Views on Young Parenting Latinas, Migration, and Family

This lecture will examine the potential of digital stories to elevate complex realities and histories. The presentation draws on “Hear Our Stories,” a project that uses new media to reveal how young parenting mothers experience and cope with sexual health disparities. 

ABSTRACT: Digital stories have the potential to draw on hidden histories and render them visible. Challenges with digital storytelling overlap with those of oral history and ethnography: connecting parts to totalities, redeeming fragments, and co-constructing new narratives from idiosyncratic stories. Small yet poignant stories connect to larger issues, such as growing inequality, that affect everyone. This presentation draws on “Hear Our Stories,” a project that uses new media to reveal how diasporic youth experience and negotiate sexual health disparities. We prioritize uprooted young parenting Latinas, whose material conditions and cultural worlds have placed them in tenuous positions, both socially constructed and experientially embodied. We aim to recalibrate conversations about young parenting Latinas through a reproductive justice orientation that connects sexual health to young women’s lived experiences in relation to family, migration and movement across generations.