Bettina Haasen, Organizational Consultant and awarded Documentary Filmer will be Keynote Speaker at BST2020. Who is Bettina Haasen, what will her Keynote speech enlight on the stage? As we talked about her professional past, she began her story with a guy called Musa. Musa is a Pheul-Nomad, who became friend of Bettina: back in the 90ies she got to know Musa in Nigeria, being there for a few months while studying African Languages.
4 years later she went back to West-Africa, this time to Niger, to explore the possibilities of Storytelling in Documentary Filming. She wanted to find Musa again and asked here and there, filming her search for Musa, “Between 2 worlds”. It became a film which differs from other ethnographic films creating an intimate atmosphere and deconstructing the notion of “home” and “belonging”. The National Radio broadcasted about the Documentary Filmer and her search for Musa, and it became a national quest.
"I really need the Unknown", answers Bettina, when I ask her about her motives for filming and, later on about her journey into the Present, for working as a Peace Advisor in Burundi and coordinating a network of journalists in the Great Lakes Region committed to peace, journalism and democracy.
Soon this important role of journalists was turning out to be a poisoned gift.
"What does it mean to be a journalist in a crisis area?", this question was driving her, when she began her research for the PHD. In these months in Burundi, Bettina was interviewing many journalists from radio stations, that have been destroyed during the following military coup in 2015. In her PhD she is studying the meaning of the concept of habitus and resilience in a context where liberty of speech is no longer guaranteed. She talks about the extreme danger the local journalists were in, when the military coup pushed the country into violence and traumata.
Her voice sounds vulnerable at the telephone, she slows down in her pace of talking. The breaks between her words let me sense her sadness, when she remembers the encounters with former journalists, transformed into hunted targets of the military. Her PHD was about finding the collective narratives of those journalists. She wrote a book about her findings with the thrilling subtitle “Erfahrungswelten in Konflikt und Transformation”.
"I found out so many things about their past and how it influences the present. Their stories showed me, how they were overcoming dominant narratives which have been clustering people in ethnic concepts and categories of “good” and “bad” for decades."
We arrive at the Present, where Bettina is working as an Organizational Consultant in a very different transformational context such as the automotive industry. What is the Unknown beyond the spoken words, the underlying paradigms, unspoken rules and beliefs in an organization? She laughs: "I still need the Unknown, I couldn't go along with pretending to be an external consultant, who knows the answers to the organization's problems better than itself. I still stick to the listening of the stories people tell me. And then I search, what is beyond."
Her Keynote will take the audience on a journey to three peak moments of transformational settings, that she experienced during her own journey as a Documentary Filmer, a researcher and a consultant: How does the power of narrations emerge in these different settings? What does work with narrations achieve in transformational tasks? Her speech will also reflect on the concept of development and maturity and how it affects how a person thinks, feels and acts and how stories can support the course of empowerment.
We are looking forward to searching for the Unknown together with Bettina Haasen at BEYOND STORYTELLING 2020!
