DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
Editorial
Digital Storytelling, Vulnerable Migrant Communities, and Undergraduate Education
Humanizing Deportation is a participatory audiovisual project that since early 2017 has documented and disseminated
the repercussions of contemporary migration and border control laws and policies on
vulnerable migrants in the United States and Mexico. Through on-the-ground collaborations
with deported migrants and asylum seekers in Tijuana and elsewhere, we have published
over 500 digital stories (testimonial audiovisual shorts) on our bilingual website. While fieldwork has been realized principally in Tijuana and elsewhere in Mexico
by faculty and graduate students, we have increasingly developed strategies for incorporating
undergraduate students at the University of California, Davis, into our research team,
by training them in our audiovisual production techniques. This has allowed these
students, many of whose families are affected directly by such laws and policies,
to become meaningfully involved in helping migrants communicate their experiences
and concerns to the world. This article lays out the methods we use in involving undergrads
directly, albeit remotely, in our deeply collaborative production processes, highlighting
both the rewards and the risks in this endeavor. For many of our students, their participation
in Humanizing Deportation constitutes one of the most meaningful experiences they obtain in college.
The Humanizing Deportation Project
Humanizing Deportation employs digital storytelling to document the experiences of vulnerable migrants in
the context of the migration corridor that stretches from the Darien Gap to the US-Mexico
border, including noncitizen migrants living with or without temporary authorization
in the United States, migrants who have been deported or otherwise repatriated from
the US, and asylum seekers and other migrants in transit heading for or waiting at
the US border. Since 2017, this community archive has grown significantly to include
over 500 digital stories of over 400 migrants (some of whose stories include multiple
installments) and continues expanding. While our teams have recorded these testimonial
audiovisual narratives at multiple sites across Mexico and the United States, as well
as further afield (Honduras, Haiti, Colombia, Ecuador), the heart of this project
is Tijuana, one of the major crossing points for migrants heading north, as well as
a major resettlement site for repatriated Mexicans and production site for some 57%
of the videos published in the online archive.
The digital stories can be located via our bilingual website’s homepage, which offers
direct access to the archive’s thirty most recently published videos, with others
accessible in reverse order of publication by clicking at the lower righthand corner
on “older posts,” or by searching for specific titles. The “Citing the Archive” tab
leads to a thematic index that includes hyperlinks to videos that touch upon indicated
themes. Among the site’s other tabs, “Key Issues” links to a page containing pedagogical
materials on over a dozen different topics, such as “Deported Childhood Arrivals,”
“Deported Military Veterans,” “Domestic Violence and Asylum Law,” and “Effects of
Policies of Deterrence on Contemporary Migration Experiences.” The website aims not
only to foster dissemination of the videos, but also to assist those interested in
carrying out research or incorporating migrant stories into instruction on topics
related to contemporary migration and repatriation.
The majority of the archive’s digital stories are recorded in Mexico (or elsewhere
in Latin America, depending on available resources) by faculty or graduate students
trained in both the project’s protocols for community collaboration, and the audiovisual
production techniques of digital storytelling. While digital storytelling has significant
history as a tool for community activism (see, for example, Lambert, 2017; Bickel,
et al., 2017; Nah, Lee and Liu, 2021; Vivienne, 2016; Canella, 2017) and classroom
instruction (see Jamison, et al., 2017; Shahid and Kahn, 2022; Smeda, Dakich and Sharda,
2014; Robin, 2016), we developed our innovative use of the genre as a research method
based on my own experience with a prior project (Lizarazo, et al., 2017; see also
De Jager, et al., 2017; Gubrium and Turner, 2011), with modifications made based on
our expectations for Humanizing Deportation and improvisations incorporated in the
field as issues arose (see Irwin, Calvillo Vázquez and Román Maldonado, 2022). Since
the project’s launch, our fieldwork teams have consisted almost exclusively of faculty
and graduate student researchers from the University of California, Davis or other
academic institutions formally affiliated with the project (see the project website’s
Sponsors/Affiliates page).
