Ethical Storytelling As An Embodied Practice
Written by Dung Tran and Doug Cronin
Ethical storytelling is growing- at least the use of the term, but as we reflect on ten years of doing this work, we feel it is a good time to start an essential conversation on ethical storytelling in practice.
So, what is ethical storytelling in a world where more people are using this term but are not using their platforms to amplify stories of the oppressed and calling out the silencing of people who stand for human rights and against genocide, oppression and ethnic cleansing?
When considering this question, we believe we must start with what we are doing, what we are not doing and why. This can sit uncomfortably when we are trying to build a sustainable business while maintaining our moral compass and ethical integrity. And over the last two and half years it is clearer than ever to see how storytelling plays a key role in whose lives matter and who is not afforded any human dignity.
For us this has become extremely frustrating and harmful at the same time. Part of this is due to large organisations taking our work and selling it as their own, being invited to collaborate which ends up being extractive and ghosting becoming the norm. But this is not where the real frustration lies. It is both a reflection on how we have come to understand ethical storytelling and how others use this term in a one-dimensional way. It is how “ethical storytelling” practitioners remain silent when they see how media, politicians, businesses and the general public weaponise stories in unethical ways while silencing those who dare speak up about Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
We can’t get comfortable with what we thought we knew
We have seen extraction happen from so close before being able to explain what was happening. This was so close in that it was Dung’s story which became a commodity- one that people felt they could critique, analyse and ultimately weaponise for their own purposes.
And although we worked really hard to hold stories with care and integrity, there were many times that we were complicit in extracting and interpreting stories.
By realising this and demanding better from our workplace, we were met with the same excuse as we get when we talk to most organisations today: time, resources and ultimately “we know better.”
Whilst we have witnessed this program continue and win awards, we know that the work we do at Our Race Community will never be measured by awards and large government grants. Instead it is based on the relationships we have formed and the feedback we receive from Story Holders.
This steep learning curve has been a result of (un)learning in practice, and not so much from Doug delving into academia or our engagement with lawyers, but through the thousands of conversations we have had with Story Holders across the continent. This is where we have and will continue to focus our work, because ethical storytelling is more than a program or project. It is the way we turn up every single day.
We are not the Story. It’s why we do what we do
The story is why we do this work. The story of how and why we are living on stolen land and what we do each day. The story is the people of Gaza and the Australian government sending weapon parts to the genocidal state of Israel. The story is about the West Bank and attacks by violent settlers, many with dual passports, including Australians. The story is Sudan and why this story is getting minimal coverage. The story is more than what we can include here and why we need to keep on recentring our attention to the macro-story.
The macro-story is complex and we will never understand all the nuances and layers that shaped it, but some parts are really simple. Locking up children as young as 10 is not OK. Black Deaths in Custody and no accountability is not OK. Welcoming a war criminal who’s committing a genocide is not OK.
This is the responsibility we all should carry, especially by people and organisations who claim to be for defenders of human rights and justice. Ethical Storytelling gives us the vehicle to share, tell, create and care for those around us.
The False Equivalence: Lived Experience and Participatory Storytelling ≠Ethical Storytelling
Although the pursuit for lived experience and participatory storytelling is important, it does not necessarily result in ethical storytelling.
Firstly, lived experience storytelling has become a very fundable model as it is finally acknowledged by governments that people’s lived experiences improves service delivery outcomes. But when you look at lived experience storytelling and programs, who is getting the bulk of the funding, who do they serve and who is left out? Does it allow for intersectional experiences and does it go beyond the individual or a specific community? And what are the explicit or implicit funding conditions?
Participatory storytelling is also extremely important, and there is a need for more of it led by and benefiting the people in the community rather than a white-saviourism top-down funding model. Unfortunately, in many instances when it is being controlled by government and corporate-sponsored programs, the focus is on the individual that chooses a convenient point of departure, omitting the key actor from the story itself. Mohammed El Kurd sums this up in his book Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal :
“[their story] must remain individualistic, never for a collective cause and never through an organised collective, and must solely seek to remedy humanitarian crises that, like earthquakes and eclipses, occur in isolation from the global state of affairs.”
What we argue is that ethical storytelling, like anti-racism, is a verb and must be constantly worked upon. Participatory and lived experience storytelling can also be ethical, but often it is not. For example, power goes beyond passing someone the mic or training the community on how to better tell stories to the funders. It requires naming the perpetrators. It requires naming the systems of harm whilst still running lived experience and/or participatory projects.
Lived experience and participatory storytelling does not require this added level of responsibility. It is usually project or organisationally bound, and therefore the framing has already been set by the funding body. As a result it is rarely relational.
We acknowledge several of our projects are focussed on lived experience storytelling as they are one-offs, but we know that one off training will not result in sustainable change. Instead, we believe we need to focus on our overall practice and look at our roles within the stories and the context within which it sits. We need to start with Story Holders who have been strategically marginalised and silenced. We need to look at the macro-story.
For ethical storytelling practitioners, we must be ethical storytellers. It is not just a 9-5 job. It takes into account politics, society, class, media which means we must speak up to power and use our platforms to call out injustices, genocide and connect this to the power and impact of storytelling.
On the other hand, we argue that ethical storytelling must not treat stories in isolation or only pass the mic to those with the most palatable or exceptional story. Instead, it must sit within the ecosystem of which we live and not be selective of who should be afforded human dignity and who should not.
All three types of storytelling have much in common: free, prior and ongoing informed consent, co-design and story sovereignty, however the difference lies in whether we are willing to break the silence and not just talk about power dynamics but to challenge these power dynamics. This is where we must be clear on our approach no matter how hard it has been, is and will always be.
We invite you to share your views on ethical storytelling and add to this conversation we believe is well overdue.
