In Your Shoes™, a signature program of Georgetown’s Laboratory for Global Performance & Politics, employs techniques rooted in theatrical performance to promote deep listening and empathy, bringing participants of diverse backgrounds into mutually respectful creative exchange.
Participants build communities of trust, often in polarized settings, by engaging in facilitated group activities and pair conversations in which they curate and perform one another’s exact words.
At a time when polarization is reaching unprecedented levels with devastating consequences for individual and collective well-being, In Your Shoes™ offers transformative tools for productively encountering a broad range of experiences and perspectives. In Your Shoes™ artfully affirms the differences among us, while shining a deeper light on the hopes, fears, and dreams that animate us all, providing an innovative path to authentic connection and finding common purpose in challenging times.
Check out this 3-minute video that explores our process through a glimpse into of one our signature programs.
Arjun Shankar, Phd, Author: Brown Saviors and Their Others: Race, Caste, Labor, and the Global Politics of Help in India with Olivia Yamamoto, Grants Manager at Woolly Mammoth Theater Company presenting In Your Shoes at Georgetown Global Dialogues Symposium
"Though a trained dialogue facilitator for many decades, with In Your Shoes, I was in for a big surprise! Unlike other methodologies, IYS asks us to engage our bodies, minds and emotions in trying to understand “another”—whether that be a person, an idea, or a cause. Working to be true to the feelings and ideas in verbatim scripts requires us to seek deep and nuanced understandings of each other, and is a powerful way to invite us into compelling spaces of heft and care."
"We can talk theoretically about empathy, but to experience it is a whole other thing. In participating in In Your Shoes™, it’s like a third perspective emerged for me as I started to notice what I myself was experiencing as I shared my partner’s narrative. Now that is empathy."
Nyasha Gandawa and Professor Sivagami Subbaraman perform In Your Shoes™ as the keynote event of the 2022 Lannan Symposium, “Beyond Identity: Reimagining the American Narrative.”
In The Media
In January of 2023, The Lab launched the In Your Shoes™ Research & Practice Center as a hub for research, training, and facilitation. Through The Center we are scaling In Your Shoes™ both on Georgetown’s campus and well beyond it. The Center is dramatically expanding our offerings, and building a dynamic international In Your Shoes™ ecosystem of facilitators, participants, and researchers, as well as an expansive global network of collaborators and partners.
The In Your Shoes™ Research and Practice Center is made possible in part through the generous support of Andrew R. Ammerman.
In Your Shoes™ is for EVERYONE!
The In Your Shoes™ Research & Practice Center offers a wide range of programs for community organizations, classrooms, and institutions.
Contact us at inyourshoes@georgetown.edu to explore how a collaboration with In Your Shoes™ might support your community, organization, or campus.
"I've engaged with the IYS process as a participant and as an audience member. On each occasion, I could feel something shift inside of me. Our internal systems seem to know when we are listening deeply and being truly heard, witnessed, honored. And once you experience this, you realize how we've habituated to far less meaningful conversation in our daily lives. Once you taste the difference, you inevitably want more, which I think influences the way we show up in the world..."
-- Gillian Huebner. Executive Director, Collaborative on Global Children's Issues
In Your Shoes™ was created and developed by acclaimed international theater-maker and educator Derek Goldman through over a decade of intensive workshops in a range of global contexts, including China, Russia, Bangladesh, and Sudan, and with diverse and often polarized university and community participants throughout the United States. In Your Shoes™ has been experienced by thousands of participants around the world, through projects ranging from immersive year-long community collaborations to shorter-term workshops. For a roster of collaborations, see here.
In Your Shoes™ continues to benefit from ongoing collaboration with colleagues and partners from a wide range of specializations including curricular design and transformation, inclusive pedagogy (with an emphasis on equity/diversity and anti-racist approaches), intergroup dialogue, conflict resolution and peace-building, movement/ dance, neuroscience, and social psychology.
“A critical component of the IYS approach is its methodology. IYS requires intense listening and observant feedback - exercising important social muscles often lost in our digital culture. Partners walk away with a new understanding and a glimpse into the communicative work of truly listening.”
--Jeanine W. Turner, PhD Author, Being Present: Commanding Attention at Work (and at Home) by Managing Your Social Presence. Professor and Director Communication, Culture & Technology Program Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
In Your Shoes™ has been widely recognized as a vibrant artistic process that has been groundbreaking both for leading professional performing artists, and inclusive and accessible for people that do not identify as performers.
