Reflecting on Story's Place in our Lives
The Storytelling Project

Thursday 3rd September - Saturday 5th September 2015
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Presentations:
Earlier meetings of the 'Storytelling: global reflections on
narrative' project have brought together participants with both
personal and professional interests in the unique role that
storytelling plays throughout our lives - in shaping us as people and
in allowing us to shape our societies, our cultures and our day to day
activities. We have been challenged by philosophers, literary
theorists, artists, psychologists, film makers, historians, teachers,
psychotherapists, nurses and many others, into reflecting on the place
that story plays in our lives and the ways in which we consciously and
unconsciously employ it. We have also been engaged, entertained and
challenged by traditional storytellers from Ireland, New Zealand,
Canada, the Philippines, India and elsewhere as well as by theatrical
and musical performances, digital stories, films and performance art.

For our 8th global meeting we invite participants to continue to
reflect on and celebrate story in challenging ways, and especially
welcome abstracts from those who bring together reflections from both
professional and personal perspectives.

Human life is conducted through story, because the telling of stories
comes naturally to us. Almost every time we speak we engage in
storytelling, and sharing stories is arguably the most important way
we have of communicating with others about who we are and what we
believe; about what we are doing and have done; about our hopes and
fears; about what we value and what we don't. We make sense of our
lives by telling the stories that we live; and we learn about other
lives by listening to the stories told by others. Sometimes, under the
influence of the culture in which we are immersed, we live our lives
in ways that try to create the stories we want to be able to tell
about them.

The importance of the stories we tell and the stories we hear is
recognized in every culture. The work of many professions, including
medicine, nursing, teaching, the law, psychotherapy and counselling,
involves a great deal of time listening to and communicating through
stories.

Story is a powerful tool for teachers, because by telling stories they
can help students to integrate what they are learning with what they
already know, by placing what they learn in a context that makes it
easy to recall. Story also plays an important role in academic
disciplines like philosophy, theology, anthropology, archaeology and
history as well as literature. Narrative methods for the collection of
data are increasingly used in research in the social sciences and
humanities, where the value of getting to know people in a more
intimate and less distant way - almost as if we are getting to know
them from the inside, is increasingly valued, and academics in many
disciplines have begun to realise the value of storytelling as a model
for academic writing.

Most of us have lots of experience of relating to other lives through
narrative forms, including the stories we encounter as children, the
books we read and the TV programmes we watch - the dramas; the
documentaries, and for those who will own up to viewing them, the
'reality' TV shows. When we are moved by a play, a movie or a novel,
we are moved because we begin imaginatively to live the lives of the
characters that inhabit them. If we are lucky we will encounter as we
grow up, fictional stories that stay with us like old friends, that we
will revisit again and again throughout our lives, as a way of coming
to terms with and responding to the things we experience.

Reflecting on Story's Place in our Lives, the 8th global meeting of
the Storytelling project, provides a space in which stories about
story can be told, and in which the use of stories in the widest
possible range of aspects of human life, can be reported. Abstracts
are invited for individual contributions and for symposia of three
closely related papers. They may address any aspect of story or
narrative, including, for example:

- Story as a pedagogical tool in academic disciplines such as history;
anthropology, psychology, theology, cultural theory, medicine, law,
philosophy, education, and archaeology.

- Narrative and the gathering of stories of lived experience, as a
research approach in any area of academic, professional and public
life.

- The place of story and storytelling in the practice of journalism;
PR advertising; conflict resolution; architecture; religion; tourism,
politics and the law, and in clinical contexts such as medicine,
psychotherapy, nursing and counseling.

- Finally abstracts may feature storytelling in any aspect of culture,
including music (from opera to heavy metal, folk and sacred music);
fine art; theatre; literature; cinema and digital storytelling.

Alongside traditional conference papers, earlier conferences in the
Storytelling: global reflections on narrative project have included a
huge range of presentations, including traditional storytelling; the
screening of award winning films; theatrical performances (including
cabaret) and workshops aimed at engaging participants in active
learning about story and its possibilities in, for example, research
and therapy. This has enriched our conversations greatly, and so
participants are encouraged to propose presentations of all kinds.

What to Send:
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 5th June 2015. If an
abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be
submitted by Friday 7th August 2015. Abstracts should be submitted
simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word or
RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in
programme, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of
abstract, f) up to 10 keywords.
E-mails should be entitled: STORY8 Proposal Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using
footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as
bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all
paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a
week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be
lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative
electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs:
Gavin J Fairbairn and Susan Fairbairn: gsstory@inter-disciplinary.net
Rob Fisher: story8@inter-disciplinary.net

The conference is part of the Persons series of ongoing research and
publications projects conferences, run within the Probing the
Boundaries domain which aims to bring together people from different
areas and interests to share ideas and explore innovative and
challenging routes of intellectual and academic exploration. All
papers accepted for and presented at the conference must be in English
and will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers
may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume(s). All
publications from the conference will require editors, to be chosen
from interested delegates from the conference.

Inter-Disciplinary.Net believes it is a mark of personal courtesy and
professional respect to your colleagues that all delegates should
attend for the full duration of the meeting. If you are unable to make
this commitment, please do not submit an abstract for presentation.

For further details of the conference, please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/persons/storytelling-global-reflections-on-narrative/global-reflections-on-narrative-call-for-presentations/