Listening to Passengers, Listening to Stories

Abstract

In metropolitan life, public transportation is essential to the everyday commute of people. Although they manifest important aspects of our culture, they also sometimes present issues of conflict by the violation of personal space, privacy, and other harmful and abusive behavior. This workshop aims to increase awareness of these conflicts and abusive behaviors in public transportation especially from the eyes of the victims. Transportation creates an impact on our daily roles, public persona, and social identity. This project aims to expose these issues by the contemporary critique of the cultural norms shaped by compulsory encounters happening in urban transportation. The project traces the ways that the participants, as passengers, would survive in such an oppressive cultural context. In doing so, we aim to ask the questions of how can one body turn invisible in such a physically limiting and politically controlling, gaze-centered space? In this workshop, participants are given a story that takes place in public transportation with the circumstance of being in a threatening zone. While they are being told of how the story begins, it is up to them to decide how such conflict is, or can be, resolved given their imagined narrative construction. In this dialogical exchange of stories, participants are also welcomed to tell their personal stories regarding a trip in public transportation. After the participants share their stories, they are motivated to produce tactics and strategies to cope with what they have encountered in their experiences. The participants will practice listening to each other’s stories that stayed hidden or ignored by the public.