This is a three-credit hour course designed to provide students with a critical understanding of the effects of narratives, storytelling, and media communication—mass, social, and participatory—in promoting and impeding the achievement of public health goals. Students will develop communication skills to strategically advance public health policies and social change, with ethical considerations paramount. The course covers the design, implementation and evaluation of health communication campaigns to promote public health goals, examines theories and research on health communication influences with respect to its potential harmful effects—as well as its potential emancipatory or empowering effects—on wellbeing. Students will design a digital media-based health communication campaign.

In this course, we specifically focus on “critical narrative intervention.” Narratives are the stories that people tell. Storytelling and narrative approaches are increasingly becoming key methodologies of health communication research and practice, especially with those taking a social justice orientation. “Critical narrative intervention” renders otherwise discounted knowledge as relevant, to potentially bolster social support and solidarity, recalibrate damaging conversations on social health and wellbeing—ultimately to create more supportive policies with and for marginalized communities.

Critical narrative intervention is a methodology for engaging community members in the conduct of public health research, advocacy, and practice. Here, community members, themselves, may be involved in production of public stories told to a variety of audiences—academic, service provider, policy maker, and community. Because otherwise potentially marginalized narrators are encouraged to critically consider socio-cultural dimensions and power structures that inform their lives, and to actively create meaning by transforming personal understandings of their experiences into public stories, these strategies are profoundly useful to action/social justice-focused public health efforts.

Participatory storytelling processes promote active sense making among participants by engaging the individuals whose story is told in story production. For example in digital storytelling, individuals participate in a group-based workshop process that situates them as storytellers in their own right. The knowledge they share is prioritized as they are given the tools and techniques to assemble and tell a story within a digital format. This is in place of hiring trained professionals to collect and tell the stories of community subjects. Through the production process, participants are active storytellers who are participant observers of their own lives, as they reflect on past and present personal and social memories and make sense of (and sometimes move beyond) their lived experiences.

Storytelling also provides storytellers with the opportunity to assert control, cope with challenges, and ultimately to transform their identities and public conversations, which can result in an increased sense of self-efficacy, self-esteem, and hope, and decreased sense of stigma, shame, and stress. Participants who may otherwise be objectified through traditional research and intervention methodologies are active subjects constructing an object—a story. In a group-based format, the storytelling process can also forge a sense of social connection and solidarity—even as a platform for organizing—as participants enter into dialogue with each other, receive feedback about their stories, and present and discuss their stories inside and outside the group.

Stories also do something by humanizing statistics, challenging stigmatizing conversations, and ultimately re-shaping public and policy conversations in a more productive direction. Storytellers may negotiate and confront dominant narratives and messages about themselves and strategically produce narratives that address the negative judgments about themselves. Further, individually or collectively, stories may be shared on and offline to effect social change.

Critical narrative intervention approaches, including digital storytelling, graphic narrative, action-oriented documentary film, and other multimodal approaches, are changing the way health communication researchers and interventionists forge new knowledge, creating new possibilities for arts- and activist-based inquiry. These methods produce rich visual and narrative data and appeal to wide and diverse audiences, deploying the production and consumption of scientific knowledge beyond the academy.