Talking and Listening About Suffering

We invite you to participate in a one-day workshop "Talking and Listening About Suffering" dedicated to the recording and working with oral histories about traumatic experiences. The event will take place in a conference room at the Center for Urban History from 10.00 to 17.00.

In her essay for "Qualitative Inquiry," a German sociologist Gabriele Rosenthal proves a healing power of storytelling as it helps people reconcile with their own past. An important role in such a reconciliation belongs to the interviewers who use their attentive listening and empathy to create an environment similar to therapy. However, dealing with the topics of violence, suffering, and death requires significant emotional investment from the researchers. Each of them copes differently and builds a mechanism to distance themselves and recover psychologically. In fact, we would like to talk about it during the workshop.

Within the series "(Re)making a Story" we invite you to reflect with us about the challenges faced by researchers dealing with the conflicting past with the help of oral history method. Let us discuss how psychological wellbeing can be maintained and secured. We organized this meeting because of the transfer of oral history collection "Social Anthropology of Filling the Void: Poland and Ukraine After the Second World War" to the Center by the research coordinator Anna Wylegała.

The meeting will take place in a format of peer-group moderated by a psychotherapist. In the first place, we would like to invite interviewers who have had the experience working with violence-related topics at different times and areas. In order to optimize our work, please, fill in a brief form.

The group would be facilitated by Oksana Nakonechna– a trauma therapist (EMDR therapy), a Psychology in Crisis trainer, coordinator of Lviv Crisis Psychological Service, Chair of the Board EMDR Ukraine.

The workshop will be held in the Ukrainian language. Attendance is free of charge. Participants will be provided with coffee breaks and lunch.

For more details, please, contact a project coordinator of "Urban Stories" Natalia Otrishchenko at [email protected].

The workshop is taking place within the [unarchiving] program. It aims at promoting collections and resources of the Urban Media Archive. We are trying to shape new attitudes to archiving and present our collections from an unconventional perspective. Events from the cycle imply public film screenings and listening to visual, audio-visual, or audio pieces, as well as processing the materials collected by the Center combining popular formats and archival historical collections in the setting of free reflection and discussions.

Facilitator of the meeting

Credits

Cover image: Opening of Nikita Kadan’s "(un)named" exhibition