Undergraduate Reception and Interest
The very first public presentation of the Humanizing Deportation project was held at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art on UC Davis
campus. We booked its largest auditorium space, which normally seats 125. In November
of 2017, nearly a year into the first Trump presidency, characterized as it was by
a sometimes fierce antiimmigration rhetoric, and following a decade of unprecedented
levels of detention and expulsion of immigrants, interest in the project among students
on campus, many of whom were from immigrant families, was strong. This “Community
Education Space” quickly filled to capacity, and we were soon startled as museum staff
raised the back wall, which they were able to open like a garage door, to allow them
to add additional rows of folding chairs to accommodate the still growing audience.
This was the largest free public event I recall attending or hearing about on UC Davis
campus aside from graduations. Although at that time we had published only a little
over 40 digital stories, we quickly realized that the archive’s potential impact was
substantial.
Once I began to teach the material from the archive, I came to learn why, as students
related their own families’ experiences with deportation, or the weight of the fear
of deportation on undocumented or mixed status families, or their own vulnerability
to deportation. The digital stories, which focused attention on such issues as family
separation, the plight of childhood arrival migrants, and injustices and abuses of
US immigration authorities, struck students on a very personal level. Students not
only appreciated studying the archive but also expressed interest in volunteering
their assistance with the project.
Due to the expenses, logistical complications, and emotional intensity implied in
our fieldwork, most of which was being carried out in Tijuana (located over 500 miles
from UC Davis campus in northern California), UC Davis fieldwork teams consisted exclusively
of graduate students and faculty (me). It seemed impractical and perhaps risky to
send undergraduate students, even under faculty or graduate student supervision, to
work in Tijuana, a city increasingly notorious for high levels of violent drug-related
crime. However, we realized from the beginning that the production process even for
a five-minute DIY-style video required significant labor, some of which could easily
be outsourced. We soon began recruiting undergraduate volunteers to provide remote
support, usually by transcribing or translating audio recordings, or sometimes by
assisting with elements of postproduction, such as adding subtitles, as the archive
is meant to offer full access to all materials in both English and Spanish.
Since 2017, dozens of students have helped out in this way, and have been grateful
to be offered the chance to get involved in an academic project whose mission of community
engagement resounded with them, and also to gain experience as part of a research
team. Still, many wanted more. A few opted to carry out independent research, analyzing
material from the archive for senior honors theses or other similar projects. However,
taking into account the potential for digital storytelling as “one of the innovative
pedagogical approaches that can engage students in deep and meaningful learning” (Smeda,
Dakich and Sharda, 2014, p. 1), I was often left wishing I could involve them in more
profound ways. I was able to engage them in projects to update the website, or to
enhance the archive’s searchable index, but was unable to come up with a way to draw
them closer to the migrant storytellers.
Evolving Fieldwork Methods
The method that we use for the production of digital stories is a variation of that
laid out in the Joe Lambert’s Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community, which documents the community-based collaborative production processes designed
by Lambert (2012) and his colleagues of the Center for Digital Storytelling (now known
as the StoryCenter) in the 1990s. This method, in its basic form, involves an outside
facilitator guiding members of an existing community organization in producing digital
stories that relate the personal experiences of community members, with the aim of
communicating through these stories collectively agreed upon messages. A key component
of the process is the “story circle,” which gives the community a chance to vet and
give feedback on each other’s narratives as they begin to shape them into digital
stories. Community members would also be trained in audiovisual production techniques
and guided by the facilitator as they produced their own digital stories. We made
two main adjustments from the beginning in the Humanizing Deportation project (See Irwin, Calvillo Vázquez and Román Maldonado, 2022). First, unlike Lambert’s
method, which is oriented toward organized community groups, the lack of sense of
community among the deported migrants whose stories we focused on our first year required
that we work with individuals. Story circles were not possible in this context. This
meant that nearly all dialogue during the creative process was between the storytellers
and the academic facilitators, making it difficult to ensure that all involved remained
confident that we were not making videos about migrants, but rather were helping migrants
realize their own visions in the process of creating their own testimonial audiovisual
shorts.
