Storytelling as Human Agency: Understanding, Community, and Embodiment

Modern life seems to have consigned the notion of wisdom to oblivion, and in its place, knowledge has become more about information. Storytelling allows for authentic communication between individuals, and to integrate or exchange personal experiences. Yet the story, the epitome of wisdom, has diminished as experience becomes increasingly fragmented, events are torn from their underlying context, and the individual becomes distant from the physical world of lived experience fuelled by social media and smartphones.

Through oral and writing strategies, the three-day workshop will develop the individual’s capacity to formulate a story by understanding the problem of separate experiences (Erlebnis) that are accumulated, but often lack the profound kind of experience (Erfahrung) in which we are transformed by what we encounter.

The workshop will seek to move beyond the individual’s self-conscious and reaction, and understand the ability to integrate experience that develops across society, history and time. As well as how we need to incorporate a moral, maxim, proverb or practical advice away from the current information models and into the authentic realm of storytelling. This endeavour echoes Walter Benjamin’s line of thinking that sees stories as open-ended that can provoke reflection and inspire recollection. The essential aim being that stories can contribute to human happiness by restoring possibilities that were apparently closed.

If you are interested then please follow the instructions to apply (deadline: 8 May 2018), which will then be followed by an interview at the offices of Tahrir Lounge Goethe. The workshop will be conducted primarily in Arabic.