Our Words, Our Truths: Storytelling as a Performative Memoir for Collective Identity and Community Engagement

This eclectic presentation will map out Ada Cheng’s own journey as an Asian American and immigrant storyteller and delineate how her personal stories reflect and mirror urgent social concerns of our time. It will also include her experiences as a storytelling show producer, who engages in community- based storytelling.

The workshop includes the following components:

• How can storytelling serve as a performative memoir, different from the written memoir?
• Why is this approach important?
• How can we use personal stories to critically reflect urgent social issues of our time, such as racism, xenophobia, gender-based violence, etc?
• What does community-based storytelling mean? How do we use personal storytelling for collective identity formation and community engagement?
• How is it connected to the concept of performative memoir?
• How can we strategically use storytelling to address the issue of equity, beyond diversity and inclusion?

This event is Free and Open to the public. For more information, please contact Rebecca Hopman at rhopman@eapl.org.

Learn more about Ada Cheng, this program, and how to book it.