Dartmouth Events

Knowing Other People’s Stories: Empathy, Illness, and Identity

A talk by Arthur W. Frank, exploring storytelling as a practice that seeks to establish empathic relations by offering listeners a moral imagination of others’ worlds.

Tuesday, February 16, 2016
5:30pm – 7:00pm
Room 003, Rockefeller Center
Intended Audience(s): Public
Categories:

A talk by Arthur W. Frank, who describes his topic: I understand empathy as dependent on knowing other people’s stories. Storytelling is a practice that seeks to establish empathic relations by offering listeners a moral imagination of others’ worlds, what identities are possible in those worlds, and what actions are indicated by those identities. I’ll discuss four stories in which empathic relations either happen or fail. Complexities include respecting how stories affect others without agreeing with those stories, and deciding which among someone’s stories to honor, when stories differ.

 

BIO:

Arthur W. Frank is professor emeritus at the University of Calgary and professor at VID Specialized University, Bergen, Norway. His books include The Wounded Storyteller (1995; second edition 2013) and Letting Stories Breathe (2010). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and winner of their 2008 medal for bioethics.

For more information, contact:
Humanities Center

Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.