Call for papers: 5th Academy of Professional Dialogue conference: Dialogue as Story, 1-3 November, 2022, UK but Online. Deadline: none listed.
The Academy of Professional Dialogue (AofPD) will be holding its fifth Annual Conference online from Tuesday 1st November to Thursday 3rd November. This year’s theme will be ‘Dialogue as Story’. The idea behind this is that when people come into any Dialogue, they bring their own story. This is closely connected with the idea of ‘identity’. The stories we have about ourselves form our identities.
This also applies to groups of people. Groups frequently come together around their shared stories, and over time they may also create new stories together. Different people and groups also often have different stories about the same thing – for example, in organisations, people at different levels and in different parts of an organisation will probably have different stories about the organisation they are all part of. All these different stories lead to fragmentation between different people and different groups. Dialogue provides a means of sharing and understanding the different stories, reducing this fragmentation, and ultimately helping to change everyone’s story going forward. It’s probably worth saying that this isn’t the same as ‘Storytelling’. In fact, ‘Storytelling’ itself is more about monologue. Instead, Dialogue is key to exploring, revealing and understanding different stories.