From Soft Skin to Strong Voices

This chapter examines digital storytelling (DST) as a form of political activism within refugee emergencies. Over the past few decades, DST has evolved into a powerful tool for what Sonja Vivienne calls “everyday activism”, addressing social injustice, exclusion, and marginalisation. Humanitarian organisations, filmmakers, and displaced communities have adopted DST as a grassroots genre, offering an inclusive, transnational platform to share challenges, foster solidarity, and amplify the voices of marginalised groups beyond borders. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin ’s concept of heteroglossia and Homi Bhabha ’s notion of the third space, this chapter argues that DST creates a decolonial, transnational, and relational space in which narrators navigate competing identities and voices – adapting to, and at times resisting, power dynamics with intention, care, and persistence. DST is a form of everyday-insistence, where personal testimony becomes political intervention. Through two case studies of DSTs produced by displaced children and adolescents in Gaza, Palestine, and Rabat, Morocco, this chapter illustrates how co-creative, collaborative approaches like DST can open space for more nuanced narratives, fostering meaningful engagement with disempowered groups and their stories’ complex trajectories through the borderless realms of film.