Nature(s) in Narrative

The ISFNR Interim conference in 2026 will be held in Reykjavík Iceland, June 13th to 16th.

The conference will take place at the main campus of the University of Iceland, a walking distance from the vibrant city centre of Reykjavík. With nearly 24 hours of daylight, and plenty of geothermal pools to soak in, it’s the perfect place to recharge on all levels.

The conference is hosted by the department of Folkloristics at the University of Iceland, the Icelandic Association of Ethnology and Folklore and The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies.

This will be a hybrid event, so delegates will be able to participate either virtually or in person.

Deadline for panel proposals is June 20,  2025

Read more here

Conference Theme

The conference engages broadly with the theme of nature(s) in narrative. We ask how narrative is entangled with nature in its various forms, situated in the micro and macro, the rural and urban, ranging from essentialist notions of the natural, the supernatural to non-binary assemblages of nature-culture. Subjects for discussion might include the following:

How do notions of nature relate to narrations of identity, heritage, the national and personal, the physical and the spiritual?
What comprehensions of “the natural” can be gleaned from storytelling, in its various cultural and social contexts, and in folk narrative research itself?
How has our narrative vocabulary and academic terminology borrowed from and conversed with the discourses of nature?
Does folk narrative entail a commons of sorts?
How do environment and disparate nature-cultural assemblages shape narrative, characters, flow, style and storytelling events?
How are human and non-human entanglements expressed, sensed, performed and reimagined in storytelling events?
How do narrators delineate “selves” from “the other” in the living world; the natural from the “unnatural” or supernatural; the mundane from the enchanted?
How are our conceptions of nature shaped and challenged by unusual “natural events” and climate crises, or urbanisation, technology, information disorder (fake news) and artificial intelligence?
What are the “natures” of archives and how are they shaped by narratives?
Do natures in narrative reveal aspects of the “natures” of narrative, its forms, functions and practice?

The 17th international SIEF congress will take place at the University of Aberdeen in Aberdeen, Scotland

The call for panels is open 02 Sep-07 Oct 2024

Theme: Unwriting

Linguistic, discursive, and reflexive writing has long been a core activity for ethnographers, whether in the field or behind the desk. Ethnology, Folklore, and Anthropology were seen as interpreting the oral ’Other’ into the written modern world, with inscription becoming a measure of fact and truth – ’Can I have that in writing?’ These acts of mediation often carry with them an innate sense of superiority over the subject and source, even in disciplines that have lionised the oral and material vernaculars from their inception.

Unwriting is a powerful tool with which to retract, or rewrite, some of what has been inscribed or recorded, allowing us to reshape that which power has imposed and presenting an opportunity for those who have often only been written about.

SIEF2025 invites ethnologists, folklorists, anthropologists, and scholars from adjacent fields to do some unwriting: redo, seek or restore social justice, dismantle hegemonic frameworks which limit us to predetermined paths towards predictable conclusions. We ask for new ways of honouring and ceding space to bottom-up research and analysis, an opportunity for Indigenous and insider scholars to take centre stage, facilitating more equitable scholarly texts for all.

The ’discursive turn’ and ideas of ’writing culture’ helped to deconstruct academic writing, highlighting the politics of text and connections with practices, institutions, and spaces that produce discipline, hierarchy, and power. Unwriting further suggests a constructive, or even activist role focusing on practices, materiality, and life, while supporting decolonial, feminist, and more-than-human perspectives. It asks us to revisit the consequences of casually accepted paradigms, confronting the unseen, unheard, untellable, or untouched. It invites us to explore undocumented social and material practices of unwriting in practice-based, multi-media, multi-sensual research, incorporating the input of valued partners.

Unwriting works in interdependent symbiosis with writing. In a world of surveillance, we examine the forms of our communications – verbal, in small delimited groups, with encrypted messaging – due to fears of being seen (read). Here, unwriting becomes a mechanism of security, safety, control, all the while avoiding outside control, but when can this engender (self)censorship?

Unwriting is a call to action, a call to reflect on how we have been doing things and how they can be done differently. In contrast with the sometimes dark histories of our academic traditions, we have a chance to create new, embedded, and relational visions, distancing ourselves from skewed, hegemonically generated accounts of the past. By unwriting, we consider what it takes to undo some of what writing’s power has imposed, particularly as we cede space to AI and its algorithms.

Ultimately, unwriting challenges us to create anew in multidimensional ways.