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This special collection of Health Promotion Practice introduces critical narrative intervention (CNI) as a key theoretical framing for an asset-based, narrative, and participatory approach to promoting health and addressing social inequality. Innovative digital and visual methodologies highlighted in this special collection—comics and graphic novels, cellphilms and other participatory film, story booths, digital storytelling, and photovoice—are changing the way critical public health researchers and practitioners forge new knowledge, creating new possibilities for interdisciplinary and activist-based inquiry. Public health research and engagement efforts that critically contend with historically repressive structures and intervene through narrative and participatory processes to enact change with and for disenfranchised communities are long overdue. This special collection showcases six CNI projects that promote equity and justice in the context of LGBTQ, nonbinary, and other gender-diverse young people; people who inject drugs living with hepatitis C virus; young women who trade sex; undocumented and formerly undocumented immigrants; and people living with HIV/AIDS. It is our intent that this collection of exemplars can serve as a guidepost for practitioners and researchers interested in expanding the scope of critical public health praxis. Individually and collectively, the special collection illustrates how CNI can create space for the increased representation of historically silenced populations, redress stigma, and provoke important questions to guide a new era of health equity research.

The familiar story about young pregnant and parenting Latinas relies on commonsense logic about the timing of reproductive lives. We explore young mothers' own sense making, captured in local vernacular through participants' digital story depictions, our fieldnotes of digital storytelling workshop talk, and participants' follow-up interview reflections about enduring judgment and doing their lives. In this article, we introduce the Hear Our Stories project and present key digital stories and related ethnographic material that serve as local exemplars of “doing your life.” Findings reveal ways participants negotiate value making about their reproductive lives. As a narrative intervention, digital storytelling helps to gain a firmer grasp on social worlds and to better understand inequality, while also engaging participants in a process that affords them the opportunity to shift from being a judged teen mom to co-creators of knowledge and change as strategic storytellers.

Most visual culture related to early childbearing represents pregnant and parenting teen bodies as sites of fear and disgust. The embodied experiences of pregnant and parenting young women ...

This article focuses on findings of a two-year pilot research study focused on addressing sexual and reproductive health inequities faced by adolescent women of Puerto Rican descent living on the mainland United States. Working with three groups of young women, in the pilot study we gathered ethnographic data in and around a group-based digital storytelling process to inform the development of a larger intervention. Digital stories are short (1–3 minute), participant produced videos that synthesize still and moving image, a voiceover recording of the participant telling her story, and background music and text to document personal experiences. Based on narrative analysis of digital stories and field notes written in and around the digital storytelling workshop process, as well as follow-up individual interviews with workshop participants, our findings center on the ways that trauma has specifically shaped participants’ sexual and reproductive health experiences. We argue that digital storytelling serves as a critical narrative intervention, whereby participants’ engagement in the storytelling process enables them to collaboratively interrogate and potentially address prior trauma, bolster a sense of social support and solidarity, and potentially recalibrate stigmatizing conversations about them. We introduce our project methodology, and then present key findings on trauma as it informs sexual and reproductive health practices, with digital storytelling showcased as a modality for critical narrative intervention. We conclude by discussing implications for critical public health research and practice.

Substance use disorder (SUD) is a growing issue nationally, and SUD in pregnancy has significant consequences for mothers and their children. This article describes findings from a pilot project that used digital storytelling as a mechanism for understanding substance use and recovery from the perspective of women in recovery from SUD in pregnancy who worked as peer mentors with pregnant women currently experiencing SUD. Research on peer mentorship has primarily focused on outcomes for mentees but not the experience of the peer mentors themselves. In this qualitative study, a 3-day digital storytelling workshop was conducted with five women in recovery serving as peer mentors in their community. Each mentor also participated in an individual, in-depth interview. The digital storytelling workshop process helped peer mentors make linkages between their past substance use experiences to their present work of recovery, and fostered deep social connections between mentors through the shared experience. The workshop process also elicited a sense of hope among participants, which served as groundwork for developing advocacy-based efforts. Digital storytelling may be therapeutic for women in recovery and has the potential to be integrated into recovery programs to bolster hope and social support among participants.

