Recently we attended the Ethical Storytelling webinar hosted by Tiny Spark, and we thought it would be interesting to review what we learned. Tiny Spark describes itself as a podcast that investigates nonprofits, international aid and philanthropy. It’s an industry publication. But while many industry publications are warehouses for press releases, Tiny Spark has a more critical bent.
You can watch the entire webinar here:
As advocates, we want to center the people that are effected. In that, we want to center their stories. Someone that’s experienced homelessness or housing instability is an expert — more than someone that went to school for nonprofit management or urbanism. But how do we elevate their stories in an ethical way.
Ethics is a branch of philosophy that seeks to systematize and advocate for concepts of right and wrong behavior. Storytelling, in this context, is the sharing of individual narratives to speak to a larger issue or opportunity. Ethical storytelling, in turn, is an attempt to create systems for telling stories that do not exploit the subject or cause the subject harm.
Below are reflections on the Tiny Spark webinar.
POWER DYNAMICS
Do you hold power over the interviewee? As housing advocates, we want to elevate the stories of people that are homeless or experiencing housing instability. But sometimes those stories are coming from people seeking services our organizations offer or living in properties that we manage. Can this person you’re trying to interview consent to having their narrative shared?
When possible, it’s important to never link participation in storytelling with access to services. For example, if you’re working for a community develop company, and someone comes to your organization seeking housing, you don’t want to have a situation where the interviewee thinks they get priority to the housing if they share their story. Help the clients first. Their story is not less valid after they have stability.
TRAUMA PORN
Advocates are sharing other people’s trauma. We must ensure that the narrative is more than just the spectacle of their trauma. Are we seeing the interviewee as a whole person? Are we romanticizing their trauma? Does the narrative you are telling advance the mission?
The webinar emphasized avoiding labels like formerly incarcerated or homeless. You don’t want to have someone’s lower-third read “Jane Doe | Formerly Incarcerated” as though it was their job title.
Not romanticizing is a complicated task. As storytellers, we’re equipped with a suite of tools that we deploy to create affect. When we want to portray sincerity, we slap some emotionally manipulative music over a slow-motion gimbal shot with shallow depth of field — in the style of sincerity.
And one thing I liked about the webinar was that it emphasized embracing complexity. Don’t just apply the tropes. Get into it, and I’ll cover this more later, give the interviewee control over their story. Providing context can change someone’s story from trauma porn to content that has a positive impact. The best thing is to ask follow-up questions. Moving to the questions that are specific to this person’s story.
Within the interview itself, get people’s consent to continue the story. We know these are intense subjects. Check in to make sure they want to keep telling their story. A heuristic the webinar offered is: would you be comfortable sitting next to them after the story goes public?
Are you considering the interviewee’s experiences after this is released? If you publish something with their name attached to it, potential employers, family, friends, and people out to inflict harm will be able to find it with a simple google. What are the systems in place for protecting the interviewee?
CONSIDERING THE INTERVIEW
When we interview someone, it’s easy to just treat that as an organizational asset. The footage becomes more like stock footage, opposed to a real person’s story. The quotes get chopped up and added to collateral. Gradually the connection between the interviewee and the story feel thin. But we need to keep in mind that this is a human.
Keep people in the loop when you’re sharing their stories, and when they don’t want their story shared anymore, stop. This involves a lot of book keeping, but if you can’t do this, it storytelling might not be the job for you. This is part of giving the interviewee agency and control over their story
INTERVIEWING EXPERTS
Another compelling thing they covered in the webinar was the idea of experts. Who is the expert? Is someone who’s been homeless more of an expert than someone that read a couple books in school? I really liked turning this on its head.
I do think that someone that works in housing is an expert. They might be an expert in navigating services. They might be an expert in applying for tax credits to fund building projects. But the foremost expert in homelessness is someone that’s lived it.
THE INTERVIEWEE’S STRENGTH
The interviewees have strength. We’re taking to them and sharing their stories because they bring insights and knowledge. Creating space for interviewees to correct us is important. We need to be mindful of the presuppositions that we bring to the interviews. It is easy for us to assume things, but if we do that, we’re not telling their story — we’re just making up a fiction.
