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- Convenors:
-
Dani Schrire
(The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Susanne Österlund-Pötzsch (Society of Swedish Literature in Finland)
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Short Abstract
Wandering entails a close and intense physical engagement with the environment – to what degree is nature an actor in walking narratives, and in which ways do narratives emerge from the relationship between walker and her physical and natural surroundings.
Long Abstract
A walk has the same structure as a story, with a start, a progression of events and an end. In this sense, every walk can be interpreted as a narrative. Conversely, setting out on a walk is favorite motif in folk narratives, in which the protagonist meets challenges, adventures and various characters along the way. Walking is abundant in traditional narratives, partially because it was the most common form in pre-industrial societies. It gains new meanings in post-industrial societies when walking is often associated with leisure or escape. The motif of the walk is equally popular in literature, applied to an array of genres from travel books and picaresque novels to self-help books and biographies.
Wandering inevitably entails physical engagement with the environment. In some forms of storytelling, such as the popular genre of pilgrimage literature, the surrounding nature becomes a reflection of the inner journey of the wanderer. Often nature presents an obstacle that has to be negotiated by the walker. But to what degree is nature an actor/agent in walking narratives? In what ways do narratives emerge from the relationship between the walker and nature(s)? Walking as a slow form of movement is based on heightened awareness to places traversed and multitude of multispecies that become part of the journey, and eventually, the narrative. Humans and more-than-humans simultaneously traverse and dwell in the same environment – creating an intricate web of paths that sometimes intersect. Which walking stories move us, and what stories should put us in motion?
Accepted papers
Session 1 Monday 15 June, 2026, -Paper short abstract
Ambulatory storytelling provides an alternative model to the fireside or stage. Using the World Plowing Match story from tiny Peebles, Ohio, I explore intersubjective dimensions of stories that emerge while walking and talking to challenge orthodoxies around story form, ownership, and historicity.
Paper long abstract
Mullen and Webber (2011) comparatively explore the indexical potential of telling stories in the places where they happened. Similarly, naturalists are adept at storying the landscape, as they gently encourage walkers to slow down and perceive the signs of more-than-human activity. But the nature walk also offers the opportunity to recall former human world-making that has been obscured by current rewilding projects. In 2016, I and my coworker joined conservation activists Martin and Jody Newton McCallister on a walk through their recently acquired preserve bordering the Scioto-Brush Creek in Southeast Ohio. We learned of the return of beaver and other fauna, of the utility of identifying rare plants on a parcel in order to attract conservation funding, and of a 1980s-era birdhouse-making commune nearby that fell apart after the members sold out to Walmart for millions. But the tale I will explore here came out in fragments, much like Susan Kalcik's (1975) consciousness-raising stories. It offers a means to explore how a discontinuous and dialogically voiced stream of discourse formed in the minds of teller and auditors. Our group oscillated between trying to understand how the World Plowing Match came to tiny Peebles, Ohio in 1957, and a countervailing drive to recognize and exploit the humorous and dramatic potential of the "facts" as we learned them. If we view this storytelling event as a collective enactment of sociality or even verbal play, how might we then rethink larger questions of story form and storytelling rights?
Paper short abstract
Using ethnographic fieldnotes and thematic interviews from a five-day hike along the Karhunkierros trail in Finland, this paper explores how narratives in the research material reflect embodied, affective, and material dimensions of a hiker's relationship to nature.
Paper long abstract
This paper focuses on how a hiker’s relationship to nature is narrated in ethnographic fieldnotes and two thematic interviews produced during a five-day hike along the Karhunkierros trail in Oulanka National Park, Finland. The research material was formed as a part of my doctoral research, which examines the cultural practices and meanings of hiking and their influence on the construction and transformation of human–nature relations. The theoretical framework draws on the concepts of human-nature relationship, materiality, and affect, and is informed by feminist new materialism as well as by the notions of the “more-than-human world” and natureculture. The paper uses the concept of narrative as a methodological tool for exploring the layered meanings of the hiking experience and of the hiker's relationship to nature.
In the material hiking is presented as a potentially gear-intensive practice, where bodily and sensory experience is mediated by equipment. Along trails, campfire sites, and wilderness huts materialize shared practices and layered histories, while guestbook entries and carved inscriptions reflect narratives of presence. Weather, seasonality, and changing sensory atmospheres — scents, sounds, tastes, colors, temperature, and light — further shape the embodied perception of nature.
