A brief description of the workshop: “Understanding Cairo through Urban Creatures” is a creative writing workshop in which a puppet is used as a prompt to communicate cultural, social, and personal realities of Cairo. By giving these realities a body, a face, organs, and vulnerabilities, they can be encountered differently as a living presence rather than an abstract idea. The puppet becomes a research tool with a form, a voice, and its own way of asking questions about Cairo. It invites participants to project meanings, construct narratives, negotiate alternative perspectives on urban experience, and reimagine relationships with the city. The stories, discussions, drawings, and reflections generated throughout the workshops contribute to an ongoing research on cultural and urban sense-making of Cairo.
Objectives of the workshop: Everyday urban life rarely creates opportunities for people to pause, reflect on, and articulate their relationship with the city. Their experiences become normalised, overshadowed by routines, infrastructure, economic pressures, and the demands of daily survival. As a result, people may possess rich experiential knowledge of Cairo without having the language, space, or social conditions to recognise and communicate it. These workshops therefore do not simply collect stories; they attempt to create an environment in which participants can become aware of their own urban experience, and externalise it through fiction, and collectively construct meanings that might otherwise remain unspoken. The material produced during the workshop will contribute to an ongoing research publication.