We currently see an interdisciplinary shift toward a "participatory turn" in health research and promotion under which community engagement, shared decision making and planning, and the use of visual and digital methods have become paramount. Digital storytelling (DST) is one such innovative and engaging method increasingly used in applied health interventions, with a growing body of research identifying its value. Despite its increasing use, a standard approach to empirically assess the impacts on individuals participating in DST interventions does not currently exist. In this article, we define DST as a distinct narrative intervention, illustrate key elements that inform the methodology, and present a conceptual model to examine how DST may contribute to increased socioemotional well-being and bolster positive health outcomes. Our proposed model is informed by elements of narrative theory, Freirian conscientization, multimodality, and social cognitive theory and can serve as a guide for public health practitioners and researchers interested in assessing the potential benefits of DST as an applied health intervention. Recommendations for practice call for a rigorous methodological approach to apply and test this model across a range of health contexts and populations.

Public health efforts focused on Latina youth sexuality are most commonly framed by the syndemic of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, a narrow and often heteronormative focus that perpetuates silences that contribute to health inequities and overlooks the growing need for increased education, awareness, and support for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth. This article presents findings from the project Let's Talk About Sex: Digital Storytelling for Puerto Rican Latina Youth, which used a culturally centered, narrative-based approach for analyzing participants' own specifications of sexual values and practices. The strength of digital storytelling lies in its utility as an innovative tool for community-based and culturally situated research, as well as in its capacity to open up new spaces for health communication. Here we present two "coming out" case studies to illustrate the value of digital storytelling in supporting the development of meaningful and culturally relevant health promotion efforts for LGBTQ-identified Puerto Rican Latina youth across the life span.

Digital storytelling (DST) engages participants in a group-based process to create and share narrative accounts of life events. The process of individuals telling their own stories has not been well assessed as a mechanism of health behavior change. This study looks at outcomes associated with engaging in the DST process for vulnerable youth. The project focused on the experiences of Puerto Rican Latinas between the ages of 15 to 21. A total of 30 participants enrolled in a 4-day DST workshops, with 29 completing a 1 to 3-minute digital story. Self-reported data on several scales (self-esteem, social support, empowerment, and sexual attitudes and behaviors) were collected and analyzed. Participants showed an increase in positive social interactions from baseline to 3-month post workshop. Participants also demonstrated increases in optimism and control over the future immediately after the workshop, but this change was not sustained at 3 months. Analysis of qualitative results and implications are discussed.

The nexus of migration and family offers a conjuncture to enrich understanding of teen pregnancy and parenting. This article draws findings from a project centered on participant-produced new media to reveal how young mothers negotiate reproductive health disparities. We focus on young mothers' experiences of migration and movement, captured in local vernacular through participants' digital story depictions and follow-up interviews. We argue that disparities link up with the single story of teen mothering, involve public shaming, continue hand-in-hand with institutional humiliation, and are exacerbated through migration and movement. To disrupt the normative notions that shadow young mothers, we take seriously the young women's narratives. We theorize how the richness of stories and storytelling may serve as a potent intervention-a narrative shock-for articulating meanings and cultivating dignity for young mothers and their families, especially those who do not fit the sedentary and age biases of parenting ideals.

Substance use disorders (SUDs) are a growing problem for pregnant and parenting women. Woman-to-woman peer support may positively influence perinatal outcomes but little is known about the impact of such support on the women who are providing support. The purpose of this study was to describe experiences of addiction in pregnancy, recovery, and subsequently serving as a peer mentor to other pregnant women with active SUD among women in recovery in a rural setting. We conducted one digital storytelling workshop with five women serving as peer mentors with lived experience of perinatal SUD. The mentors faced significant stigma in pregnancy. They had each done the “inside work” to achieve recovery, and maintained recovery by staying balanced. Peer mentoring supported their own recovery, and story sharing was integral to this process. Peer-led support models may be an effective, self-sustaining method of providing pregnancy-specific peer support for SUD.

Digital storytelling workshops are increasingly being used to capture lived experiences and develop/disseminate health promotion messages for vulnerable and marginalized populations. Thirty female Latina teens of varied sexual/parity status produced digital stories of significant life experiences in a group context and then viewed and evaluated them using the Narrative Quality Assessment Tool. This tool was used to examine participants' experience of emotional engagement and identification with each story as well as a single-item indicator of desire to "do something in my community" related to the story. Emotional engagement was moderately strong; identification scores were neutral relative to the stories. Emotional engagement was strongly, significantly related to "desire to act in my community," while identification was not related. Emotional engagement should be considered an important factor to incorporate in the production of digital stories for purposes of developing interest in social action beyond the digital storytelling workshop.

