More-than-human humanities research group!

Tag: Multispecies Storytelling

DUE 31 Dec. Conference CFP: “Narrating the Multispecies World. Stories in Times of Crises, Loss, Hope”

For those of you interested, consider submitting your work for this upcoming conference. Here are the details as provided by the organisers:

Narrating the Multispecies World. Stories in Times of Crises, Loss, Hope
August 3 to 5, 2023, University of Würzburg
An interdisciplinary, hybrid conference, organized by the Chair of European Ethnology


We are living in a multispecies world. Although the world is constantly changing, this change has accelerated extraordinarily in recent years, bringing forth substantial and manifold crises. Essentially caused by the capitalist pervasion of almost every part of our everyday, we are currently experiencing an increasing loss of diversity, particularly in the more-than-human world: due to changing circumstances in their original habitats, numerous living beings such as plants, insects, and mammals (including humans) migrate all over the world; some of them become extinct, and others are forced to adapt to new ecologies.

Narrating is a powerful practice. It allows us to understand what happens, and it enables us to shape the world, particularly in times of crises. Storytelling can also be seen as a practice of other-than-humans, as anthropologists Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren remind us of in their work. What are the stories of our multispecies world today? Which observations, needs, desires, dreams, nightmares, aspirations, and ethics are shared by narrating? Who is narrating which stories for whom, where, when? What is the role of the past, and which parts of our narrative heritage do we still maintain? What is the role of multispecies temporalities in narratives? What are the new powerful stories developing possibilities for a peaceful cohabitation in the multispecies world?

We are looking for critical scholarly studies and artistic projects focusing on narratives dealing with the effects of the current crises on the more-than-human world, particularly those involving more than one single species. The scope of possible topics is wide and ranges from the extinction of species, the loss of bio-diversity in the everyday lives, memories of former ecologies, historical experiences with extinction to present-day narratives about the returns of species and stories of the living together in emergent ecologies.
We will work with a broad concept of narrative culture to encompass, in addition to verbal art, diverse forms, genres, and media such as everyday narrations, films, fictional texts, multimodal artefacts, photographs, art installations, collages, inscription into landscapes etc. We invite scholars of any career level (including students) from different fields such as  

  • Ecocriticism
  • Econarratology
  • (Environmental) Humanities
  • Multispecies Studies
  • Extinction Studies
  • Cultural and Social Anthropology, European Ethnology, Visual Anthropology etc.
  • Literary Studies
  • Arts and Art History
  • History

Please send your proposal with your name and email-address until December 31, 2022 to: multispecies.conference@uni-wuerzburg.de
For more information, please visit: https://www.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de/eevk/multispecies-conference/

We can offer up to ten stipends of 500,00 Euros each to cover the cost for travel and accommodation of accepted speakers. Please inform us whether you are interested to apply for one of the grants when submitting your proposal. For those who will participate in person, we request a conference fee of 40,00 Euros for lunches and the conference dinner, and 20,00 Euros for the optional excursion, for which registration is needed.

Join us in a Midsummer Fertility Ceremony for Bladderwrack – an Invitation from (P)Art of the Biomass

During calm nights in May and June, and synched by the full moon, bladderwrack releases its eggs and sperms. If you want to pay tribute to the forests of the sea and help bladderwrack reproduce, especially in the Baltic Sea, you can help it find new homes.

You don’t need to erect an underwater Midsummer pole, as (P)Art of the Biomass did together with marine biologists Cecilia Wibjörn and Maria Bodin at Tjärnö Marine Laboratory, Sweden. The only thing you need is a large rock where fertilized eggs of bladderwrack, zygotes, can settle. Or a brush, with which you can scrub a cliff clean from green algae, below the waterline, nearby where bladderwrack grows. If there’s an abundance of green algae, bladderwrack might find it hard to find a surface where the tiny zygotes can settle and grow.

Midsummer full moon occurs the 24th of June, 8:40 p.m. (CEST/Swedish time). If it’s a calm evening, the bladderwrack will spawn. Before this happens, take a walk with us to the sea.

It’s the smell of home I guess

Denna bild har ett alt-attribut som är tomt. Dess filnamn är lobell_blastangjuni2021-14-1024x683.jpg
Sound, voice and editing: Janna Holmstedt. Field-recordings from an intertidal zone and singing by Janice McEwen in Lofoten, Norway.

Find your way to the sea
Seek out where bladderwrack grows on hard cliffs and stones
Air-filled pods keep the algae afloat
Spongy bladders are swelling when ready to spawn
Prepare a clean, hard surface
Scrub a cliff
Sink a stone
Feel the sponginess and readiness
Smell the tangle
And for a moment, be that stone

This ceremony has been composed by (P)Art of the Biomass for the Nordic-Baltic transdisciplinary State of the Art Network in which the Posthumanities Hub is a member, and was originally posted here.

Multispecies Communication at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, with Janna Holmstedt

Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, 21st February, 17:00-18:30

As part of Zoönomic Futures – an immersive workshop on ethics for a society that is no longer human-centric – The Posthumanities Hub researcher and artist Janna Holmstedt will present her talk Follow the Blind, Mimic a Worm, and Listen to the Tangle. The talk will be followed by a conversation with Anne van Leeuwen (board member at the Embassy of the North Sea) and Het Nieuwe Instituut researcher Klaas Kuitenbrouwer.

Read more here!

Zoönomic Futures is part of a series exploring Multispecies Urbanism, one of the themes of the Dutch contribution to the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.

CfP:”Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practice”: Conference in Växjö,

Call for Papers:

Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practice“: Conference in Växjö,

January 23-25, 2019 (from Wednesday 1- pm to Friday 1 pm)

This transdisciplinary conference is hosted by the Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies, Linnæus University, Sweden, in collaboration with the Laboratory of Aesthetics and Ecology, Copenhagen/Berlin.

It is generously funded by the Seed Box. Deadline for abstracts: 15 August 2018.

See the full call for papers here.

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CfP: Multispecies Storytelling

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