storytelling, emotions and empathy
DESCRIPTION
Presentation of first findings at the Posthumanism and Affective Turn NRF Project Meeting, Montfleur, 27th of November 2014TRANSCRIPT
STORYTELLING, EMOTIONS AND
EMPATHY
Daniela Gachago
Cape Peninsula University of Technology
Context / background
Aim:
Reflect on journey to become teachers
Raise awareness of social issues in education
Engage with / facilitate diverse classrooms
Create digital stories as teaching materials
Transformation in HE
Transformation in
Higher Education has
led to racially
integrated classrooms
Social and cultural
integration are lagging
behind (Jansen 2010,
Soudien 2012)
Talking difference, talking race
South African classrooms are ticking time bombs
Desire / necessity to talk / engage with these issues
‘In a country that is oversensitive to race talk, few
young people or adults feel comfortable talking about
race, especially when they have to speak about
personal experience ‘ (Jansen 2010: 10)
Pedagogy of discomfort
Stipulates that for both
educators and students to
develop a deeper
understanding for their own
and their shared past, it is
necessary to move outside
their comfort zone, to start to
unpack their understanding
of norms and differences (Boler 1999, Boler and Zembylas 2003).
Cognitive and emotional labour
To engage in critical inquiry often means asking students to radically re-evaluate their world views. This process can incur feelings of anger, grief, disappointment, and resistance, but the process also offers students new windows on the world: to develop the capacity for critical inquiry regarding the production and construction of differences gives people a tool that will be useful over their lifetime. In short, this pedagogy of discomfort requires not only cognitive but emotional labor. (Boler and Zembylas
2003: 110)
Pedagogy of possibility
Result of pedagogy of discomfort: negative
emotional labour such as vulnerability, anger,
suffering.
Emotional labour can produce favourable
results, including self-discovery, hope, passion
an a sense of community.
PHD focus
2013 Train-The-Trainer workshop
9 students
Everybody
has a story to
tell
Image from Flickr by whateverything (CC)
Give
marginalised,
silent people a
voice
Story circle
“Stories move in circles. They don’t move in
straight lines. So it helps if you listen in circles.
There are stories inside stories and stories
between stories, and finding your way through
them is as easy and as hard as finding your
way home. And part of the finding is getting
lost. And when you’re lost, you start to look
around and listen.”(Lambert 2010, v).
Critical texts and dialogue
Dialogue is focused conversation, engaged in intentionally with the goal of increasing understanding, addressing problems, and questioning thoughts or actions. It engages the heart as well as the mind. It is different from ordinary, everyday conversation, in that dialogue has a focus and a purpose. Dialogue is different from debate, which offers two points of view with the goal of proving the legitimacy or correctness of one of the viewpoints over the other. Dialogue, unlike debate or even discussion, is as interested in the relationship(s) between the participants as it is in the topic or theme being explored.Ultimately, real dialogue presupposes an openness to modify deeply held convictions (Romney 1996: 1)
Counter-storytelling
‘challenge social and racial injustice by
listening to and learning from experiences of
racism and resistance, despair and hope at the
margins of society’ (Yosso 2006: 171).
PHD in School of Education at
UCTWhat is the potential of a digital storytelling workshop as a process and a product to facilitate an engagement across difference within a post-conflict pedagogical framework?
1. What do the small stories told in these dialogical spaces tell us about how students construct notions of difference, how they position themselves towards each other and towards hegemonic discourses?
2. To what extent do the storytelling spaces during the workshop as part of the digital storytelling process facilitate an engagement across difference and in particular what is the potential of this process to elicit empathy and witnessing from the audience?
3. What do the digital stories as product of the workshop tell us about how students position and re-position themselves in terms of difference and what is the potential of this process to elicit empathy and witnessing from the audience?
