Story Collider: Community + Campus Collaboration

Last Thursday evening I witnessed an amazing example of a community/campus collaboration: The Story Collider.  I heard about this event via Open.Michigan and decided to check it out.

The Story Collider is a group out of New York City that brings stories of science to real-life situations.  This is vague sounding, yes, so let me try to explain.  The Story Collider event I attended was produced through a partnership between Open.Michigan, the Ann Arbor District Library, and The Story Collider group.  This was not the first time The Story Collider had been in Ann Arbor, but it was the first time I had seen the performance, so I'll speak to that event.

Last Thursday's Story Collider featured two emcee's; one was a founder of The Story Collider Brian Wecht, the other was University of Michigan staff member Erik Hofer.  The emcee's introduced six different speakers who told a story about their life and science.  Now, let me preface the rest of this entry by saying I am not a "science person."  I've taken science, yes, but am by no means an Chemical Engineer, or a Cosmologist, or an English professor, like a few of the speakers were.  Yet, through their storytelling, I was taken to a place where science made sense, in the real world that we all live in.


One storyteller explained how she became to realize why she felt the way she did about science, another told about a time when they had an ephiphany about science and was able to express that to a professor, before they were even in college.  Another speaker talked about wikipedia editing, and yet another about a wild trip to Haiti to do relief work.  The other stories reflected the speaker's interactions with science then and science now (how could a museaum be wrong about something?), and about what it's like to live with a real, live scientist.


These stories touched me, and made me realize that events such as this can bring together the unlikelist of partners.  I would love to know more about how this collaboration came together, but it showed me that the opportunities for outreach are endless.


You can read more about the speakers, and check back for the podcasts of their stories.  And, if The Story Collider comes your way, be sure to check them out!