PROPOSAL TYPE
Workshop
SEEKING
- Seeking General Feedback and Interest
RELATED TOPICS
- Memory
- Public Engagement
- Teaching and Training
ABSTRACT
What if history wasn’t just understood—but felt? This interactive session introduces embodied approaches to public history that use storytelling, humour, and simple movement to help audiences engage with difficult narratives. Participants will explore how these tools can reduce emotional overwhelm, foster connection, and create more meaningful, inclusive public engagement.
DESCRIPTION
This workshop explores how embodied storytelling—integrating movement, humour, and narrative—can expand how public historians engage audiences with complex, emotional, and often traumatic histories. The goal of this proposal is to introduce practical, trauma-informed approaches that move beyond traditional interpretive methods and support deeper audience connection, accessibility, and meaning-making.
Drawing from clinical nursing experience and community-based work with trauma-affected populations, this session demonstrates how simple, low-barrier embodied strategies can help audiences regulate emotional responses, remain present with difficult content, and engage more fully in dialogue. It also examines how humour, when used intentionally and ethically, can create entry points into challenging topics without diminishing their seriousness.
This session is designed as an interactive workshop. Participants will engage in guided storytelling and light, accessible movement exercises to experience how physical engagement influences attention, emotional capacity, and retention. Facilitated discussion will focus on how these approaches can be adapted across public history settings, including museums, exhibitions, community programs, and educational environments.
The goal is to provide practical, adaptable tools for immediate use while contributing to broader conversations about accessibility, inclusion, and trauma-informed engagement in public history. This session invites participants to consider how embodied approaches can enhance interpretation and create more meaningful audience experiences. I welcome feedback and collaboration from public historians, museum professionals, educators, and community practitioners working with difficult histories or underrepresented narratives. I am particularly interested in insights on adapting these approaches across diverse institutional and cultural contexts. I am also open to collaborating with panelists who bring expertise in trauma-informed practice, community-based history, Indigenous or marginalized perspectives, or museum education. Contributions that deepen discussion around ethical storytelling, audience care, and inclusive engagement would be highly valuable.
If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to pass along someone’s contact information confidentially, please get in contact directly:
Lita Mae Button, Punch Positive, [email protected]
All feedback and offers of assistance should be sent by June 5, 2026. If you have general ideas or feedback to share, please feel free to use the comments feature below.
This sounds so interesting and I would love to see this at the conference. I am a strong proponent of “humour, when used intentionally and ethically, can create entry points into challenging topics without diminishing their seriousness,” and have used humor to create entry points. I think there is a value to this topic and helping others learn why this is important, when, where and how to implement and understanding why this is even necessary.