Studies on digital storytelling and
difference
Lots of engagement around digital storytelling and difference
Less focus on difference & critical theory
Only two references on digital storytelling & counter-storytelling
Rolon-Dow (2011): Race(ing) stories: digital storytelling as a tool for critical race scholarship
Vaseduvan (2006): Making Known Differently: engaging visual modalities as spaces to author new selves
Very positive reception
Potential of non-experts to create complex
multimedia products (Hull and Katz 2006)
Sharability / publishability
Giving marginalised voices a forum
Breaking of culture of silence (Thumbran
2010)
Own research
It is interesting to note that the students who participated in the digital storytelling approach came away with a deeper understanding of one another’s ethnic, racial and socio-economic backgrounds. The knowledge about other students enhanced the understanding and respect for one another in the class. The situation gave a practical example of what and how they would handle diverse classrooms when they begin their teaching career next year. (Condy et al 2012)
The study has showed the extent to which students essentialise race, identify along racial background lines and construct identities in opposition to each other, confirming findings of previous research (Leibovitz et al., 2010, Pattman, 2010; Rohleder et al., 2008; Bozalek, 2011). However, it has also showed how indirect knowledge (as Jansen (2009) calls it) that is passed on from generation to generation and still impacts on students‟ social engagements can come to the surface through these disruptive moments of sharing and listening openly to each other‟s stories, and may constitute a first step to transform students‟ engagements with one another. (Gachago et al 2014)
Narrow genre
‘as a cultural form it is marked by a fairly
predictable, if not uniform, range of ways to
represent the self’ (Burgess 2006, 209)
Poletti argues ‘that the specific narrative strategies
of the digital storytelling form present significant
barriers against digital storytelling being used as a
means of redefining or challenging existing
meanings attached to life experience, given its
emphasis on narrative accessibility, closure, and
coherence of theme (Poletti 2011).
Sentimentality in DST
‘Somewhat paradoxically from a critical
perspective, it is the very qualities that mark
digital stories as uncool, conservative, and
ideologically suspect – ‘stock’ tropes,
nostalgia, even sentimentality – that give them
the power of social connectivity, while the
sense of authentic self-expression that
they convey lowers the barriers to
empathy.‘ (Burgess 2006:10)
Finally…
The seven story elements, as guides for
participating in digital storytelling (and the
‘stuff’ its participants consume), coax life
narratives in such a way as to encourage
individuals to shape their heterogeneous
experiences into stories of personal
reflection on these dominant themes. (Poletti 2011).
The power of personal storytelling lies in its
potential to allow affective connection between
storyteller and storylistener (Amy Shuman 2005)
Are some stories more capable than other to
elicit empathy? (Frank 2010)
What kind of empathy do they elicit? (Boler 1999)
Theoretical framework
Affective turn - Sara Ahmed (2004) What do emotions do?
Emotions as relational / social practices
Attached to bodies
‘comfort is the effect of bodies being able to ‘sink’ into spaces, that have already taken their shape. Discomfort is not simply a choice or decision – ‘I felt uncomfortable about this or that’ – but an effect of bodies inhabiting spaces that do not take or ‘extend’ their shape.’ (Ahmed 2004: 152)
The ‘Other’
Iris Marion Young (1997)
Asymmetrical Reciprocity: we cant put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes
A temporal dimension, by which she refers to the kind of experiences that we have made in life, that make us unique and which cannot allow us to know the other or understand the other’s standpoint in life
And our social position in life, which is linked to issues of power and oppression and does not allow a symmetric reciprocity with the other
Amy Shuman and the limits of
empathy
Both the personal and the
collective story can be
legitimizing categories
that provide meaning and
pattern to life, but
traversing the terrain
between the personal and
the collective can be
fraught with obstacles to
understanding. (2004: 55)
Empathy
‘Empathy preserves a distance between those
who understand and those who experience
trauma: witnessing troubles that distance, and
while it does not necessarily close the
distance, it transforms the distance enough for
the witness to be part of the constituency of
sufferer… empathy can produce alienation’ (Shuman 2004: 144, emphasis added).
Sentimentality
The ordinary becomes precious, and as we
know well, the precious is the most dangerous
of representations; it is always precariously
close to the trivial, just as its counterpart, the
extraordinary, is precariously close to scandal.
