Featured Video:

Something to Hold on to: A Digital Story

By Charles "Coco" Bayron, Edited by Liz Calka

For the past two years, anthropology and film students in the course Community Documentary: Stories of Transformation have worked with residents of Southeast Washington- a historically marginalized, largely African American community plagued by poverty, violence, and crime – in the creation of four-minute, self-narrated films called digital stories. Working in partnership with the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum, students assist residents in finding and telling a story from their lives, using photographs, family documents, community archives, and their own voice to create first-person narratives.  Wrote one student:  “When we listen to community members’ stories of the roots, love, beauty and home that they have, find, and feel in Southeast, it does more than simply contest these dominant images. It allows for a reimagining of this part of the city – its past and its future.”

In the first digital storytelling project in the fall of 2010, students assisted eleven public artists from Southeast Washington share stories from their lives. With crystal clarity these artists illuminated the joy, pain, humor and artistic spark behind their work. In Fall 2011, a new group of students partnered with the Anacostia Community Museum, which wanted to document the stories of people of Southeast Washington who engage with the Anacostia River. In one of the seven digital stories, which we called RiverStories, a community member said she never had an opportunity to tell her story and understand her lifelong commitment to environmental work. The student she worked with wrote: “…working on the story … helped our community member find a connection between her own life of struggle and the healing power of the River…  (She came) to see the River as a source of healing for people who have been forsaken.”

Digital storytelling can take us into the lived experience of community residents not often heard from. In their own words, these stories help break down a sense of “Otherness” from both sides, changing the storyteller and the witness in the process.  In its place are people, in all their complexity, with nuanced narratives of segregation, poverty and violence interwoven with beauty, spirituality, connection and hope.

This is the transformative potential of the digital story --both in its capacity to effect personal and social change. It allows us to listen deeply to each other, across the divides of neighborhood, class, race and culture, allowing us to connect as people. Course description