A cross-comparison of digital storytelling and everyday multiculturalism reveals that the two phenomena are guided by similar aims and principles pertaining to the value of shared, diverse experiences. In a way, the pattern in migrant digital storytelling seems symptomatic of the drive towards cultural difference that occurred in the early part of the century, following identity politics debates. Scholars and practitioners alike are drawn to digital storytelling's capacity to express cultural difference at a ‘grassroots’ level; however, they often move ahead too quickly into empirical discussions of the technology, before asking critical questions of the genre itself. In this way, many of the problems inherent in art practice pertaining to cultural diversity are reinstated.

I attempt in this book to create a pause before this moving ahead – to consider how we might carve out critical spaces in both digital storytelling and everyday multiculturalism as a way to deconstruct cultural difference more productively. So far, I have argued that there is a need to analyse the corporeal manifestations of multicultural life, in particular to consider how discursive regimes construct bodies in twenty-first century Australia and elsewhere according to long-standing conceptions of race. I have also highlighted the tendency in everyday multiculturalism scholarship to analyse multicultural experiences as belonging to one of two separate spheres: the institutional/theoretical or the ordinary/street. Often, scholars study this ‘street level’ as a means of providing what is considered to be a genuine reflection of everyday cultural encounters. A similar tendency is prolific in digital storytelling scholarship. As a community-based arts practice, digital storytelling is often considered to be removed from the political pressures of mass-produced media or art practice and thus implies an authenticity – as if the genre is a conduit through which the real voices of the marginalised can be expressed.

Everyday multiculturalism must be broadened to include a closer attentiveness to the ways in which everydayness and institutional spaces are interrelated. Although it is important to maintain a focus on the messy middle section of multicultural life (where everyday practices and formalised encounters interact), deliberately trying to fill in a perceived gap between the everyday and the systemic could be counterproductive in deconstructing the racialised body.