Through these dimensions, hiking emerges as an affective practice in which human, material, and more-than-human agencies intertwine, generating narratives that both reflect and transform cultural meanings of nature. In this sense, hiking not only produces embodied and material stories of human–nature entanglements, but also participates in the broader, socially constructed narratives through which we continuously reinterpret what “nature” means.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores how walking in bear-inhabited landscapes in Croatia, becomes a multispecies, affective, and ethical practice—revealing how humans and brown bears co-create meaningful landscapes through stories, sensory experiences, and shared presence.
Paper long abstract
Walking with Bears: Multispecies Encounters and the Storying of Landscape
In the mountainous regions of Croatia, where humans and brown bears (Ursus arctos) have long shared a landscape, walking becomes more than a mode of movement—it is a narrative practice shaped by multispecies presence. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in the mountainous regions of Croatia, this paper explores how walking through bear-inhabited forests is experienced as a form of embodied storytelling, where landscape, memory, and emotion intersect. Personal anecdotes, traces of bear activity, and artistic interventions—such as those at the “Mystic Place” created by Bear Refuge volunteers at the village of Kuterevo — reveal how both humans and bears leave narrative imprints upon the land. These encounters evoke a heightened awareness and sensory attunement, prompting what Julie Andrews calls “biophilic attention.” This contribution will consider how bear encounters alter the way one walks—and the stories one tells and how landscapes shared with large carnivores provoke both fear and reverence, ethics and enchantment?
Paper short abstract
Walking Camino del Norte—zooming in on geological textures, zooming out to deep time–is a reading that discloses and illuminates nature’s agency through multiscalar readings. Mythical, historical, and ecological layers converge, making walking a narrative practice entangled with the more-than-human.
Paper long abstract
This presentation explores walking as a narrative method and reading practice, focusing on how embodied movement through landscapes can generate ecological insight and create relational connections with the more-than-human world. Drawing on a pilgrimage along the Camino del Norte in northern Spain, I examine how the act of reading while walking—both literally and metaphorically—can open up new modes of engaging with nature as an active participant in narratives.
The Camino del Norte offers a layered terrain where geological formations such as "the flysch" cliffs between Zumaia and Mutriku reveal deep time and planetary history, while medieval architecture, mythological traces, fantasy, and contemporary pilgrim narratives intertwine across the path. By zooming in to the micro-level of textures, fossils, and flora, and zooming out to the planetary and evolutionary scales, I investigate how walking can become a multisensory reading practice that situates the human walker within a broader ecological, mythical, and temporal web.
Through this approach, I ask: In what ways does nature act as a co-narrator in walking narratives? How might walking and reading landscapes together generate alternative understandings of environmental meaning and agency? The presentation contributes to discussions on narrative ecologies, pilgrimage as environmental engagement, and the speculative potential of walking as a method for ecological storytelling.
Paper short abstract
The paper explores two autoethnographic walking narratives— in Finland and Latvia—in forging familiar and magical routes of belonging. I apply concepts and methods of attunement, attentiveness, and noticing through embodied engagement with place and more-than-human encounters.
Paper long abstract
For several years, I have embarked on two significant types of walks on a daily and occasional basis. One is my daily well-being walk, which involves wandering in the close surroundings of a suburb in the South of Finland. I take the occasional walk when I visit Latvia and my parents in the little seaside town in the bay of Riga. The first walk embodies my attempts to forge the routes of belonging and to emplace myself in a land where I always feel a slight stranger. The occasional walks in Latvia are a boost of familiarity and belonging through my embodied presence on the land I descend from.
In this paper, I unravel two walking narratives based on auto-ethnography. It is an experimental wandering and storytelling through the experience of places and routes we thread to forge identity and a sense of belonging. I discuss the rhythms, organisation, flow, and tempo of both types of walks that are part of the art of noticing and the art of attentiveness towards the surroundings of the walks. I show how attuning oneself to the diverse sensorial experiences, by engaging with a broad array of more-than-humans (plants, animals, rocks, waterbodies), opens space for creating and re-creating stories of the familiar and the magical. More broadly, I ask how and if the immersive walking narratives can contribute to the mindful practices of belonging and becoming with more-than-human and environments against the backdrop of uncertainty stemming from the doom of polycrisis.
Paper short abstract
We propose that by walking and talking within nature, we transcend the boundaries between natural science and folk wisdom to recreate new narratives. Through case studies of dialogue within nature, we explore the transformative potential of narratives.
