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Power and Powerlessness in a Group Based Digital Story Telling Project-An Exploration of Community Perceptions of Health Concerns in Urban Malawi

Digital Story Telling (DST) is an art-based research method used to explore embodied experience of health and initiate dialogue with under-represented groups on issues affecting them. It involves engaging participants to create and share their stories using photos, drawings, and audio recordings in...

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Autores principales: Nyirenda, Deborah, Payesa, Chipiliro, Ntaba, Jolly, Mhango, Rachel, Kingori, Patricia, Parker, Michael, Desmond, Nicola
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9068996/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35530737
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2022.826428
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author Nyirenda, Deborah
Payesa, Chipiliro
Ntaba, Jolly
Mhango, Rachel
Kingori, Patricia
Parker, Michael
Desmond, Nicola
author_facet Nyirenda, Deborah
Payesa, Chipiliro
Ntaba, Jolly
Mhango, Rachel
Kingori, Patricia
Parker, Michael
Desmond, Nicola
author_sort Nyirenda, Deborah
collection PubMed
description Digital Story Telling (DST) is an art-based research method used to explore embodied experience of health and initiate dialogue with under-represented groups on issues affecting them. It involves engaging participants to create and share their stories using photos, drawings, and audio recordings in short videos. Benefits of DST include enhancing co-creation of knowledge, empowering participants to confront dominant narratives and revise inaccurate representations. We report our experiences and reflections of using DST to explore community perceptions of health concerns in urban Malawi. Community leaders were briefed about the project before and after study related activities. Three participatory workshops were organized to train community members in DST, support them to develop videos and discuss their experiences of DST. Twenty-six participants from two high density urban communities consented to be part of the workshops. They were all new to DST. All the 26 participants were invited together to the three workshops and their DSTs were developed in smaller groups (n = 7), based on their geographical location. Although we engaged residents from selected communities to share priority health concerns, all the seven groups presented challenges pertaining to Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), and their powerlessness to address the complex challenges. The collective focus on WASH showed that DST effectively empowered communities to present priority health concerns. The inability of community members to address the challenges without external assistance or failure to use findings from DST to generate social change however raise questions on the ideals of empowerment and social justice. In addition, lack of financial resources or technical know-how to produce digital stories and unequal power relationships between service providers and community, may affect the use of DST for community activism among socio-economically disadvantaged groups. We conclude that DST empowered participants to articulate genuine health challenges that they felt powerless to address. We question the realization of “empowerment” and social justice of vulnerable participants in cases where structural challenges present obstacles to effectively address social inequalities.
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spelling pubmed-90689962022-05-05 Power and Powerlessness in a Group Based Digital Story Telling Project-An Exploration of Community Perceptions of Health Concerns in Urban Malawi Nyirenda, Deborah Payesa, Chipiliro Ntaba, Jolly Mhango, Rachel Kingori, Patricia Parker, Michael Desmond, Nicola Front Public Health Public Health Digital Story Telling (DST) is an art-based research method used to explore embodied experience of health and initiate dialogue with under-represented groups on issues affecting them. It involves engaging participants to create and share their stories using photos, drawings, and audio recordings in short videos. Benefits of DST include enhancing co-creation of knowledge, empowering participants to confront dominant narratives and revise inaccurate representations. We report our experiences and reflections of using DST to explore community perceptions of health concerns in urban Malawi. Community leaders were briefed about the project before and after study related activities. Three participatory workshops were organized to train community members in DST, support them to develop videos and discuss their experiences of DST. Twenty-six participants from two high density urban communities consented to be part of the workshops. They were all new to DST. All the 26 participants were invited together to the three workshops and their DSTs were developed in smaller groups (n = 7), based on their geographical location. Although we engaged residents from selected communities to share priority health concerns, all the seven groups presented challenges pertaining to Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), and their powerlessness to address the complex challenges. The collective focus on WASH showed that DST effectively empowered communities to present priority health concerns. The inability of community members to address the challenges without external assistance or failure to use findings from DST to generate social change however raise questions on the ideals of empowerment and social justice. In addition, lack of financial resources or technical know-how to produce digital stories and unequal power relationships between service providers and community, may affect the use of DST for community activism among socio-economically disadvantaged groups. We conclude that DST empowered participants to articulate genuine health challenges that they felt powerless to address. We question the realization of “empowerment” and social justice of vulnerable participants in cases where structural challenges present obstacles to effectively address social inequalities. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-04-22 /pmc/articles/PMC9068996/ /pubmed/35530737 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2022.826428 Text en Copyright © 2022 Nyirenda, Payesa, Ntaba, Mhango, Kingori, Parker and Desmond. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Public Health
Nyirenda, Deborah
Payesa, Chipiliro
Ntaba, Jolly
Mhango, Rachel
Kingori, Patricia
Parker, Michael
Desmond, Nicola
Power and Powerlessness in a Group Based Digital Story Telling Project-An Exploration of Community Perceptions of Health Concerns in Urban Malawi
title Power and Powerlessness in a Group Based Digital Story Telling Project-An Exploration of Community Perceptions of Health Concerns in Urban Malawi
title_full Power and Powerlessness in a Group Based Digital Story Telling Project-An Exploration of Community Perceptions of Health Concerns in Urban Malawi
title_fullStr Power and Powerlessness in a Group Based Digital Story Telling Project-An Exploration of Community Perceptions of Health Concerns in Urban Malawi
title_full_unstemmed Power and Powerlessness in a Group Based Digital Story Telling Project-An Exploration of Community Perceptions of Health Concerns in Urban Malawi
title_short Power and Powerlessness in a Group Based Digital Story Telling Project-An Exploration of Community Perceptions of Health Concerns in Urban Malawi
title_sort power and powerlessness in a group based digital story telling project-an exploration of community perceptions of health concerns in urban malawi
topic Public Health
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9068996/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35530737
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2022.826428
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