HULL AND KATZ Crafting an Agentive Self 43 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 41, Number 1, August 2006 43 Crafting an Agentive Self: Case Studies of Digital Storytelling Glynda A. Hull University of California, Berkeley Mira-Lisa Katz Sonoma State University Drawing on data from a multi-year digital storytelling project, this comparative case study offers portraits of two emerging authors—one a child and the other a young adult—who used multiple media and modes to articulate pivotal moments in their lives and reflect on life trajectories. The conceptual framework blends recent scholarship on narrative, identity, and performance, with an eye towards fostering agency. These cases demonstrate how digital storytelling, in combina- tion with supportive social relationships and opportunities for participation in a community- based organization, provided powerful means and motivation for forming and giving voice to agentive selves. Following critical analyses of social power and discourse (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Foucault, 1979, 1980), the social science research of the last two decades has moved toward reconceiving possibilities for agency and change (Bruner, 1990; De Certeau, 1984; Fairclough, 1989, 1995; Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998; Scott, 1985; Wenger, 1998). With few exceptions, however, such moments of agency are sparsely illus- trated in the literature, and the discourse of “possibility” is often tentative about its own hopeful assertions. Drawing on data from a multiyear digital storytelling project, part of a larger study on uses of technology and literacy to bridge the digital divide (cf. Fairlie, 2003; Warschauer, 2003), this paper illustrates how adults and youth in one Bay Area community used the powerful multiple-media, mul- tiple-modality literacy of digital storytelling (Lambert, 2002) to articulate pivotal moments in their lives and to reflect on life trajectories. Their stories speak to how conceptions of self have much to do with how and why we learn; the desire to acquire new skills and knowledge is inextricably linked to who we want to be as people. Through an exploration of participants’ processes of authoring multime- dia, multimodal autobiographical narratives about self, family, community, and society, we offer suggestions about the creation of invitations for learning that