[Air-L] New Book - Story Tech: Power, Storytelling and Social Change Advocacy

[Filippo Trevisan]

AoIR Friends!

We hope you’ll excuse the shameless self-promotion, but wanted to share with you news of our latest book Story Tech: Power, Storytelling and Social Change Advocacy<https://press.umich.edu/Books/S/Story-Tech2>, which was released recently by the University of Michigan Press. UMP currently has a sale on with -50% on every title through the end of May with code “SPRING25.” Even better, the e-book version of Story Tech is open access<https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/z890rx07r> and freely available! We’re grateful to UMP for giving us this opportunity to make our work accessible to a wider audience. We’d also be happy to talk to your students, department, or school about the book and our on-going research on digital storytelling, advocacy, and policymaking. A book synopsis is below. Filippo, Michael and Ariadne

Filippo Trevisan, Michael Vaughan & Ariadne Vromen, Story Tech: Power, Storytelling and Social Change Advocacy<https://press.umich.edu/Books/S/Story-Tech2> (University of Michigan Press, 2025)

Personal stories have the power to stir the heart, compel us to act, and spark social change. While advocacy organizations have long used storytelling in campaigns, the role technology plays has increased. Today, invitations to “share your story” are widespread on advocacy organizations and political campaign websites, calls to action, and social media pages. But what happens after one clicks “share”? And how does this affect which voices we hear—and which we don’t—in public discourse?

Story Tech explores the increasingly influential impact of technologies—such as databases, algorithms, and digital story banks—that are usually invisible to the public. It shows that hidden “story tech” enables political organizations to treat stories as data that can be queried for storylines and used to intervene in news and information cycles in real time. In particular, the authors review successful story-centered campaigns that helped change dominant narratives on disability rights, marriage equality, and essential workers’ rights in the United States and Australia. They compare the use of storytelling advocacy across different types of organizations including volunteer grassroots groups, large national advocacy coalitions, and trade unions, and examine how trends differ for storytellers, organizers, and their technology partners. As political stories shift to being “on demand,” they reshape power relationships in key public debates in ways that produce moments of tension as well as positive narrative change. Story Tech examines these trends and illustrates how storytelling success can—and should—be achieved in conjunction with personal dignity, privacy, and empowerment for storytellers and their communities, particularly marginalized ones.