Symposium: More-Than-Human Story-Making

Symposium:

More-Than-Human Story-Making

This symposium explores how we might make stories with and about the more-than-human. It brings together artists, scholars, filmmakers and scientists to consider storytelling practices that engage with nonhuman presences, agencies, and materials. Examples include animals, plants, waste, and digital and tactile objects such as a crocheted coverlet and the only book ever printed in Antarctica. The event asks how stories can be made through more-than-human entanglements and what this means for research, practice, and collaboration across disciplines.

The Symposium webpage can be found here.

Speaker Details:

Details to follow.

About the ‘Antarctica’s More-Than-Human Stories’ Research Project:

Extractivism is the mass removal of the Earth’s resources for profit, an exploitative approach in which our global economic system, unfortunately, remains deeply rooted. A key obstacle to challenging this extractive approach is the prevailing ethos which divides the world into two groups, ‘human’ and ‘other’, with the latter encompassing animals, land, minerals, and other nonhuman entities, all primarily treated as resources for the human. These assumptions also pervade much academic research, and nowhere is this more conspicuous than in Antarctica, the only continent without an indigenous human population.

Our research aims to support collaboration between the arts, humanities, and natural sciences in developing climate interventions, via a creative practice-led methodology based on making ‘more-than-human’ stories. Stories provide connection and convey complex ideas in ways that resonate deeply with emotions and values as well as the intellect, and thus, without instrumentalising stories or artistic practice, we believe story-making can enhance how we make and value knowledge about the world. More-than-human story-making emphasises the relationship between human and non-human elements such as ice, water, rock, scientific data and equipment, animal lives, historical artefacts, and technologies.

Further details about the Project and the research team can be found here.

Further Details and Contacts:

The symposium will take place over two days:

• Day 1 (10/06/2025) will be a hybrid event, taking place in The Buttery, Wolfson College and online.
• Day 2 (11/06/2025) will only take place online.

Registration is required. To help cover the costs of running the event, we ask for a contribution of £10.

When booking, you may choose:

• £10 contribution
• Free place with bursary

Bursaries are available on a self-declared basis for anyone who would otherwise be unable to attend due to cost. No explanation is required.

This event will be recorded and made available on the OCLW website. There is no need to register to receive the recording.

Any queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.