From Silence to Screen: Harnessing Digital Storytelling to Decolonise HIV Narratives in the UK
In public health, the dominant narrative can often reinforce the very stigma it seeks to eliminate. For Black women living with HIV in the UK, this narrative is often one of silence, shame, or victimhood, obscuring their resilience and economic potential. Agatha's Space CIC is challenging this by placing agency and technology at the heart of their advocacy, using a model known as Digital Storytelling (DST) to help women reclaim their voices and reshape public perception.
The Power of the Authentic Voice
The foundation of Agatha’s Space’s approach is the understanding that stigma is best countered by authentic, self-directed narratives. For women whose experiences are shaped by both gendered racism and HIV stigma—a concept known as intersectionality—telling their story is an act of deep empowerment. When a diagnosis is often met with systemic failures and even judgmental comments from healthcare professionals, the need for a safe, supportive space to communicate becomes paramount.
Agatha's Space plans to train women in filmmaking and digital media, enabling them to produce short video testimonies. Studies on the use of narratives in public health confirm this intervention's efficacy, showing that digital storytelling can effectively reduce stigma by fostering narrative involvement and promoting genuine, mediated intergroup contact between the storytellers and the wider audience. By seeing a peer’s face and hearing her personal journey, the audience's abstract prejudices dissolve, replaced by empathy and understanding.
DST: A Two-Fold Empowerment Tool
The benefit of this approach is two-fold, impacting both the individual and the community:
Individual Empowerment: For the women involved, the process of creating a digital story is profoundly therapeutic. It offers a structured way to reflect on their lived experience, moving from internalised shame to self-acceptance. A systematic review of DST methods found that, beyond influencing health outcomes, the process of creating media builds technological competency, encourages self-expression, and greatly enhances an individual's confidence. This is critical for women who have often felt invisible or silenced by traditional support systems.
Cultural and Social Change: The resulting films serve as a powerful advocacy tool. They bypass traditional, often biased, media filters to deliver authentic, unscripted perspectives directly to policymakers, clinicians, and the public. By using the high-impact medium of film, Agatha’s Space is actively working to normalise what it means to live well with HIV. It’s a direct challenge to the often-negative master narratives that control public discourse, allowing the women to redefine success and wellbeing on their own terms.
Investing in Narrative Technology
In an era where technology drives communication, the most effective activism is often the most engaging digitally. Agatha’s Space is not only focused on support but is also building a digital media portfolio for social impact. This work requires investment in the necessary tools—cameras, editing software, and professional facilitation—to ensure the stories are told with high-quality production value that matches the power of the content.
The work of Agatha's Space CIC provides a compelling model for future funding that targets narrative technology as a solution for complex social issues. By financing this fusion of creative skills development and destigmatisation, investors are supporting a sustainable, replicable approach that delivers both tangible economic skills and measurable social change, ensuring that Black women living with HIV become the authors, rather than just the subjects, of their own powerful story.