In the winter term 2020/2021, Prof. Roberta Maierhofer taught together with Nicole Haring and Dagmar Wallenstorfer from the Narrative Didactics research group two seminars that combined US-American literary and cultural studies with digital storytelling. The seminars with the titles “Specialized Topics in Anglophone Literary Studies (Media and Messages: Digital and Other Storytelling” and “Topics in American Cultural Studies (Art and Artificiality: Mediated Realities)” discussed storytelling in context of digitalization and addressed how cultural representations reflect material realities. Special focus was on how lives and interpretations of these are narrated and the different forms storytelling can take. The courses offered an understanding of the concept of storytelling as cultural and aesthetics expressions of a certain time and place. The students engaged with theoretical as well as literary texts by Maya Angelou, Angela Davis, as well as with the film maker Agnés Varda. It was the aim of the courses to critically engage with the question of intersectionality, identity, and voice. Eventually, the students created Digital Stories, which were watched in an online watch party. Based on theses digital narratives, the students wrote seminar papers and thus not only created and watched Digital Stories, but also interpreted them in a scholarly manner.
You can find more digital stories on the Narrative Didactics YouTube channel: