søndag 14. oktober 2012

Digital Storytelling in Election Campaigns

Article written with professor Eva Bakøy of Lillehammer University College published 2010 in Seminar.net vol.6, issue 2. The study was also presented at the conference of the International Association for Intercultural Communication Studies (IAICS) in Guangzhlou, China, June 18-20., 2010. Powerpoint of presentation is available at Slideshare.


The paper goes into how a particular Norwegian-Pakistani Labour politician, Hadia Tajik, has used digital storytelling to construct her political identity, and a discussion of the consequences of her experiments with this genre. 

During the 2009 electoral campaign she moved from being an unknown politician to becoming a political household name and the only member of the new Parliament with a migrant background. The digital stories were instrumental in this development for numerous reasons, the most important probably being that they gave her prime time television coverage. In 2012, she was appointed Minister of Culture, which also led to international attention, as in this piece in EL Pais. Apparently the paper also was aware of our article and I did an interview to get information about how she constructed her identity :)