Call for Papers: Collective Storytelling in the Anthropocene

Panel proposal for the 2025 conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. Miami, April 2-6 2025

Organizer: Shannon Lambert, Ghent University

Recent years have seen a growing interest in narratological engagements with collective narration (Lanser 1992; Fludernik 2017; Bekhta 2017 and 2020). Yet, despite this uptake, “agents of shared experience…still remain underexplored” (Alders 113). Taking this shift from the individual to the collective as its focus, this panel explores how groups feel, narrate, and engage with climate change. The interest here is broad, with groups understood on both diegetic and extradiegetic levels as (a) represented collectives and (b) collectives that engage with climate change in storied forms. For example, artistic, Indigenous, scientific, and student groups, citizen scientists, activist, music, and reading groups, and non-human communities and collectives. In investigating such groups, the panel is interested in how (literary) collectives participate in the affective practices of “encountering, witnessing, and storying” climate change (Verlie 2021). Papers might consider: how do climate collectives organize? How does feeling move through and shape groups, how do groups shape feelings, and what role does storytelling have in these processes? The panel welcomes proposals that engage with collective storytelling and climate crises that include (but are not limited to) we-narrative, anthologies and edited collections, multi-perspectival and multi-scalar narratives, representations of community, reader response theory, pedagogy, and fictional and non-fictional collective/co-writing writing.

If you would like to be considered, please forward me an abstract and bionote by Monday October 7, 2024. Abstracts should be no longer than 200 words. You can reach me for submissions and queries on shannon.lambert@ugent.be.

Works cited:

Alders, Maximilian. “Introduction: Social Minds in Factual and Fictional Narration.” Narrative, vol. 23, no. 2, 2015, pp. 113–22. doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/ nar.2015.0009.

Bekhta, Natalya. “We-Narratives: The Distinctiveness of Collective Narration.” Narrative, vol. 25, no. 2, 2017, pp. 164–81. doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/ nar.2017.0008.

Bekhta, Natalya. We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020.

Fludernik, Monika. “The Many in Action and Thought: Towards a Poetics of the  Collective in Narrative.” Narrative, vol. 25, no. 2, 2017, pp. 139–63. doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2017.0010.

Lanser, Susan S. Fictions of Authority Women Writers and Narrative Voice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. doi: https://muse.jhu.edu/book/58030/.

Verlie, Blanche. Learning to Live with Climate Change: From Anxiety to Transformation. London: Routledge, 2021.