Sessizlikten Sese: Türkiye’de Sağlık İletişimi için İşitme Kaybını ve Ötesini Anlatmak

This paper, deriving its starting point from the studies that focus on digital storytelling and voice studies in the recent decade, discusses giving voice to personal experiences and listening as political action, focusing on the digital stories produced in a digital storytelling workshop that I facilitated with our facilitation team at Hacettepe University Faculty of Communication Digital Storytelling Unit in February 2014 in cooperation with the New Born Hearing Screening and Early Detection Research and Application Center at Hacettepe University in Turkey. This workshop was the first digital storytelling workshop facilitated in relation to health communication in Turkey. The digital stories from this workshop are collected under the name “First Steps to Sound Digital Stories” and have been in circulation for the promotion of newborn hearing screening since April 2014. The majority of the participants were women and their self-representations as mothers were very strong during the workshop. Focusing on the narratives of quest for sound, I discuss how these storytellers position themselves and their children in their narratives in relation to gaining access to sound and claiming their own voices. In this paper, my aim is to examine how motherhood and childhood are narrated in the digital stories of the participants.