The second fundamental adjustment we made was to offer migrants our services in carrying
out all steps of the montage and editing of their digital stories. Although the audiovisual
production processes generally employed in digital storytelling are quite simple,
they can be time-consuming. Many participants worked long hours and did not have adequate
time to dedicate to learning and then carrying out the processes of audio editing,
audiovisual montage, incorporation of visual effects and transitions between images,
editing and subtitling. Many others did not have computers – and some, including many
living in shelters or on the street, lacked experience and interest in even basic
personal computing functions. Therefore, with nearly all the deported migrants whose
stories we recorded that first year, our academic teams carried out all of the technical
steps in production.
Still, we strove to ensure that our production processes were highly interactive,
as we sought significant direction and feedback from community storytellers at all
stages of production, even as we assumed all of the technical labor ourselves. Basically,
once we launch a collaboration with a community storytellers, our production process
consists of the following steps: 1) definition of story, 2) audio recording of narrative
(including any necessary editing), 3) design of visual track and assembly of visual
materials, 4) preparation of storyboard (transcription of edited audio, with selected
images assigned to appropriate phrases), 5) audiovisual montage, 6) review of draft
video, 7) revisions to draft video based on storyteller feedback, and final postproduction
steps, including incorporation of titles, subtitles, and credits. Frequently, we meet
six or more times with community storytellers, maintaining a sustained dialogue as
our teams carry out each of the steps of audiovisual production.
During our first year, we worked almost exclusively with deported migrants, most of
whom had fixed addresses, and with whom it was easy to maintain contact, and, with
some exceptions (for example, with homeless migrants) it was relatively easy to follow
these procedures. During the summer of 2018, however, we had a team in Monterrey,
Mexico, who had been invited to present the project at a migrant shelter to an audience
that turned out to be principally not deported immigrants to the United States, but
migrants in transit from Central America on their way to the US border. Although they
had not necessarily experienced deportation, we welcomed the collaboration of any
migrant who wished to share their experiences via our website. The Monterrey team
members were able to collapse the first four steps of the production process into
a single weekend, but when they returned a week later with draft videos ready for
viewing, the migrant narrators were already gone. In those days many migrants still
travelled without cell phones or telephone contracts, and many were reachable only
via WhatsApp or other messaging platforms via wifi, while others were not reachable
at all once they moved on from the shelter. Initially, we abandoned the idea of working
with migrants in transit due to the importance of ensuring that our production processes
remain deeply collaborative.
However, with the arrival of huge caravans of migrants in Tijuana in November of 2018,
I made an on-the-spot decision to make a major revision to our production process
in the case of vulnerable migrants who felt an urgency to publicly document some of
their experiences, especially in the face of the increasingly politicized and sensationalized
discourse about them in both the media and in international politics. These migrants,
who evaded some of the dangers typically experienced by Central American migrants
(exposure to criminal assaults, reliance on human smugglers, travel on the network
of freight trains commonly known as “La Bestia”) by travelling in large groups (often
thousands of migrants moving together), were jarringly visible during the course of
their journeys, much of which they travelled on foot, from Central America to the
US-Mexico border, representing a novel means of mobility in the region (see Torre
Cantalapiedra, 2021). As the caravan migrants arrived in Tijuana, no one, including
our teams or the migrants themselves, knew when they would cross the border, where
they would find shelter, and where they could be found from one day to the next. So
when I recorded the story of a caravan migrant from Honduras, although I gave him
our project calling card, which included our web address along with my personal email
address and phone number, it was clear to both of us that we might never be in touch
again. So, as we completed the first steps in a single meeting, he signed the shared
intellectual property rights form that we use, and agreed to let me complete the production
process, following the guidance he’d given me, even if I was unable to locate him
and obtain his final approval before publishing the video. While the contract gave
him the right to withdraw his story from the archive at any time in the future, it
would also allow me to publish it if I was unable to track him down when it was finished.