The ethnography of suffering requires a
critique of empathy, an understanding of
representation that represents emotion as
neither trivial nor scandalous’ (Shuman 2004: 150)
Destabilising empathy
when a personal story travels beyond the
original story setting and is used as an
allegory for a collective experience
entitlement claims are made that challenge
sentimentalizing allegories which in turn
undermine empathy – as she argues often as
alibis for failure of empathy (personal narrative
to similar to collective)
Narrative inquiry
Arthur W. Frank 2010:
Letting stories breathe: A socio-narratology (2010)
Dialogical Narrative Analysis (DNA)
Stories seen as actors / stories do…
Having certain capabilities
Focus on relationship between story, storyteller and storylistener: ‘The storyteller gives breath to the story, but the story is already there, waiting.’
5 Questions of DNA
Resources: What narrative resources can storyteller draw from? What resources shape how the story is being told and comprehended? How are resources distributed?
Circulation: To whom is the story told, who can understand story and who can’t?
Affiliation: Who does the story render external or other to that group?
Identity: What identity is performed/constructed, what are possibilities to change? Or remain the same? What identity is claimed, rejected, experimented with?
What is at stake: Who is holding her/his own? Who is made more vulnerable by the story?
How did I chose my stories?
Frank (2010: 43): ‘the analyst’s cultivated
capacity to hear, from the total collection of
stories, those that call out as needing to be
written about.’
‘Narrative analysis gives increased audibility to
some stories, recasts how other stories are
understood, and necessarily neglects many
stories.’ (50)
Lauren’s and Noni’s story
Capabilities of stories
Stories choose us
Stories make us uncomfortable
Stories go under our skin
Stories move us
Stories trouble power dynamics
Stories are out of control
Stories connect the personal and the political
Stories open spaces for wonder and respect
Stories connect us
Daniela: What were the reactions of people or how did you perceived them?
Lauren: Shocked! But also like they felt with me, there was no judgement and I knew I expected judgement. I was ready to like put it all out and then when people just looked like they had empathy and they didn’t pity me, you know? They just felt with me in the moment that made me like ready to just share more!
Daniela: Why do you think they didn’t judge you?
Lauren: I don’t know I think because we clarified that it’s a space that was safe to say anything and just to be yourself …and the people in our group fortunately where people who are very open and diverse and …well I don’t know if they all were, but they are now at least you know …and I think they would have felt silly to judge me because it was a space where we all just kind of connected with each other -even for a moment you know?
Stories make us see the ‘other’
Christine: Because I am comfortable being white and I am comfortable speaking English I am comfortable with my whiteness and I only realised when Noni was talking about it how white people unconsciously make black people feel. I had to leave the room to go to the bathroom had a good cry in the bathroom and then splash my face with cold water and then come back to class. And that’s why my nose was blocked when I did my recording because that was the day I did my recording but at the same time I was thinking about Noni’s discomfort.
Christine: I would actually almost want to give Noni the credit, she made me realise that we are all the same, we are all the same, we all feel the same. And again told me, in my mind, I was thinking: But you can make the difference! You can be the one to take the first step! Because this workshop showed us, that article actually showed me, where my weakness is. And it’s noted, I am not hesitant. It’s not that I don’t trust black people. It’s just that I have never thought of them as being intimate, somebody to be intimate with on a very close terms with. That’s, that’s about it. I can’t say, I can’t say, that I don’t want black people in my life but the course made me more aware that they have feelings. And then maybe there’s something that stops them from approaching me. But maybe they can see something in me that stops them from approaching me and making the first contact. It should come from me - you know? I can make it happen.
