By Dr. Kimmika L. H. Williams-Witherspoon

We welcome this guest post from Dr. Kimmika L. H. Williams-Witherspoon who just released a new album entitled You Gotta Have Game. Dr. Williams-Witherspoon is senior associate dean of strategic initiatives and innovation in the Center for the Performing and Cinematic Arts at Temple University and writes about her chapter for our book Teaching Digital Storytelling: Inspiring Voices Through Online Narratives.

In Anthropology, Theater, performance and Higher Education, one of the legacies of the Covid-19 pandemic was the expanded use of  both fieldwork and virtual performance outcomes to meet the wider pedagogical needs of educational programs. student success, and distribution of research data. The pandemic and its aftermath forced so many of us to rethink what we teach and how we teach and I was fortunate, as an anthropologist teaching in a theater department, “teaching poetic ethnography and ethnographic field research methods that… [resulted] in the creation of global narratives [and] supports and encourages diverse voices” (Williams-Witherspoon, 65). This chapter, critiques the digital storytelling techniques that transformed the Poetic Ethnography course final class projects (2020-2022) that incorporated community engagement strategies, field research and ethnographic research methods to “produce compelling  digital storytelling motifs” (Williams-Witherspoon, 66). Recognizing that performing research “is a constructed process that mediates issues of authenticity, ownership and social activism…This chapter provides a practical toolkit for applying  digital storytelling techniques to a wide range of disciplines and pedagogical settings” (Williams-Witherspoon, 66).

As noted in my chapter:

“Poetic ethnographies encourage students to document and collect memories, reflections and personal narratives by and about neighborhoods and communities. When that data is disseminated through performance and/or digital storytelling, the cultural memories of the communities in question are given greater value and help to recenter the conversation around those communities and their issues.“ (Williams-Witherspoon, 67).

These tips encourage metaliteracy and help to create a new kind of  meta theater that directly reflects a more inclusive “particularizing of place”  and people in and around our communities using various mediums as digital storytelling, [and] resulting in devised performance that recenters marginalized voices and acts as social activist theater” (Williams-Witherspoon, 65). Expanding our understanding of the Toolkit (below), Poetic Ethnography and digital storytelling can be a formidable tool in raising awareness in our communities about the issues, problems and concerns of individuals across multiple positionalities.

Toolkit

Textbox 3.7 Seven Elements of Digital Storytelling (Williams-Witherspoon, 82).

• Point of View. (What is the main point of the story, dramatic question or author’s perspective?)
• 3 C’s (Character, Culture, Content) 
• Logistics: (Form, Length & location)
• Orality: (Voice, Pitch, Timbre) 
• Musicality (Rhyme, rhythm & beat) 
• Multimedia (visuals, images, sound) 
• Purpose (Historiography, Edutainment, Moral) (Parenti. Make Believe Media. 1992)

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Kimmika L. H. Williams-Witherspoon, PhD (cultural anthropology), MA (anthropology), MFA (theater), Graduate Certificate (women’s studies), BA (journalism); is a senior associate dean of strategic initiatives and innovation in the Center for the Performing and Cinematic Arts at Temple University and a full professor specializing in urban theater and community engagement in the theater department in the School of Theater, Film and Media Arts. She is immediate-past president of the faculty senate at Temple University. Williams- Witherspoon is the author of Through Smiles and Tears: The History of African American Theater (From Kemet to the Americas) (2011) and The Secret Messages in African American Theater: Hidden Meaning Embedded in Public Discourse (2006). A hybrid researcher/scholar/performer, Williams-Witherspoon has had over twenty-eight plays produced, twenty productions, thirteen staged readings, eight one-woman shows; and she has performed poetry in over 120 national and international venues. Williams-Witherspoon is a contributing poet to forty-nine anthologies and magazines, author of eleven books of poetry, nine book chapters, seven journal articles, and two books on African American the- ater. She is the recipient of a host of awards and citations. Her scholarly work centers around pedagogy, women’s issues, the African diaspora, performance rituals, and community engagement (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1916-8535).

Williams-Witherspoon, K. (2024). Poetic Ethnography as Digital Storytelling. In Aird and Mackey (Eds.), Teaching Digital Storytelling: Inspiring Voices through Online Narratives. (pp. 65-90). Rowman & Littlefield.