This collection of original articles, a companion to the authors' Participatory Visual and Digital Methods, illustrates how innovative visual and digital research techniques are being used in various field projects in health care, environmental policy, urban planning, education and youth development, and heritage management settings. These methodologies produce rich visual and narrative data guided by participant interests and priorities, key tools for collaborative work. The 16 chapters-include digital storytelling, PhotoVoice, community-based filmmaking, participatory mapping and GIS, and participatory digital archival research;-provide a portfolio of model research projects for researchers who wish to collaborate on community-based studies;-will appeal to an audience across social science, heritage, health, education, and social service fields.An open-access companion website will allow readers to view the research products presented in each contributor's chapter.

Digital storytelling (DST) engages participants in a group-based process to create and share narrative accounts of life events. We present key evaluation findings of a 2-year, mixed-methods study that focused on effects of participating in the DST process on young Puerto Rican Latina’s self-esteem, social support, empowerment, and sexual attitudes and behaviors. Quantitative results did not show significant changes in the expected outcomes. However, in our qualitative findings we identified several ways in which the DST made positive, health-bearing effects. We argue for the importance of “measuring down” to reflect the locally grounded, felt experiences of participants who engage in the process, as current quantitative scales do not “measure up” to accurately capture these effects. We end by suggesting the need to develop mixed-methods, culturally relevant, and sensitive evaluation tools that prioritize process effects as they inform intervention and health promotion.

This chapter discusses a digital storytelling project that combined aims to gain fine-grained understanding of, and address, sexual health inequities among Puerto Rican Latinas in the project community. The authors begin by introducing digital storytelling as a culture-centered approach for use in public health research and intervention. They then trace two emerging ethical issues in research using digital storytelling, both related to key project findings of current and historical trauma among participants: (1) conflicting aims in the project and (2) the ethical standard to minimize harm. The authors conclude that these issues can be resolved if projects are guided by a sensitive ethical protocol, and that digital storytelling and other participatory, visual, and arts-based methods can be harnessed for the design of effective sexual health interventions.

Technology…is not simply an adjunct to business-as-usual; it becomes a defining quality of our culture as researchers. As such, we might do well to devote more of our energies to studying ourselves as we study others (Tedlock 2005). In other words, we need to turn our observational skills on the encounters we ourselves create; we must observe not only what happens when "we" encounter "them," but also what happens to us when we mediate those encounters via a particular kind of technology that has the capacity to transform both our way of seeing and our way of understanding the world (Angrosino 2007:119).

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.

New visual technologies are changing the ways that anthropologists do research and opening up new possibilities for participatory approaches appealing to diverse audiences. Participatory digital methodologies featured in this special issue include digital storytelling, Photovoice, interactive multimedia as new media ethnography, participatory digital archival research, and participatory geographic information systems (GIS). Other methodologies involving participatory digital methodologies that are gaining traction in anthropology include community-based filmmaking (Biella 2006) and collaborative blogging and website production (Hess 2001; Young 2007). Research participants are producing digital representations of their experiences, taking and sharing pictures, and mapping their own environments. These methodologies produce rich visual and narrative data guided by participant interests and priorities, putting the methods literally in the hands of the participants themselves. They appeal to wide audiences, allowing for access to and production of anthropological knowledge beyond the academy.

Using a positive youth development framework, this article describes how a 3-year digital storytelling project and the 566 digital stories produced from it in Northwest Alaska promote protective factors in the lives of Alaska Native youth and serve as digital “hope kits,” a suicide prevention approach that emphasizes young people’s reasons for living. Digital stories are short, participant-produced videos that combine photos, music, and voice. We present process data that indicate the ways that digital stories serve as a platform for youth to reflect on and represent their lives, important relationships and achievements. In so doing, youth use the digital storytelling process to identify and highlight encouraging aspects of their lives, and develop more certain and positive identity formations. These processes are correlated with positive youth health outcomes. In addition, the digital stories themselves serve as reminders of the young people’s personal assets—their reasons for living—after the workshop ends. Young people in this project often showed their digital stories to those who were featured positively within as a way to strengthen these interpersonal relationships. Evaluation data from the project show that digital storytelling workshops and outputs are a promising positive youth development approach. The project and the qualitative data demonstrate the need for further studies focusing on outcomes related to suicide prevention.