Stories make us see our
sameness
Stories make us see shared
experience
I was thinking about my father who was a poor white who was not welcome in wealthy people’s homes. Even in his own family extended family, a boy was given a chocolate wrapper and was thinking there was a piece of chocolate in it. He found nothing, only a little strips of melted chocolates which he is still licked in the street and afterwards he realised what he had done or what. He was: It’s like, I don’t know how to explain it, it’s like such total rejection and that’s what went through my mind for the whole of that day. I was out of it, all of it for the whole of that day. I was just thinking about the things we do to reject other people. Some people do it explicitly and some people don’t…What do we do as whites to make people feel like they’re nothing?
Daniela: And you’ve never thought about this before?
Christine : No! I’ve never thought of the black/white issues never!
Stories move people
Thando: I was telling her [Lauren] about the story, her story… and then she said to me: You know what? The day I was telling my story you cried and then I noticed… and then she said: I knew those tears were not for nothing! I said: Hell no, you saw me very well (laughing)… yeah because I was living a lie and then I thought, if Lauren can be so, so brave about her sexuality, revealing about her sexuality in class and with her family, why I can’t I do it? Because I know one thing about me and my family…because of my education status I am more powerful than them. And I was thinking: if I reveal my sexuality and then they say: We disown you, I don’t care! I can survive on my own. And then from there I think the other day I sent my sister an sms. And then I told her about this sexuality of mine.
Daniela: You have said a lot of tough emotions [came up] is it?
Lauren: Yeah it is so overwhelming... (laughs)
Daniela: Would have expected something like that?
Lauren: No! Not at all not at all! People that I would never have guessed have been emailing me and messaging me the whole morning I have been talking to this one guy …
Daniela: In your class ?
Lauren: In our class yeahh, he has been emailing me like, telling me, he doesn’t know what to do with his feelings emm yeah …
Stories make us uncomfortable
Daniela: So which of these stories affected you the most?
Christine: Lauren! Because I am homophobic…
Daniela: So listening to Lauren’s story what does that make you ...?
Christine: Ohhh, inside I was like screaming. I think [name of student] was the one who told me quite a long time ago that she’s like this. But I didn’t believe a thing until I heard it out of the horse’s mouth. Oh my god and then she asked me to read her story and then she said: Did you know this about me? And I just swallowed this big lump and I said: No, it’s the first time I hear of it. And I had to like: Ohhhhhh, keep it in this morning.
Daniela: Ok emm so what were the most uncomfortable moments for you in that process?
Lauren: Emm when Noni showed those photos of where she comes from. I felt not guilty but in a sense guilty, because I mean, I can’t help that am white. But I don’t know the way that they have lived, it’s not their fault either but that’s just how they live… so it was this kind of confusion of how has this happened? How do some people have to live like that and I lived so comfortably? And it made me made guilty in a sense, even though I am not in control of the fact that I was born as I am you know? And I just felt angrier as well because it was like, I could see that the other black people in the room where going: That’s where we live too, you know, it’s not a big deal! And the white people going: Ooooh shame! Like that it’s horrible you know and it made me feel so uncomfortable in that moment.
Stories make us defensive
Sadika: I felt like: Well, everybody has their own opinion. And I just feel like: Yes, that happened. But it happened a long time ago. And it’s like, the generation that implemented Apartheid has died out. And people are living the way they’re living because of themselves. They also have to remember, they vote for the same president every year and that president has made no change. Yes, they have the power and the money to make the most change in the country, yet it isn’t. So why do why do people get the blame because of the past when we’ve had we’ve been democratic for almost 10 years? For more than 10 years! I also understand where she’s coming from, I truly understand, but I think African people are not the only people who suffer. Like coloured people also suffered and I mean if you go to other areas in Mitchells Plain… I don’t live in that area but if you go further in you’ll see, you have gangsters and people, coloured people, also live in shacks. They’re also waiting for the same opportunities as others. But I think the story just focuses on their race. I understand why - because she is who she is, but I think she should have broaden it because more than one race suffered.
Christine: She asked me to walk down to the
Main Road with her for snacks and I thought:
Wohhh! This is unusual - she doesn’t
approach me for anything. But so far we’ve
had long talks about the GEP file we’ve have
to do for Janet. And now she asked me to go
down to the Main Road with her. She’s just a
normal girl. While I know she’s gay - I don’t
see she’s gay.
