Course Details

Story, Knowledge, and Systems of Power in which they move are the central concepts of this course. Stories and storytelling used as both pedagogy and source information. Story is understood to be any narration on any topic about any event with any amount of veracity and/or claim to exclusiveness of accuracy – from indigenous storytellers orating in a bighouse to science texts of the westernized academy to online D&D gaming to political rhetoric. Philosophies, performances, and politics of power will be large components of our time together.

We will explore knowledges, philosophies and histories as told by indigenous people around the globe. We will spend time with contemporary versions of history in which various stories of reality have been forwarded or erased. We will hear from guest tellers of stories and we will write and perform stories, being ever aware of where all these sharings reside within scholarly canons. We will ponder and converse with these ideas: 

• performances of living
• methodologies for scholarship
• knowledge systems and their genealogies including creation stories
• negotiating and negotiated histories and philosophies
• identities – particularly as they relate to power systems of telling stories