A one-day symposium on Thursday 23rd June 2022 – (hybrid/online) at Solent University, Southampton, UK.
The Evolution of Story is a one-day symposium dedicated to unravelling the hero’s journey. An exploration of the experiential in storytelling, design, technology, marketing, architecture, entertainment, retail, and other fields of practice where the user experience is of paramount importance to creative practitioners. It aims to explore the ways in which story has evolved beyond the linear, the stage and the boundaries of the screen. It will take the lid off new forms of storytelling and offer a snapshot of current practices.
Hosted by Dr Roy Hanney (Solent University) and Alison Norrington (Story Central), the symposium will take a hybrid form with all papers submitted in advance as video clips so that the live sessions can focus on dialogue and discussion. We hope there will be a real-life aspect to the symposium (pandemic willing) but equally, given our goal of engaging with global voices, we expect to facilitate virtual participation in the symposium.
Papers presented at the symposium may be offered the opportunity to be included in a proposed edited collection (subject to contract) which hope to offer for publication to Routledge as part of their Routledge Advances in Transmedia Studies book series, edited by Matthew Freeman (Bath Spa University).
Provocation
In his insightful article C.P Nield (2013) describes Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey as a Hollywood McMyth suggesting that rather than promoting cross-cultural plurality it has become a monolithic dogma that has drowned out other voices, other ways of telling stories. He goes on to argue that the monomyth is no more than a “cut-and-paste quest myth” thrown together from a mix of decontextualized fragments of mythology, sprinkled with Jung’s theory of universal archetypes, and cross-cut with psychoanalytic renditions of dream experiences. Campbell’s eclectic methodology results in a cultural entanglement that reflects a colonial past, a hegemonic discourse in which the appropriation of the other’s stories serves to justify the “provincialising” (Bangstad 2020) of European culture as a universal form against which all other cultural forms are judged. If museums and galleries are being asked to “return artefacts appropriated in the course of European Colonialism” (Bangstad 2020), shouldn’t we include within this project the return of the story artefacts appropriated in the service of a cultural othering that sought to establish the universalism that is so rife in theories of story and of the monomyth in particular.
Research Question
At a time when the world is rethinking what it means by diversity and inclusion, how can we open up the concept of story to global voices, alternative visions, and new experiential approaches with a recognition that audiences collectively engage with story in culturally situated contexts?
Rationale
The epistemological underpinnings of knowledge in today’s world were shaped during colonial times for purposes of social control. For the majority of people in the world, particularly those in the global South, what is learnt, understood, and how the world is viewed have been structured by coloniality emanating from the global North – itself a construction. However, Hollywood is no longer the behemoth it was, there are other sites of production, of circulation and distribution. There are newly emerging opportunities for a decentring of narrative production that might, if allowed, offer alternative ways of telling stories about the world that disrupt rather than reproduce theoretically old and obsolete tropes. The unravelling of story will necessarily be an ongoing process that “develops by recovering the original meanings, by representing the origin communities, assuring the inclusion of their narratives and their active and equal participation” (Roque 2020). What is called for is a “circulation between and co-imbrication of worlds” (Bangstad 2020) that celebrates a multi-perspective view. One that aims towards a de-entanglement of ideas that circulate around the notion of story. We should understand that an unravelled theory of story is one that celebrates “incompleteness as a universal characteristic, a dynamic and mobile subject discipline that facilitates encounters between different perspectives, ways of seeing and doing” (Nyamnjoh, 2021).
Themes
We invite contributions that respond to any related theme including but not limited to:
- Practical strategies for rethinking story in practice.
- Polyphony, multi-sequentially and interactivity.
- Political economy and/or the hegemony of story.
- Experience design and the psychology of story.
- Subverting linearity in story structure.
- Role of audience as active agent in constructing meaning.
- Experience, temporality, perception and subjectivity.
- The banality of universalised globalised narrative forms.
- De-commodification, disrupting reification and alienation of story forms.
- Remediation of mythologies and indigenous voices.
- Humanising story traditions, systems, forms and structures.
- Whose story to tell, metaphors of ownership, discourses of power.
- Giving voice, decolonisation and historicising narrative theory.
- Gender and sexuality as constitutive considerations of story.
- Narratological, cultural and ideological studies of story.
- Minority and postcolonial challenges to narrative theory.
Submission
Please send us the following as an indication of interest to roy.hanney@solent.ac.uk by 31st March 2022 at the very latest:
- Title
- Abstract (200-300 words)
- Keywords (4-6)
- Authors titles, names & affiliations
- Contact details
- Author biographies (100-200 words each author)
DOWNLOAD THE CALL FOR PAPERS AS A PDF HERE
References
BANGSTAD, S., 2020. Achille Mbembe’s decolonization [viewed Feb 28, 2021]. Available from: https://africasacountry.com/2020/11/achille-mbembes-decolonization
NYAMNJOH, F., Feb 24th 2021. “Decolonising the Curriculum: Inspiration from ‘The Complete Gentleman’ in Amos Tutuola’s ‘The Palm-Wine Drinkard’. Decolonising the Curriculum? Which Curriculum? How? and by Whom? University of Westminster: Communication and Media Research Institute, University of Westminster,
NIELD, C.P., 2013. The Hero’s Journey is Hollywood’s McMyth [viewed Apr 12, 2021]. Available from: https://standpointmag.co.uk/features-october-13-the-heros-journey-is-hollywoods-mcmyth-c-p-nield-joseph-campbell-the-hero-with-a-thousand-faces/
ROQUE, M.I., 2020. Decolonising the museum: exhibition and mediation of African collections in European museums. Lusophone Journal of Cultural Studies, 7(2), 53-71