The urgency of the moment motivated me to produce his story in only a few days, but
by that time he was already gone – I learned only later that he had already crossed
the border and was being held in a detention center in southern California (Irwin,
Calvillo Vázquez and Román Maldonado, 2022, pp. 53-55).
Over time, even as cell phones and WhatsApp become essential travel tools for nearly
all migrants, we learned that it could be difficult to maintain contact with migrants
heading northward. While a few might keep our card and contact us, many just disappeared.
Those who crossed the border and initiated asylum processes in the United States,
for example, tended to quickly give up their Mexican (or Honduran, etc.) cell phone
numbers and enroll with US carriers (using US numbers). And while Facebook Messenger,
which registers a name and not a phone number, was a better option in some cases,
WhatsApp was the preferred method of communication for many migrants.
An additional difference we have found in our collaborative experience in working
with deported migrants versus migrants in transit is that the former were much more
likely to incorporate materials from personal archives, such as family photos, into
their videos. Migrants in transit, many of whom are afraid to give any clues of their
whereabouts to individuals or organizations that may be pursuing them or are fearful
of revealing information that might be used by against them by state authorities,
often prefer to not reveal their identities in their digital stories, opting instead
to represent their experiences through more generic imagery. For many of these community
storytellers, the dissemination of their story is what is most essential; while they
understand that the visual track can enhance their narration, they are often uninterested
in involving themselves that deeply in the minutiae of audiovisual production when
they are still in the middle of their migration process. We’ve realized over time
that even those who end up waiting months at the border for an opportunity to cross,
with little to occupy them, are unwilling to engage deeply in the production process.
Our policy in such cases is to discuss the visual track with them and try to get as
good an idea as possible of how they imagine the video version of their story so that
we can produce something that meets their expectations.
While our evolving fieldwork protocols and collaborative production methods raised
a number of logistical and ethical issues for our research teams (for example, we
needed to put protocols in place for migrants fleeing danger or otherwise at risk,
to maintain their anonymity, with the option to not reveal their real name in their
videos or even in their interactions with our fieldwork teams), I eventually realized
that they opened opportunities to involve undergraduate students more deeply in the
project. If videos, like that produced with the caravan migrant cited above, could
be managed with only a single meeting, perhaps it would be possible to incorporate
student contributions to different steps of production without compromising the project’s
commitment to guarantee that community storytellers maintain a feeling of ownership
of their digital stories, and that our team’s interventions in the creative process
remain minimal.
Bringing Remote Collaboration to the Undergraduate Classroom
The summer of 2022 was a particularly active one in Tijuana, and the field work team
we sent to record migrant stories there ended up with an abundance of material. Our
policy is to never turn away any migrant with a sincere interest in sharing their
experiences through our archive. That summer in particular, with the border still
remaining closed to most asylum seekers under the Title 42 pandemic emergency order,
many migrants who had made arduous journeys to the border were left waiting for permission
to cross and were especially eager to participate in our project. Indeed, our research
team that summer recorded so many digital stories that they were unable to produce
them all by the end of the summer. Also, a few videos had been delayed: as our practice
is to encourage migrants to narrate their stories in their native tongue, and that
summer we ended up recording a number of videos in other languages, we had to find
people fluent in those languages (specifically, Haitian Creole and Russian) to transcribe
and translate them for us, which took extra time. Meanwhile, I was going to teach
a first-year upper-division honors seminar in Spanish that fall, so I set aside nine
of those recordings for a class assignment. In each case, I’d asked the team member
who had recorded the story to get us, in addition to the audio recording itself, whatever
information they could regarding the migrant narrator’s ideas for the visual track
of their story.
From there I assigned them as a class project. The class met for 80 minutes on Tuesdays
and Thursdays over the course of fall quarter (10 instructional weeks), and I reserved
the last half hour each Thursday for workshops in which I walked the students step-by-step
through our production process, including audio editing, preparation of storyboards,
audiovisual montage, translation (from English to Spanish or vice versa – or, from
other languages into both English and Spanish), and subtitling.
