“In Your Shoes: Reckoning with Our Past/Imagining Our Future“ Closes the 2022 Lannan Symposium “Beyond Identity: Reimagining the American Narrative”
Posted in Past events | Tagged Aminatta Forna, Derek Goldman, Spring 2022
This performance, which was the closing event of the 2022 Lannan Symposium, “Beyond Identity: Reimagining the American Narrative,” displayed The Lab’s award-winning In Your Shoes methodology, created and developed around the world by Derek Goldman, in which participants have deep, open conversations around a topic and then perform one another’s perspectives.
The event brought together students and members of the Georgetown community to explore American identity, in particular the gulf between professed values of democracy, freedom, and opportunity and the realities and reckonings that characterize our past and present. Engaging the story of Mélisande Short-Colomb, a direct descendant of the GU272 who came to Georgetown as an undergraduate student and using her celebrated multimedia performance Here I Am as a catalyst, these performative dialogues engage questions of race, memory, justice, institutional legacy, what young people are inheriting from the past, and how they can reimagine the future and contribute to reshaping a new American narrative.
The 2022 Lannan Symposium, “Beyond Identity: Reimagining the American Narrative,” organized by the Lannan Center, in affiliation with the conflict mediators Beyond Borders Scotland and Beyond Conflict, brought together experts in conflict resolution, scientists, writers, and creative artists whose work addresses the themes of conflict and identity in a series of seminars held over the course of one year.
Watch the recording: