Narrating Chinese Youth Mobilities by Zhang, He; Gong, Qian;

Short description:

This book presents the first major initiative to introduce workshop-based Digital Storytelling to digitally dynamic and engaged youth, both in China and internationally.

Long description:

This book presents the first major initiative to introduce workshop-based Digital Storytelling to digitally dynamic and engaged youth, both in China and internationally.

Conceived nearly three decades ago, the participatory and creative practice of Digital Storytelling has been embraced by public institutions, advocates, and researchers as a media democratisation intervention that empowers non-professionals to actively contribute to the media. Drawing on data from ten workshops conducted with Chinese young migrants in Australia and China, this work investigates the extent to which Chinese youth's participation in Digital Storytelling constitutes media citizenship in both home and destination societies. The findings show that their digital self-expressions construct "alternative stories" that resist dominant discourses of place, mobility, education, and language. This book provides nuanced insights into the experiences of young educational migrants through bottom-up autobiographical narratives. As the first major study of its kind after decades of China's reform era, it sheds light on Chinese society from a unique perspective on the interrelationships between state-mandated subjectivity, personal aspirations, and digitally mediated narrativity.

The title will be of value to professionals in the field of Digital Storytelling and will also appeal to students and scholars interested in Chinese youth culture, educational mobility, media citizenship, digital literacy, and Chinese migration.

"In this judicious and readable study, Zhang and Gong explain where Digital Storytelling comes from, why it matters, and how to do it. They introduce it to China, reinventing it as a powerful pedagogical tool for the algorithmic era, because everyone is an outsider sometimes."

John Hartley, University of Sydney, Australia

“He Zhang’s and Qian Gong’s well written exposition of their engaging and revealing digital storytelling work with migrant Chinese students, demonstrates only too well the value of making and sharing-in-the-flesh considered narratives, both as ‘tools for conviviality’ (Illich) and as another way of ‘being in the truth’ (Hoggart).”

Daniel Meadows PhD, creative director, BBC Capture Wales (2001-2006)

“Delivering rich understanding of experiences of migration in China and Australia, this important study details how radical workshop-based digital storytelling remains impactful, as practice and as research, at a time when privately owned corporations offer myriad possibilities for self-representation, but not often for reflection, listening and creativity, off and online.”

Nancy Thumim, University of Leeds, UK

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction: Digital Storytelling, Mobility, and Media Citizenship  2. Conceptualising Digital Storytelling as Practice and Method  3. Designing the Research  4. Narrating Transnationality by Chinese Young People in Australia  5. Reskilling through Self-representation: Empowering Chinese International Students through Digital Storytelling  6. The First Trial of the Digital Storytelling Workshop for Young Migrants in China  7. Autobiographical Storytelling as Counter-Narrative to the Myth of “the South”  8. Is It Worth It?: Youth Mobility and the Consumption of International Higher Education by the Chinese Middle Class  9. Conclusion