If you could wear a mask and be anyone or anything, who or what would you be? What would you do? Story Booth: Carnival allows students to answer just that. The event is a new take on the Story Booth series hosted by NSU’s Center for the Humanities. The goal is to encourage community collaboration and collect stories produced by the NSU community.
The Story Booth series was originally conceptualized by the former humanities center director and interim dean of the Halmos College of Arts and Sciences Andrea Shaw Nevins and has taken on a variety of forms in the past few years. Like most experiences, it has adapted to a virtual setting due to the pandemic. This year, Story Booth: Carnival is a Zoom portal open 24/7 where students are encouraged to join and share their stories. The link begins recording as soon as you join and invites students to respond to the prompt, share about themselves and their culture and experiences or just have fun.
Aileen Miyuki Farrar, assistant professor and interim associate chair of the department of humanities and politics, an assistant professor of literature and the director of NSU’s Center for the Humanities explained that this year’s event encourages students to explore the spirit of carnival.
“With this [event], we are getting to hear a much more authentic and raw response to the prompt. We have a designated prompt, which is ‘If you could wear a mask and be anyone or anything, who or what would you be? What would you do?’ but we have also invited people to go in and just have fun. The spirit of carnival is to have fun and liberate yourself, to be expressive, to be subversive even. We invite people to go on and just express themselves,” she said.
The Zoom link for the event is now open and will close on March 16. After the link has closed, the recording for this year’s Story Booth event will be compiled into a video and posted on the Story Booth website where anyone can access all past Story Booth compilations.
Farrar expressed her hope that Story Booth can be a platform where students can let their voices be heard.
“It feels like people just need to have a chance to let go… Because we don’t even have a spring break, something like this might give us the chance to express ourselves at a time that we might not be able to otherwise… I hope people recognize their voice is getting to be heard and there is a community of concerns and also unique differences that we can celebrate. This is something that I really hope students can get involved in so they can feel more visible and can also appreciate each other,” she said.
While this semester’s Story Booth event is hosted in collaboration with the department of humanities and politics, the Center for the Humanities encourages future collaborations with student clubs and organizations. They are welcomed to propose prompts they wanna to see answered and to join in the efforts to collect stories.
For more information about Story Booth: Carnival students can reach out to humanities@nova.edu. Students can access the Zoom link for the event here.
