Events

Decolonial Storytelling. Dismantling Hierarchies of Knowing-Being

04 December 2023, 09.00-14.30
Online on Zoom (for login data, please see the PDF document)

Stories are important epistemically, particularly as a source of other ways of knowing and being. They can open spaces for corporealities and experiences constantly and structurally marginalized and become a place of encounter to see each other beyond the dominant gaze. We thus consider storytelling as a critical methodology of working alongside and with those whose knowledges have been silenced and excluded. As a decolonial praxis, it counters harmful and dominant narratives and epistemic injustice and violence that erase the pluralities of knowing-being. It is grounded on an ethics and epistemology of relationality and accountability and praxes of rehumanization and healing. This lab expands this understanding and approach by engaging with participants who work at the intersections of academia, arts, and activism to experiment with dynamic and creative methods of inquiry, theorizing, knowledge communication, and collaboration that center storytelling. Through the sharing of various storytelling praxes in multiple forms (e.g. scholarly and literary texts/music/images/videos/dance) and experiences, we engage with the following questions:

• What is decolonial storytelling and what can it do?
• Whose bodies, voices, and what forms of stories are valid and whose are invalidated?
Legitimate and illegitimate? Legible and illegible?
• What enables people to tell their stories? How are these stories received? What strategies
of silencing and exclusion are in place that prevent marginalized voices and bodies from
telling their stories and from being heard?
• What praxes of working alongside with instead of speaking of/about/for can we enact to
dismantle inequalities and hierarchies of knowledge production that mark certain
knowledges as invalid/illegible/illegitimate and certain people as incapable of knowing?
• What are the ethics, accountability, and responsibility of telling stories?

Workshop Mentoring Team:
• Tamara Soukotta, Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies at Radboud
University
• Jorge Vega, Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment
Systems (IRI THESys) and Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Workshop Facilitation:
• Shulagna Pal, PhD scholar at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (palshula(at)hu-berlin.de)

Participants working with these questions and methods are invited to submit a short statement in whatever media they use explaining their storytelling praxes and how they relate to the topic.

How to register

For details on how to participate and register, see information in the provided PDF document in the left column. Workshop program details will be announced one week prior to the event via email.