Students thus advanced gradually in the production of these videos of recently recorded
experiences of real people in the process of migration. Not only did they learn our
audiovisual production techniques, but they also became deeply involved in the stories
of the migrants whose recordings they’d been assigned. While they’d learned in class
about many of the challenges faced by contemporary migrants arriving at the US border,
their need to engage deeply with the details of these stories (for example, in seeking
out the best images to depict dangerous migration routes or intimidating bureaucratic
processes, or in trying to fully capture the emotion of a given scene in a translation)
made this hands-on assignment especially memorable and instructive. Moreover, they
became officially part of the Humanizing Deportation research team, their work in the audiovisual production acknowledged in each video’s
credits, and their collaboration with the project duly recognized on our webpage,
on the “Research Team” tab. Of course, many students are also excited to be part of
a publicly visible research project, which gives them practice with practical skills,
and allows them to include this community-engaged research on their résumés.
It should be noted that this experiment required significant supervision on my part
to ensure that students performed the task at hand with sufficient care. Given their
lack of experience in the field and limited knowledge of the migration contexts narrated
by the community storytellers, it was important for me to give them feedback, most
especially on the visual design – for example, to ensure that a scene set in Tapachula,
Chiapas, not be illustrated with images from Tenosique, Tabasco, as well as on technical
details in which many were equally inexperienced. I was grateful that I was teaching
this small-enrollment honors seminar, both because of the perhaps deep commitment
on the part of this profile of student to their studies, and also due to its small
class size.
While not an expert at all in what is known as “educational digital storytelling,”
the claims being made for its use in the university-level classroom (i.e., its benefits
in helping students to develop digital, visual, and oral literacies, among others
– Wu and Chen, 2020, pp. 1-2; see also Clement, 2012) made intuitive sense to me.
And its potential to incorporate what Stewart and Gachago (2016) call “transcontinental
border crossing” – i.e., a form of transnational collaboration between the migrant
storytellers and the students who produce their digital stories – as a meaningful
component of on-campus “border pedagogy” (see especially pp. 530-531) as well as the
opportunity it permitted for community-engaged learning or “implicated scholarship”
(Bickel, et al, 2017; Fletcher and Cambre, 2009) was compelling to me. While conscious
of potential ethical issues implicit in turning to what is effectively a form of “student
labor,” on which digital humanities critics have reflected incisively (see, for example,
Anderson, et al, 2016; Keralis, 2018), for the advancement of a research-oriented
project, the learning outcomes that I foresaw for students seemed more significant.
The most important learning experience came in the editing and montage of the digital
stories, which required listening carefully to the stories, and then interpreting
them thoughtfully by relating them to materials studied in class or, in some cases,
carrying out additional research in order to produce a visual track that both was
both accurate in its depictions of the story and true to the community storyteller’s
vision. However, for most students the audiovisual production itself was also a newly
learned skill, and while students were already at least nominally bilingual (an advanced
proficiency in Spanish was a prerequisite for enrollment in the class), the translation
process also required guidance and care as they were being produced not for literalness
or completeness, but for subtitles, which require some conciseness, often at the expense
of nuance (Bittner, 2011).
The experiment was largely successful, and nearly all of the videos were published
in December of 2022 – the roughly four months from audio recording to publication
was longer than our normal production time, which usually is only a few weeks. However,
enlisting the students allowed us to produce more stories that year than we otherwise
would have. I was especially happy that our process itself was not sacrificed. While
we did lose track of some of these migrant storytellers due to our prolonged production
time, we were able to maintain contact and offer most of them the chance to give us
feedback before finalizing and publishing the videos. I did not involve the students
directly in contact with the migrants, as our normal protocol is for the person who
recorded each story to be the one to manage communication. This policy aims to maintain
a personal relation with each migrant (rather than a bureaucratic one in which different
members of an organization communicate at different times), as well as to avoid miscommunication.
From the perspectives of migrant storytellers, the only difference with this variation
when compared to our more orthodox audiovisual production method was that it took
longer.
