Storytelling & Testimony: Exploring Dimensions of Trauma and Shame

Storytelling is inextricably linked to the history of human beings in a bewildering variety of oral and visual formats. Storytelling is a fundamental tool in communicating and recording personal, familial, communal, and national narratives. But it can also be linked to a process of expressing resistance, of remembering and working through trauma, of breaking silence, of standing up to regimes of power and cultures of erasure. These forms of resistance and remembering can be witnessed in the growth of “communal digital storytelling” embodied, for example, in the rise of shared storytellings of resistance, acknowledgement and trauma such as #NiUnaMás/#NiUnaMenos [#NotOneMore/#NotOneLess], #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo and #TimesUp. Forms of storytelling, resistance and remembering also materialize through protests—from the symbolic gesture of taking the knee in football and soccer, to the Indian farmers’ protest—and growing public interventions, such as the removal of statutes of problematic historical figures (eg. slave owners and perpetrators of genocide) and the renaming of streets and schools across the globe. The ability to re-collect, re-tell, re-write, and share stories from and within the margins brings into focus the uses of storytelling as acknowledging/remembering experiences from childhood to adulthood, of personal stories that can also represent the shared experiences of a broader collective.

Unlike other conferences or gatherings, our Event proposes to step outside the traditional conference setting and offer opportunities for artists, photographers, practitioners, theorists, independent scholars, academics, performers, writers, and others to intermingle, providing platforms for interdisciplinary interactions that are fruitful and conducive to broadening horizons and sparking future projects, collaborations, and connections. We are excited to accept proposals for presentations, displays, exhibits, round tables, panels, interactive workshops and more. Below is an indicative but not exhaustive list of possible approaches, all of them residing at the point of connection between Storytelling and Trauma and Resistance and Remembering.

Read more and submit your proposal here.