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Strategic Authenticity and Voice: New Ways of Seeing and Being Seen as Young Mothers Through Digital Storytelling

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Abstract

This paper presents the Ford Foundation-funded Hear Our Stories: Diasporic Youth for Sexual Rights and Justice project, which explores the subjective experience of structural violence and the ways young parenting Latinas embody and respond to these experiences. We prioritize uprooted young parenting Latinas, whose material conditions and cultural worlds have placed them in tenuous positions, both socially constructed and experientially embodied. Existing programs and policies focused on these women fail to use relevant local knowledge and rarely involve them in messaging efforts. This paper offers a practical road map for rendering relevant and modifying notions of voice as a form of knowledge with the potential to disrupt authoritative knowledge. We present the context and method behind the four digital storytelling workshops that served as a venue for transforming assumptions about young parenting women and producing novel understandings of teen pregnancy and parenting. We end by suggesting an intervention for what we call “strategic authenticity” as it plays out in storytelling, meaning making, and voice, and implications for policy concerned with social justice and equity.

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Notes

  1. As anthropologists, we name the general area of the research site, as we believe that it is important for readers to better understand the cultural specificity of location, which is linked to intergenerational histories of migration and movement.

  2. Pseudonyms are used for the storyteller and her son.

  3. We have used a mosaic effect on the faces in the photo to maintain anonymity. The same photo in the digital story does not contain this effect. While we recognize the potential use of the digital stories as strategic communications material for organizing and advocacy purposes, here we present the digital story as part of a research project that is governed by our institutional human subjects review board, which expects that we protect potentially vulnerable participants’ anonymity.

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Acknowledgements

A research grant from a Ford Foundation initiative, “Sexuality, Health and Rights Among Youth in the United States: Transforming Public Policy and Public Understanding Through Social Science Research,” supported our project, “Hear Our Stories: Diasporic Youth for Sexual and Reproductive Health,” for the period December 1, 2012–November 30, 2014. The Principal Investigators followed ethical protocol for working with human subjects and received approval from the UMASS Institutional Review Board. We are particularly grateful to the 31 young parents from The Center for participating in digital storytelling workshops. We also wish to acknowledge support from our partners at the Center for Digital Storytelling and WGBY and our wonderful team of research assistants: Christie Barcelos, Iesha Ramos, and Mim Shafer. We are grateful for staff support from the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, NC, where Krause was a fellow during the 2013–14 academic year. We would also like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of SRSP for including our work in this special issue.

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Correspondence to Aline C. Gubrium.

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Gubrium, A.C., Krause, E.L. & Jernigan, K. Strategic Authenticity and Voice: New Ways of Seeing and Being Seen as Young Mothers Through Digital Storytelling. Sex Res Soc Policy 11, 337–347 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-014-0161-x

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