Exploring the affordances of digital storytelling in a media

Both restorative justice and arts-based programs within the juvenile justice system provide offenders with promising alternatives to the punitive sanctions utilized by many courts. The present article represents an initial examination of how the restorative justice media-arts program – Young New Yorkers – employs restorative justice principles via the media-arts practice of digital storytelling. Findings suggest the digital storytelling allowed participants to create a narrative discourse about their crimes, their impact, and ways to improve their communities. Further, the production of digital stories enabled participants to process restorative values and apply them toward themselves and their social worlds through recontextualization and rearticulation and then realignment of selves in the digital storytelling process. Together these findings underscore the need for more research focusing on the participants’ perspective of restorative justice initiatives to promote greater and more consistent behavioral changes for youth