At the heart of all In Your Shoes™ projects lies acclaimed international theater-maker and educator Derek Goldman’s Performing One Another methodology.
Performing One Another begins as prompt-driven two-person dialogues among participants who are paired with an eye to differences in social identities, backgrounds, or ideological or political perspectives.
Initial prompts vary but generally speak to common experiences that cut across ideological and cultural divides, like: loneliness, grief, hope, belonging, loss, anxiety about the future, family, faith, and larger questions of meaning and purpose. Prompts are designed and presented so as to invite participants to talk openly in ways that activate their own personal stories, rather than simply expressing opinions or statements of belief.
Paired conversations are recorded. Then, after getting express permission from their partners, participants curate and transcribe excerpts from among those permitted sections of their partners’ words. These excerpts form the scripts partners use to “perform one another” back to the group.
This paired “performing one another” material becomes the foundation and catalyst for further, ever-deepening dialogues and embodied explorations that shape the overall content and direction the program and become the core source material for the script and ultimate performances, or other cultural products.
Global
- International Theatre Institute World Congress (as well as at student festivals, 70th birthday celebration festival in Hainan, China)
- Stockholm School of Economics
- Theatre Communications Group National Conference
- Territory Festival, Moscow, Russia (with hundreds of young artists from every territory of Russia and Ukraine)
- Workshops with Refugee Populations at University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, Cox’s Bazaar with Rohingya population and humanitarian workers
- Shanghai Theater Academy, China
- Al-Buggaa International Festival, Sudan
- Beyond Borders International Festival, Scotland
- La Mama Umbria, Italy
Intercollegiate
- Doris Duke Foundation/ Association of American Arts Presenters Building Bridges Program (12 campuses, hundreds of participants)
- Multi-year Partnership between Georgetown University and Patrick Henry College (conservative Christian college in Purcellville, Virginia)
- Pilot program
- Collaboration between The Lab, GU’s Democracy & Governance Studies Program, and Patrick Henry
- Year-long collaboration culminating in performances on both campuses
- Grant from GU’s “Transforming the Core Curriculum Initiative”
- Creation of five-credit course “Dialogue and Difference: Performing One Another”
- Expansion of mentorship team to include Profs Derek Goldman, Daniel Brumberg (Director Democracy & Governance Studies MA Program); Ijeoma Njaka, Senior Learning Designer for Transformational and Inclusive Initiatives, Red House & Lab; Rabbi Rachel Gartner, and PHC Humanities Professor Cory Grewell
- Separate public performance with IYS™ participants from both cohorts and other faculty colleagues in response to events of January 6th at the US Capitol
- Guest workshops in dozens of university and high school settings (including Columbia UniversityUNC Chapel Hill/George Washington University/University of Maryland/Duke University/The New School/Montgomery Blair High School)
Domestic
- Sustained Program over several months with World Bank / International Finance Corporation
- Reverse Mentorship Program for Executives as part of World Bank’s DEI Initiatives
- Doris Duke Foundation/ Association of American Arts Presenters Building Bridges Program (12 campuses, hundreds of participants)
- Theatre Communications Group National Conference
- “Art of Care” Initiative with Global Health Institute, Medical Humanities Initiative, School of Health, Mosaic Theater
- Conferences in Peacebuilding & Conflict Resolution; Social Psychology; Couples & Family Therapy; Medical Ethics; Global Health; Creative Writing & Devising
- Various Synagogues, Churches, and Community Settings
Georgetown University
- Georgetown University Global Dialogues:Ways Forward in a Divided World
- Featured program at each of the five days of this inaugural international symposium on dialogue
- Featured program of Georgetown Core Pathways curriculum
- Engage 120 undergraduate students per year across departments and disciplines
- “In Your Shoes™: Reckoning with Our Past/Imagining Our Future”
- Full-length performance with students, faculty, staff as keynote event at 2022 Lannan Symposium “Beyond Identity: Reimagining the American Narrative”
- US-China Project
- 2 years of semester-long collaboration between The Lab and the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues
- Numerous In Your Shoes™ courses, workshops, and “infusions” into existing courses across the curriculum
In Your Shoes curricular efforts are supported by and run in collaboration with the Doyle Engaging Difference Program.
