Laura Moran

This project explores how the sociality of storytelling provides refugee youth a sense of agency in circumstances of precarity. In partnership with Humanitarian Service Team, a refugee founded and led non-profit organization in Nikavale Refugee Settlement, Uganda, displaced young people will participate in ethnographic storytelling workshops and the creative exchange of ethnographic works with an audience of peer writers drawn from Stone Soup, children’s literary magazine. The stories produced will then be published in a special issue of ethnographic storytelling journal, Otherwise Magazine. The project contributes to an anthropological understanding of storytelling as an intersubjective experience, by exploring the social processes through which: 1) a sense of agency over one’s own life is made possible through storytelling, particularly in contexts of displacement or trauma; 2) stories transform and are transformed in collaboration with other social actors; and 3) storytelling is a transformative experience for those on the receiving end of the story. Through providing a platform for refugee youth to tell their own stories, in their own voices, the project explores how anthropology might be innovated as a discipline that not only studies, but also hosts spaces of explicit collaboration with other social actors where stories are shared and transformed.