Welcome to Storylisteners! Did you just look that term up in the dictionary? It is not there. We want to change that.
We are a research podcast. Based in the Department Journalism and Media Communication at Colorado State University, we are sharing bot ...
... Read more
When Jesse Grace and Steve Weiss were asked to make a documentary about mail-in voting, it seemed like a straightforward assignment. Until COVID struck, and the 2020 presidential election turned into a referendum on mail-in voting, filled with conspiracy theories, death threats to election workers, and ultimately, an invasion of the U.S. Capitol. What resulted was the hour long documentary Democracy vs. The Big Lie: The Truth Behind Mail-In Voting. Grace and Weiss are both members of the Journalism and Media Communication faculty at Colorado State. How did they make the switch from informational storytelling to coverage of a historic moment of crisis in our democracy? And just as importantly, what shaped them to become the storytellers, and storylisteners, that they are today?
Dr. Ryan Claycomb remembers the night he found the subject that would animate and define his life as a literature and theater scholar. It was the first night he had ever seen a verbatim theater production. Verbatim theater has a unique relationship with democracy, because in many ways it is democratic. As Dr. Claycomb describes it in his new book, In the Lurch, verbatim theater is, “socially engaged performances whose texts rely on word-for-word testimony. Performances such as Fires in the Mirror, The Laramie Project, and The Vagina Monologues have at their best demonstrated how to hold hard conversations about explosive subjects in a liberal democracy.” Still, the book is not a celebration of the artform and his career. Rather, it looks critically at its effectiveness in the face of a hard move toward illberal ideologies around the world, and he does not spare himself in that investigation. What role does art and testimony play in the shared experience, political and otherwise? At the heart of that question is a concept critical to both narrative and listening: empathy. Dr. Claycomb is both a Professor of English and Theater as well as an associate dean in the College of Liberal Arts.
What power does language hold in a democracy? From deliberation experts to linguists to journalists, many experts will tell you it sits at the critical center. So when Adrea Purdy became a founding member of the Deliberative Journalism Project in 2021, it was to ensure the whole conversation did not occur in just one language. An Associate Teaching Professor of Spanish, Purdy is a native of Parral,Chihuahua, Mexico, Purdy received my Ph.D. in 20th Century Spanish American Literature from Texas Tech University in 1987. Her many areas of interest include: contemporary Spanish American prose, issues in culture, the teaching of reading and writing skills, and of course, translation, so important in a time when language can help, or hurt, our understanding of facts, truth, and each other.
In this final episode, we talk about what we learned as we spoke to nine healers who use narrative listening as a way to better serve their patients and clients. We also discuss how to define storylistening, how it might be used in journalism, and how the experience of meeting and discussing storylisteners changed us.
In this episode, we delve into the world of healthcare administration through the lens of an experienced professional. Ron Holder, COO of the Medical Group Management Association discusses resolving conflict through effective communication, using the "ladders of inference" to tailor messages for each person, and the differences between hearing and listening. We also explore generational communication gaps and the importance of face-to-face interaction for active and effective listening.