ABSTRACT
At the core of the Salzburg Academy’s mission is the bridging of divides and the bringing together of people from diverse—often conflicting—backgrounds. The Salzburg Global Seminar has a long tradition of creating a safe space in which people from all walks of life can open up and share their stories, and it is in that spirit that, in 2015, we ran our first Human/Living Library session. Founded in Denmark in 2000, the Human Library is an international organization and movement that aims to address the prejudices and divides by allowing people who have experienced stereotyping, stigma, or persecution to share their story. The session is structured around the concept of a library in which librarians and assistants put together a list of book titles (each Book being a human with an experience to share), which visiting Readers can “borrow” for short, intimate conversations. Despite its potency, the academic and educational literature on the Human/Living Library methodology is extremely limited. Our experience of running these sessions over the past four years has produced interesting lessons about our need for meaningful communication—and the way contemporary culture and technology put barriers to that.