First conclusions
‘Empathy is one kind of obligation, sometimes
creating a possibility for understanding across
differences, sometimes involving sentimentality,
sometimes romanticising tragedy as inspiration,
but in any case deeply compromising the
relationship between tellers and listeners’ (Shuman
2004: 20)
People become the stories they tell (Frank
2010)
Stories are out of control
Have the potential but usually do not
trouble power dynamics
They can render us vulnerable or help us
hide our vulnerability (Butler 2004, 2009)
Difficulty of negotiate the personal and the
political
‘One is undone, in the face of the other, by the
touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the
prospect of the touch, by the memory of the
feel. We are touched by stories we tell.’ (Butler
2004: 24)
Critical emotional reflexivity
….a process of using emotions as catalysts, to
allow the questioning of beliefs and
assumptions, exposing privilege and comfort
zones, with the aim for learners to find new
ways of being with the ‘Other’, and ultimately
leading to transformed ‘relationships,
practices, and enactments that benefit
teaching and learning for peace, mutual
understanding, and reconciliation’
(Zembylas 2011: 2)
Noni: I don’t know if I agree too much but for me I thought it would have brought us closer than we are I mean I don’t know if we can all be honest it has as much as we talked to each other every now and then it hasn’t been personal relationships (emmm) as we I thought it will be after that intense week and I still talk more to these guys and I believe am gonna correct me if am wrong you guys still talk to the people you talk to in the group (emm) so I would say just a tiny bit because or may be not I don’t know.
Faith: But may be that was just your expected outcome (emmm) may be that wasn’t...
Noni: From the intensity of the week that’s what I thought it would do emm that’s what am saying may be I live in dream land.
Christine: No I feel there has been more of a connection I don’t know if its just me but I have tried to ….
Faith : Not in terms of actual personal relationship
Lauren: That’s also like we’ve been here for four years I mean we have our friends you know we have our friendship groups just because it might be a race thing or something it doesn’t mean that we’re not building relationships with other people we just stuck to our original friend groups and that’s emmm
Faith : And I think its also your definition of a friend (emm) like we can’t all have five hundred friends like real genuine friends (emmm) and I don’t know if that’s what you are talking about on ehhh.
Noni: Emmmm
Open questions
Difficulties / impossibility (?) to step out of somebody’s emotional habitus/practices / pull of comfort zones
Difficult to recognise the ‘other’ as ‘other’ in Young’s sense
Temptations to make someone the same / connect / look for similarities in experience
How can we love the other that is distant?
Maria Lugones’(1987:5-7): can students learn to ‘love each other by learning to travel to each other’s “worlds”’?
What to do with silences?
Awareness of topologies and capabilities of
stories
‘Naming types of narratives can help people
think about what story they are telling what
story they want to tell. Naming narrative types
can authorize the telling of particular stories,
and it also can liberate people from stories
they no longer want to tell.’ (Frank 2010: 118)
Dialogue is not ‘academic intervention’. In fact, dialogue is not a theoretical exercise at all. There may be room for these things but they are called something else—debate, discussion, argument—NOT dialogue.
What is dialogue then?
Above all, dialogue involves uncertainty. It is an investigation of something you do not know with one or more persons who also do/es not know. Dialogue is therefore a risk: rather than pounding yourself on the chest because you are so intensely extraordinary, or, wanting to pound someone else on the head because they are so agonisingly ordinary, dialogue rarely goes according to plan. Dialogue is three D’s; Delicate, Difficult and Desirable.
(Minna Salami aka MsAfropolitan, Nov 10th 2014)
We must not see any person as an
abstraction. Instead, we must see in
every person a universe with its own
secrets, with its own treasures, with its
own sources of anguish and with some
measure of triumph. - Elie Wiesel
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Acknowledgement
Facilitators of 2013 ISP Digital Storytelling
project
NRF staff development grant
NRF CPUT Digital Storytelling Project