With the rise of social media over time, an opportunity for people to informally publish their life experiences and stories has been established through status updates, blogs, youtube videos, and more. In this blog, I will be examining the ways in which the goals of UBC HOPE’s (the Humanitarian Organization for Providing Empowerment) “Warmth of Winter” narratives align with Schaffer and Smith’s chapter on “Life Narratives in the Field of Human Rights.” In order to identify how these stories effectively allow a voice for the marginalized homeless community, I will explain the mandate of UBC HOPE and apply how it can relate to the ideas of human rights memoir composition by Schaffer and Smith.
I am in an organization at UBC called HOPE. We take part in and lead initiatives that focus on serving marginalized societal groups in our community– especially the homeless in Vancouver. Annually, we engage in conversation with people in the Downtown Eastside in order to understand their experiences. After we have completed this form of field work, we post stories based off of the conversations we had to our website and social media accounts. These stories are of similar format to those from “Humans of New York” and are written to explain the interviewed people’s points of view of what it is like to live in an area of need. This is a chance for a group of marginalized people to have their stories featured on an online platform that they would otherwise not have access to. Once posted to our social media pages, these stories act as a form of life narrative for those whose voices are typically silenced by societal norms. Our club believes that posting these narratives to social media will bring attention to the issue of poverty in Vancouver.
In UBC HOPE’s Warmth of Winter stories, the use of biographical production suggests an opportunity for a new perspective on homelessness. The perceived audience of people from Vancouver (especially UBC students) have access to the club’s website, Facebook, and Instagram pages to view the Warmth of Winter stories that are frequently published. The frequency of posting allows for bigger impact on the people reading these stories, and allows for a display of self-representation for those interviewed by UBC HOPE. The stories themselves are written by UBC HOPE club members, and are based off of their dialogue with the marginalized person they interviewed. When people read stories from this initiative such as “Captain Colleen’s” story about losing her sister to the Yukon River or Pascal’s story about his house burning down (and leaving him homeless), it may invoke emotion in the reader as we read about traumatic events that the interviewee has witnessed. These stories are real and not fabricated, as they describe real life experiences of those in our very own community. When emotion is invoked into the reader, they may actually hear a voice that is typically silenced (i.e. homeless), and will potentially want to take positive action in order to support a community in need. The people of Vancouver typically make assumptions about the Downtown Eastside, but rarely take the opportunity to converse with the people living there to witness the disparity that exists. When local residents read these experiences, they receive a different idea of what the community is like in the Downtown Eastside.
In Schaffer and Smith’s chapter “Conjunctions: Life Narratives in the field of Human Rights,” they suggest that the apparent “memoir boom” (Schaffer and Smith, 1) (as a result of “global transformations”) is sparking developments in the human rights field. By publishing these stories on the club website and other platforms, UBC HOPE is sparking a potential human rights movement in Vancouver. The more likes posts receive on social media suggests that the message of change for the homeless is rather well received, and allows for “collective movements [to] seed local acts of remembering” (Schaffer and Smith, 4). This could be considered as a way that the local community creates counter-stories in order to acknowledge those who have not benefitted from the money, technology, and health that many other people are delivered by the technologies of modernity (Schaffer and Smith, 4). UBC HOPE’s Warmth of Winter stories can be a prime example of the counter-stories that Schaffer and Smith explain, as they are stories about those who are displaced in society.
By looking at UBC HOPE’s Warmth of Winter stories that are published annually, we can associate this form of narrative on social media as a “counter-history” (as coined by Schaffer and Smith, 4) compared to the other life narratives we see hitting the bookshelves. These stories give a voice to the homeless community of Vancouver, and through the promotion and use of social media, we see a rise in acknowledgement from the local community, as they begin to see the importance of helping those who are less fortunate in our community. In conclusion, UBC HOPE’s stories are proof of Schaffer and Smith’s idea that life narratives in the field of human rights are becoming more in demand and are stirring local and global movements.
Works Cited
Schaffer, Kay and Sidonie Smith. “Conjunctions: Life Narratives in the field of human rights”. Conjunctions, vol. 27, no. 1, University of Hawai’i Press, 2004, pg 1-24
“Warmth of Winter.” UBC HOPE, accessed 12 November. 2017, thehopeinitiative.wixsite.com/ubchope/warmth-of-winter
