Storytelling for Lost and Threatened Places

An Environmental Humanities Symposium

Dates: Mon 2 June & Tues 3 June 2025

Venue: University of Sydney, Camperdown NSW 2050

This symposium will explore our contemporary biodiversity and climate crises through a focus on place and story. How might attending closely to place-based stories open up new opportunities, but also dangers, in our efforts to make sense of and respond to global processes of loss and destruction? As storytellers, what would it mean to deploy a ‘patchy’ approach to the Anthropocene (Tsing et al.), acknowledging that contemporary environmental transformations, while planetary in scope, touch down and take radically divergent forms in different parts of the world and amongst different more-than-human communities?

Far from layering meaning over a pre-existing world, we are interested in stories as technologies of both world making and unmaking. In this context, we aim to explore the role that stories (in their many forms, across diverse media) play in shaping not only how places are conceived and defined—how their borders and identities are understood—but also how, or whether, they are valued, managed, inhabited, or simply discarded, perhaps to become “sacrifice zones” (Reinert) or “shadow places” (Plumwood). In short, we aim to explore how stories both enable and disable diverse possibilities for understanding, valuing, connecting to, and resisting the destruction of the many threatened places around us. As well as the challenges and possibilities of scaling place-based stories to speak to, and intervene in, processes of environmental transformation that extend well beyond their borders. At the same time, we are interested in how stories might provide a powerful means of summoning up, holding onto, and perhaps even stitching back together some of the many places and relationships that have been, or will be, lost.

In taking up these big questions, we aim to be mindful of the responsibilities and limitation of telling others’ stories, human and not (Birch, Wright, Haraway), and of the need to hold onto an understanding of places as historically layered and temporally entangled: and as such, to remember that contemporary processes of loss and transformation take place in the wake of, and are haunted by, past and ongoing processes of colonisation, globalisation, militarisation, and more. And yet, despite their limitations and challenges, an attention to stories remains a vital part of any inclusive, creative, effort to understand and imagine our current predicament and its many alternatives. In that light, this symposium ultimately aims to explore and take up the fraught work of “storytelling for Earthly survival” (Haraway).

Organisers: Thom van Dooren, Kirsten Wehner, Cameron Muir, Andrea Gaynor, Zoë Sadokierski, and Natalie Osborne

This symposium is being co-organised by several research teams working in related areas: Narrative Ecologies of Warragamba Dam Discovery Project (DP220101258); Shadow Places Special Research Initiative (SR200201032); Living on the Edge: Caring for Australia’s Threatened Places (National Museum of Australia and Sydney Environment Institute). The symposium is jointly hosted by the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney), the National Museum of Australia, the School of Humanities at the University of Western Australia, and the Visualisation Institute at the University of Technology Sydney.

References

Birch, T. (2018) “On what terms can we speak?” Refusal, resurgence and climate justice. Coolabah, 24/25, 2-16.

Haraway, D. (1992) The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others. In Cultural Studies, (Eds, Grossberg, L., Nelson, C. & Treichler, P.A.) Routledge, New York.

Plumwood, V. (2008) Shadow Places and the Politics of Dwelling. Ecological Humanities, Australian Humanities Review, 44,

Reinert, H. (2018) Notes from a Projected Sacrifice Zone. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 17, 597-617.

Tsing, A.L., Mathews, A.S. & Bubandt, N. (2019) Patchy Anthropocene: landscape structure, multispecies history, and the retooling of anthropology: an introduction to supplement 20. Current Anthropology, 60, S186-S197.

Wright, A. (2016) What happens when you tell somebody else’s story. Meanjin, 75.

Image credit: Maksim Shutov, Unsplash