A Storytelling Workshop: PhD Tales of experiences, relationality, and sharing
A Storytelling Workshop: PhD Tales of Experiences, Relationality, and Sharing
Led by Lonceny Kourouma and Delso Batista Jr
Thursday 6 June 2024
2 - 4pm
Soho Poly, Little Titchfield Street
A workshop using storytelling to engender healing and a feeling of community through the sharing of journeys through doctoral studies and their challenges. The aim is to create a space for everyone involved to share their stories and experiences and to positively engage with each other through active listening, empathy, and a community mindset. The exercise also helps foster an understanding of difference, acknowledging that although each of us is going through doctoral studies, we each are unique in our viewpoints and lived realities, and such a space can help break the barriers of difference and allow us to better relate to one another through our stories.
Storytelling has healing components as it can allow a person to express, reframe, and connect with their experiences, feelings, and insights. As a methodology, it can counter the pursuit of universal and objective truth, instead promoting renewed spaces through authenticity and empathy and allowing a more open-ended interpretation of meaning (Polletta et al., 2011). In running this workshop, we hope to enable the researchers to “deconstruct and reconstruct the intersubjectivities of their experiences” (Brooks et al., 2008, p.4). Through a critical retelling of their story, the researchers present will be encouraged to locate the positionality and relationality of their experiences to better understand how each of their stories exist collectively and uniquely to one another.
Lonceny Kourouma
Lonceny Kourouma (he/she) is a queer doctoral researcher, Part-Time Visiting Lecturer (PTVL) in Sociology at the University of Westminster, London; member and researcher for both the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) and Early Career Researcher (ECR) steering group at the University of Manchester; member and contributor of The Pedagogy of Social Justice/Decoloniality and Partnership in Higher Education at the University of Westminster; and co-founder of the Dreaming Room. His research focuses on highlighting the intersectionalities and intricacies of Black lived experiences in the UK through their own voices which he examines through a decolonising lens. To do this, he uses storytelling as form of decolonial praxis to help understand and retell Black lived experiences in the present day.
Delso Batista Jr
Delso Batista (He/Him) is a PhD researcher in Psychology at Nottingham Trent University. He works as a psychotherapist, collaborating with the online Psychology/Psychotherapy platform RUMO and Docklands Outreach in London. In the field of work/research, he dialogues and articulates issues related to the lived experiences of LGBTQIA+, immigrants and racialised people and the decolonisation of psychology.
He is a Registered Member MBACP – British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP No392444), EuroPsy Psychologist EFPA, and Portuguese Psychologists Order (OPP No25359).