Complications and Repercussions
This scenario was not without risks. Although the course objectives and deliverables
were listed on the syllabus and presented in detail on the first day of class, this
did not guarantee that all students would fully comply. After a few weeks, for example,
I noted that one of the students was missing most of our Thursday meetings. The student
appeared to be keeping up with readings, and was punctual with assignments, including
their midterm essay. However, it was not clear that they were keeping up with the
audiovisual production schedule. I guessed that they already knew how to perform some
of the tasks (for example, the insertion of simple transitions between images or the
proper placement of subtitles), or that they simply deemed this aspect of the class
less important than others that more directly reflected questions of language or culture,
the more standard areas of pedagogical focus in upper-division Spanish classes. Reminders
and reproaches did not seem to motivate the student, who I had to infer was either
working independently, despite not attending the Thursday workshops, or was falling
behind with the hope of catching up at the very end of the quarter, not necessarily
an uncommon practice among undergraduate students. The student did hand in their digital
story, but only after requesting an extension, and the final product did not incorporate
all formal requirements (e.g., it did not apply any motion effects to its images).
I offered the student the opportunity to fix several problems I found, directing them
to the PowerPoint slides of the classes missed, which laid out the omitted procedures,
step by step. Time was short, however, and the student had other final exams or papers
to turn in, and so ultimately chose to take a bad grade on this assignment rather
than fix the problems. Unfortunately, this left a digital story that did not meet
the standards of the project and could not therefore be published.
At that time another undergraduate student had approached me seeking an independent
study project for the following quarter, and I offered him the production of this
digital story, starting over from the original audio recording. I thus repeated the
material of the weekly Thursday workshops over the course of winter quarter with this
student, who had not been enrolled in the seminar. While with one-on-one supervision
I was able to ensure that the student complied with each element of the production
process, it ended up delaying the production of this video for another three months.
This uncertainty of whether all students would properly complete each step of the
production process – or that all students would even complete the course – is an inherent
risk in this process. I knew this from the beginning, as several faculty research
team members from Mexican universities had previous experience with involving undergraduates
in the production of digital stories for the project, and knew of numerous cases in
which the videos produced by the students were not publishable. The possibility of
careless undergraduate work, or of students’ inability to complete an assignment for
health or other reasons, will always be a risk for these scenarios, but with careful
supervision nearly all digital stories do get produced properly; it is just important
to have a backup plan in place to ensure that any videos that are not published through
the classroom exercise to get produced in as timely a fashion as possible.
Since the fall of 2022, I’ve repeated this exercise twice, once with the same upper-division
honors seminar (the second time I had a larger class and assigned students to work
in pairs, which may have served as a motivator for keeping up with deadlines for production
steps), and once as an extra-credit assignment in a larger class (of the 60 students
enrolled, 22 participated, again, working in pairs). Although it takes some coordinating
to manage all the moving pieces, most especially to ensure smooth communication with
migrant storytellers (whom we now warn that audiovisual production may take several
months to complete), this has proven an effective way to involve undergraduates in
a project that many of them feel passionate about without incurring the costs and
risks of taking them to the border. Over time I’ve realized that it is essential to
emphasize that our project pledges a commitment to community, and that anyone who
wishes to participate on our team must therefore bring a high level of dedication
to their contributions; specifically, I’ve experimented with a pass/fail grading in
order to motivate students who might turn in sloppy or incomplete (and unpublishable)
digital stories to bring them up to the standards of the project. To do this, I’ve
set deadlines early enough so that any student who turns in work that is not up to
snuff will have time to make necessary revisions by the end of the term (any student
who does not comply receives no credit for the assignment, whether assigned as extra
credit or a component of the course grade). As a result, more students have made the
effort to produce higher-quality digital stories.
While I have not compiled student comments on their experience (and would feel uncomfortable
quoting such comments, whether from casual conversations or course evaluations, even
if I obtained their permission or did not refer to students by name), many participants
clearly have found the experience to be rewarding. Indeed over a dozen of the students
who participated in the project through these class assignments have signed on as
volunteers beyond the context of the class, thus extending their experience as members
of our research team for another year or even longer.
