Special Stories: Special Books by Special Kids Facebook Videos

TITLE: Special Stories: A Dialogic Narrative Analysis of Special Books by Special Kids Facebook Videos

CITATION: Bengzon, F.A.L. (2019). Special Stories: A Dialogic Narrative Analysis of Special Books by Special Kids Facebook videos, Unpublished Undergraduate Thesis, University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication.

ABSTRACT: This thesis examines the narratives of the disabled and nondisabled storytellers on Special Books by Special Kids (SBSK), a multimedia movement that advocates for acceptance of all members of the disabled community. The study challenges the dominant perspectives of the crip and the normate by analyzing the tensions and contradicting features of the two concepts in Crip theory. The study subjects twelve videos of SBSK to a dialogic narrative analysis to determine typologies and understand what makes the selected narratives popular and unpopular on Facebook.

Findings reveal that narratives with themes on optimism, affinity, and reconciliation dominate the top videos, while narratives of conflict, individualism, and admonishment emerged from the bottom videos. These typologies reveal that 'easy' stories that were emotionally engaging and positive tend to receive higher popularity compared to 'difficult' stories that were incoherent and negative. Language deficits, physical appearance, and adherence to acceptable societal values are also factors that may influence narrative popularity. The study also found that the SBSK storytellers did not adhere to the concepts of the crip and the normate as they simultaneously embodied key features present in both which calls for the need to re-evaluate the indistinguishable line that separates the two as it fails to accommodate the nuanced lived experiences of both disabled and nondisabled storytellers.

Keywords: disability, stories, dialogic narrative analysis, crip theory