Virtual Digital Storytelling: Building Solidarity in Transnational Participatory Research

Digital storytelling creates short videos that tell a story by combining images and/or video footage with an audio narrative, usually set to background music. In participatory research, they enable participants to tell their own stories and generate a rich form of multimodal data that can be shared both personally and through knowledge mobilization. In this article, we describe our use of virtual digital storytelling, which brought together 12 youth participants ages 18–25 from 11 different countries in Africa and Asia to create and share digital stories about their activism for gender transformative education. We used Microsoft Teams to hold two focus group discussions with three groups of 3–5 participants and connect individually with participants to create their digital stories. The project was designed and implemented in partnership with Transform Education, a global youth-led feminist activism coalition. We describe significant opportunities related to fostering transnational connections and providing participants with ownership and control of the stories. We also highlight logistical and ethical challenges surrounding internet connectivity, trauma disclosures, and use of images in research and provide recommendations for navigating them. Ultimately, we advocate for virtual digital storytelling as a viable means of engaging geographically disparate participants in meaningful participatory art-based research.