It is likely that these students appreciate the opportunity to participate in an academic
research project, and I certainly encourage them to list their contributions to Humanizing Deportation on their résumés. I also believe that many of them see their involvement as an expression
of alliance with an imagined community of vulnerable migrants to which they belong
or with which they sympathize, whether because of the migratory experiences of their
families, their friends, neighbors or classmates, or of their own personal histories.
This is not to say that the project demands any particular political standpoint of
its research team members. Indeed, although its name implies an attitude of compassion
toward migrants, neither the stories in the archive nor the research that draws from
it are required to convey a particular political position. The stories express whatever
migrants wish to share about their experience, or whatever opinions they wish to disseminate,
many of which may not align with those of our team members. Participation in the project
does not demand any particular stance regarding immigration laws or policies; what
it insists upon, and which I emphasize to students who take part, is that we are committed
to treating migrants with dignity and listening respectfully what they have to say.
Any student who is willing to approach their collaboration in these terms is welcome
to work with us. As with any material studied in class, the data at hand (in this
case the very heterogeneous stories of migrants) is open to interpretation. Indeed,
the videos offer nuanced real-world evidence of how contemporary migration law and
politics play out in the lives of migrants, making for productive analysis and discussion.
I should also add that I personally recorded some of the audio narrations that have
later been transformed into digital stories by undergraduate students enrolled in
my classes and have told migrant narrators that their videos would likely be produced
by my students. While I believe that most migrants who participate in Humanizing Deportation are motivated principally by a feeling of urgency for the public documentation and
dissemination of some of their experiences, I have also noticed that migrants seem
pleased that it is not only our research teams (usually faculty or graduate student
with expertise in migration studies) that are interested in helping them record their
stories and sometimes air their grievances. They are often gratified to hear that
I will be taking their stories into the classroom as instructional materials to help
my undergraduate students (mostly US citizens and permanent residents, with some DACAmented,
and others undoubtedly undocumented) to learn about the contemporary dynamics of migration.
Migrants often appreciate that we are able not only to disseminate their stories widely
on the internet, but also to use them promptly and directly as a teaching tool in
the university classroom.
Final Words
Incorporating undergraduates in community-engaged research can offer them a memorable
and meaningful experience, even if their participation is remote. Even at a distance,
the process of audiovisual editing and montage involves students deeply in the stories
of community storytellers. Although working with students always implies some risk,
as it is not possible to guarantee that all students will adequately complete the
assignment, the learning experience can be significant.
Works Cited
Anderson, Katrina, et al. (2016) “Student Labour and Training in Digital Humanities.”
Digital Humanities Quarterly, 10(1). {Available at https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/10/1/000233/000233.html (Accessed: 22 November 2024).}
Bickel, Bev, et al. (2017) “Faculty Reflections at the Intersection of Digital Storytelling
and Community Engagement” in Grete Jamissen, et al. (eds.) Digital Storytelling in Higher Education: International Perspectives. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 371-389.
Bittner, Hansjörg. (2011) “The Quality of Translation in Subtitling.” Trans-kom, 4(1), pp, 76-87.
Canella, Gino. (2017) “Social Movement Documentary Practices: Digital Storytelling,
Social Media and Organizing.” Digital Creativity, 28(1). {Available at https://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2017.1289227 (Accessed: 22 November 2024).}
Clement, Tanya. (2012) “Multiliteracies in the Undergraduate Digital Humanities Curriculum:
Skills, Principles, and Habits of Mind” in Brett Hirsch (ed.) Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics. London: Open Book Publishers, pp. 365-388.
De Jager, Adele, et al. (2017) “Digital Storytelling in Research: A Systematic Review.”
TQR (The Qualitative Report), 22(10). {Available at https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2017.2970 (Accessed: 22 November 2024).}
Fletcher, Christopher and Carolina Cambre. (2009) “Digital Storytelling and Implicated
Scholarship in the Classroom.” Journal of Canadian Studies 43(1), pp. 109-130.
Gubrium, Aline and K.C. Nat Turner. (2011) “Digital Storytelling as an Emergent Research
Method” in Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber (ed.) The Handbook of Emergent Technologies in Social Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 469-491.
