Fran Edmonds

Ethical Considerations When Using Visual Methods in Digital Storytelling with Aboriginal Young People in Southeast Australia

This chapter discusses a digital storytelling project involving young Aboriginal people from southeast Australia who used the creative capacities of digital technologies to explore subjective experiences of identity. We discuss three key ethical considerations that supported and emerged from working with young Aboriginal people. Decolonization, the participation gap and situated learning were critical factors that were important in developing an ethical framework for engagement in research with Aboriginal young people. The approach sought to address the challenges that Aboriginal youth continue to experience, including marginalization from mainstream society, negative stereotyping and lingering misperceptions of real Aboriginal identities in contemporary urban Australia. The visual content arising from the workshops supported Aboriginal young people to reposition their contemporary visual self-representations as diverse and authentic.

Digital Storytelling and Aboriginal Young People: An Exploration of Digital Technology to Support Contemporary Koori Culture

A digital ‘participation gap’ continues: not all media ecologies are created equal. Developing digital literacy and media skills are necessary for young Australian Aboriginal people to have equal opportunities for completing their education, to achieve productive online civic engagement (cyber citizenship), and to reap the benefits of the digital economy. This chapter discusses how digital stories (short films) were developed using images and information made on mobile devices and retrieved from individual’s Facebook sites. How this information (photographs, videos, music, etc.) is created and shared via participants’ digital stories is explored in relation to developing digital literacy skills that support Aboriginal youth culture.

From the Studio to the Bush: Aboriginal Young People, Mobile Story-Making and Cultural Connections

Between 2014 and 2016, a group of Southeast Australian Aboriginal young people from Korin Gamadji Institute (KGI) participated in three digital storytelling workshops, learning to use a range of digital technologies to assist in creative explorations of their culture and identities. The initial workshops were conducted at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), where professional digital storytelling facilitators supported young participants in constructing their stories in a studio environment. Locating the final workshop at Camp Jungai, a place of cultural significance for Aboriginal Victorians, inspired participants’ creative use of mobile devices for story production. This chapter reveals one approach for providing Aboriginal youth with the capacity to control their explorations of culture through mobile story-making, and the significance of a community-based setting.