Where Do You Call Home?: Storytelling in a Digital Age

“Where do you call home?” A coworker posed this question to me when I was a junior at college. It struck me because it was so different from the usual, nerve-wracking “so, where are you from?” I grew up in Dubai, United Arab Emirates and New Delhi, India, and was constantly juggling my understanding of a cultural identity with the expectations society had for me. At age eighteen, I moved to the US, with hopes and two very heavy suitcases in hand. The first time I truly felt at home anywhere was in Amherst, Massachusetts. I didn’t experience culture shock in the ways that people thought I might, but I did gain a better understanding of the struggles that come with integrating into a culture that is different from your own. My biggest conflict was that I felt neither Indian enough for India, nor American enough for here.

Honestly, I am still figuring out what “belonging” means to me, and during a very difficult time both personally and politically. The notion of “home” is under attack right now for a lot of communities in the US, something that perplexes and angers me. This country was built on migration, both forced and voluntary. People move for all sorts of reasons, which we can’t even begin to understand without sharing stories. Stories can help us to strengthen communities and foster empathy by immersing ourselves in powerful, and often unfamiliar, experiences. This was the driving force behind my thesis project, Community Storytelling Guide: Best Practices to Convey Stories About Migration, for the Emerson College Master's program Civic Media: Art and Practice (CMAP).

Over the course of the past few months, I created the guide in collaboration with a number of community media organizations. I worked with Kathy Bisbee of Brookline Interactive Group, where I was a fellow. The guide is an online resource that strives to support storytellers and mediamakers in being better prepared to work with a wide range of migrants who want to share their stories online. The aim is to help tell migration stories using film, writing, photography, extended reality, visual art, and other media. It covers practices that promote mindful and empathetic storytelling by addressing five main areas. These are: how to build an understanding of the socio-political context, how to think about messaging and framing, how to work with communities and lastly, how to consider interview guidelines as well as strategies for digital engagement.

I am proud to be sharing this guide as a resource for Immigration in Full Frame, an immersive storytelling project created by Brookline Interactive Group and the Public VR Lab, in collaboration with a cohort of artists, librarians, journalists, media practitioners and filmmakers all over the US. The project will launch at HUBweek 2018 in October. You can read the Community Storytelling Guide here.