AfriKaleidoscope: Storying Identity and Belonging

Storying Identity and Belonging What happens when a story you never chose becomes the one you carry? Storying Identity and Belonging is a 2-hour masterclass exploring how language, narrative, and culture shape identity — and how we reclaim the story on our own terms. Presented in collaboration with African Youth Initiatives Centres and Tabvuma Mental Health, the session opens with a traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony — an invitation into hospitality before a word is spoken. A guided wellbeing exercise grounds the room, before a facilitated dialogue moves through how narrative is built, how it operates as power, and how it lives in us. The session closes with a collective exercise: participants split into small groups, each taking on a different piece of the conversation, before their reflections are woven back together — leaving the room with something built together, not just discussed. This is a space that speaks to and from African and diaspora experience, and invites the wider UNSW community and general public into that conversation.