Irwin, Robert McKee, Ana Luisa Calvillo Vázquez and Yairamaren Román Maldonado. (2022)
“Approaches and Methods: Migrant Epistemologies Through Digital Storytelling” in Robert
McKee Irwin (ed.) Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge: Building a Community Archiv
e. Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 33-63.
Jamison, Grete, et al, eds. (2017) Digital Storytelling in Higher Education: International Perspectives. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Keralis, Spencer. “Disrupting Labor in Digital Humanities; or, The Classroom Is Not
Your Crowd.” (2018) in Dorothy Kim and Jesse Stommel (eds.) Disrupting the Digital Humanities. Santa Barbara: Punctum Books. {Available at https://www.doi.org/10.21983/P3.0230.1.00 (Accessed: 22 November 2024).}
Lambert, Joe. (2017) “The Central Role of Practice in Digital Storytelling.” in Mark
Dunford and Tricia Jenkins (eds.) Digital Storytelling: Form and Content. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 21-26.
— — — —. (2012) Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community
. New York: Routledge.
Lizarazo, Tania, et al. (2017) “Ethics, Collaboration, and Knowledge Production: Digital
Storytelling with Sexually Diverse Farmworkers in California.” Lateral, 6. {Available at https://csalateral.org/issue/6-1/ethics-digital-storytelling-lizarazo-oceguera-tenorio-pedraza-irwin/ (Accessed: 22 November 2024).}
Nah, Seungahn, Sangwon Lee, and Wenlin Liu. (2021) “Community Storytelling Network,
Expressive Digital Media Use, and Civic Engagement.” Communication Research, 49(3). {Available at https://doi.org/10.1177/00936502211019677 (Accessed: 22 November 2024).}
Robin, Bernard. (2016) “The Power of Digital Storytelling to Support Teaching and
Learning.” Digital Education Review, 30, pp. 17-29.
Shahid, Maria and Mohd Rizwan Khan. (2022) “Use of Digital Storytelling in Classrooms
and Beyond.” Journal of Educational Technology Systems, 51(1). {Available at https://doi.org/10.1177/00472395221112599 (Accessed: 22 November 2024).}
Smeda, Najat, Eva Dakich and Nalin Sharda. (2014) “The Effectiveness of Digital Storytelling
in the Classroom: A Comprehensive Study.” Smart Learning Environments, 1(6), pp. 1-21. {Available at https://doi.org/10.1186/s40561-014-0006-3 (Accessed: 22 November 2024).}
Stewart, Kristian and Daniela Gachago. (2016) “Being Human Today: A Digital Storytelling
Pedagogy for Transcontinental Border Crossing.” British Journal of Educational Technology, 47(3), pp. 528-542. {Available at https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12450 (Accessed: 22 November 2024).}
Torre Cantalapiedra, Eduardo. (2021) Caravanas: sus protagonistas ante las políticas migratorias
. Tijuana: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte.
Vivienne, Sonja. (2016) Digital Identity and Everyday Activism: Sharing Private Stories with Networked Publics. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wu, Jing and Der-Thanq Victor Chen. (2020) “A Systematic Review of Educational Digital
Storytelling.” Computers & Education, 147. {Available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2019.103786 (Accessed: 22 November 2024).}
Works Cited
URL: https://dhq.digitalhumanities.org/editorial/000830/000830.html
Comments: dhqinfo@digitalhumanities.org
Published by: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and The Association for Computers and the Humanities
Affiliated with: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
DHQ has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
© 2026 the author
Unless otherwise noted, the DHQ web site and all DHQ published content are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Individual articles may carry a more permissive license, as described in the footer for the individual article, and in the article’s metadata.
Comments: dhqinfo@digitalhumanities.org
Published by: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and The Association for Computers and the Humanities
Affiliated with: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
DHQ has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
© 2026 the author
Unless otherwise noted, the DHQ web site and all DHQ published content are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Individual articles may carry a more permissive license, as described in the footer for the individual article, and in the article’s metadata.
