Workshop "Narrative Consultancy and Its Application Across Professional Fields"
This 1-day workshop, led by Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar (University of Groningen), is meant as an introduction to narrative consultancy. In the morning session, the speaker will share some of his experiences as a narrative consultant. He will demonstrate how the insights and findings of narratology can be made productive in the design of interventions in organizations dealing with communication breakdowns. We will also discuss a number of methods for collecting organizational narratives and shaping corporate stories.
In the afternoon, we will ‘translate’ a classic of structuralist narratology - Greimas’s general models of the pattern of transformations and relational system that underlie most forms of storytelling – into a number of simple ‘storytelling skills’. Participants will acquire these through a number of assignments and see how they can be used in training, coaching and consultancy, both for individuals and for organizations.
The workshop will round up with a reflection on the risks and limitations of using storytelling in practices like the ones discussed throughout this workshop, and the need for an ethical applied narratology.
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Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar is co-founder and one of the academic directors of the Netherlands Winter School on Narrative. He has worked with narrative in a variety of capacities, both as an academic at universities in Tunisia and the Netherlands, and as a freelance organizational consultant. Currently he is a senior lecturer for the Arts, Cognition and Criticism programme at the University of Groningen. He is actively involved in and publishes about the establishment of applied narratology: a bridge between theory and practices of narrative. Recent work includes Narrative Values, the Value of Narratives (De Gruyter 2024, co-edited with Barend van Heusden), a special issue on applied narratology in the journal Narrative Inquiry (2024, co-edited with Laura Karttunen and Anna Ovaska), and an upcoming special issue on the same topic in Narrative (2026, co-edited with Genevieve Liveley and Andrea Macrae). |