Workshop: Narrative Kitchen

What could inter-cultural meaning making look like for design and research practitioners? In this immersive and dialogic workshop, the facilitators, co-founders of D.epicentre, Sudebi Thakurata and Probal Banerjee, will bring in aspects of their work on international cultural relations, futures and foresight, design-led innovation and transformative leadership and creative and fair collaborations to provoke the participants. Tools, processes and frameworks from many of their relevant ongoing initiatives (Fair Collaborations Toolkit for EUNIC, Response_Able Futures, Narrative Kitchen, Dignity Compass, Intercultural Collaborations by Design, SEAD cultural leadership programme, GCRP, City As Text etc.) will be used as provocations, to open up dilemmas encountered by people in their contexts.

In the workshop, the participants will engage in narrative-driven scenarios, reflect upon shared vocabulary around equity, participation, dignity and fairness and also approach those at personal, organisational and systemic levels. Food will be used as an enabler (as a medium, material and metaphor) to steer some of these conversations. They will collectively explore how their work can be more responsive to contemporary challenges or complex realities shaped by conflict, geopolitical power plays, neo-imperialism, climate crisis or AI.

This workshop would entail some of these following elements: understanding similarities and differences due to cultural contexts, knowing each other better through values, beliefs and inter-cultural teamwork, Delving deeper into identities, positionalities, intersectionalities while identifying and sharing cultural strengths. It will act as a reflective and evaluative process to look at their own practices.

Drawing on the practices of creative and fair collaborations, inter cultural collaboration by design, participatory research and design, narrative-led methodologies, curation and place-based learning and work across many contexts, the participants will delve into how intercultural meaning making becomes a foundation for any practice.