Paper long abstract
This study aims for natural scientists, humanities scholars, artisans, environmental activists, and artists to co-create while walking through nature. Our team member Hiroki Kurita (natural scientist), with the cooperation of Hideo Tsukahara (Japanese paper artisan), developed a new material with low environmental impact and published it in a natural science journal. Kurita's achievements as a natural scientist and Tsukahara's craftsmanship in producing plant-based paper, though integrated at the material level, remain narratively divided, because wisdom in natural science and folklore is narrated in different terms. Therefore, Komatsubara Orika (humanities scholar) implemented a walking project, incorporating Soichiro Mihara (artist), Tutai Kobushizawa (writer), and Noriko Konno (environmental activist) as members, employing an art-based research methodology. We wandered around Tsukahara's workshop, visiting fields where kozo [paper mulberry], the raw material for washi paper, is grown, and the headwaters of the water used for papermaking. As we walked, we talked about the history of the local community, its myths, and tales of yoka [Japanese supernatural creature]i. As we walked, we discovered nature from different perspectives and shared our stories, gaining mutual understanding of each other's values and feelings toward nature. The result was that we collaboratively created a story: the wisdom of small local communities in Japan holds the potential to transform plants into wonderful paper materials and to transform even the most advanced modern science and technology into eco-friendly solutions. We propose that walking and talking in nature allows us to recreate new stories about plants.
Paper short abstract
Titel: Beechwood Narratives My proposal investigates folk narrative as embodied and poetic material. Daily forest walks, dance, and text open hidden archives. Personal ancestry and national silences meet and disrupt, creating new ways to narrate heritage and resistance.
Paper long abstract
My proposal explores the idea of folk narrative as something that is both inherited and discovered through embodied experience. Walking daily through a beech forest – where in Swedish bok means both beech and book – became an encounter with hidden archives. The trees appeared to offer up their stories, their trunks spinning as if to show every side, their leaves carrying messages in the wind. These walks became a site for listening to layered histories, including those excluded from the official story of Sweden. By inviting a collaborator to embody my great-great-grandfather, a shaman, I confronted a suppressed family lineage and its disruptive potential for national narratives. I would like to examine how these “folk narratives” carry a subversive charge, challenging the silences imposed by dominant historiographies, and how dance, film, and poetic text can become methods for unearthing and reanimating them.
If there is space (?) I would like to share a recorded 15-20 min audio guide to present the embodiemnt of my Beechwood Narrative
Paper short abstract
The paper examines walking and drawing as anthropological methods, showing how sketching in motion produces relational narratives of nature that resist fixed viewpoints, foreground embodied experience, and reveal entanglements with more-than-human worlds.
Paper long abstract
My proposed paper explores anthropological drawing as a practice that emerges in motion, in the field, and in direct contact with landscapes. Unlike photography or video, which often aim to capture fixed perspectives, drawing unfolds as a situated, processual act: the line follows the pace of the walk, the encounter with plants, stones, or paths, and the interruptions of weather and terrain. Sketching while walking does not simply document space but narrates the embodied experience of moving through it.
I argue that such drawings resist visual hierarchies by refusing a singular, central viewpoint; they fragment, omit, or distort, thereby producing relational rather than representational accounts of nature. Bringing together insights from visual anthropology and art-based research, the paper examines how walking and drawing together create emergent narrative practices in which gesture, materiality, and rhythm generate meaning.
By presenting examples from fieldwork, I will show how anthropological drawing makes visible the entanglement of humans and natural environments, destabilizing dominant visual grammars and opening alternative ways of narrating more-than-human worlds.
Paper short abstract
At Sõrve Estonian Children’s Summer Camp, the elusive ‘Bunyip’ is introduced to under-eights during a bushwalk. This paper examines the walk as a narrative device through which storytellers and campers collaboratively imagine the Bunyip in dialogue with nature across generations since 1962.
Paper long abstract
The Australian-English term ‘bunyip’ in folklore refers to a shapeless, amoebic entity that has radiated from First Nations Dreamings into colonial pan-Australian folklore. This spirit-being-cum-monster, popularly built upon 19th-century colonial interpretations of south-eastern Australian Indigenous Dreamings, has since found a unique role in the collective imagination of Sõrve, an annual week-long Australian-Estonian Summer Camp located on the shores of Awaba at Point Wolstoncroft, NSW, since 1962.
Literally emerging from the ‘Lilypond’ as the enigmatic Sõrve Bunyip (known also as the loom, bunjip, soovana, suulvane), its role as a magical and elusive guardian figure of the camp is described to its youngest campers via a supervised walk for children under the age of eight. Through this walk in nature, the Sõrve Bunyip emerges as a figuration of collective narrativisation through encounters negotiated through improvisation and collaboration with children (and their accompanying parents) through nature.
This paper asks how the Lilypond walk is constructed as a narrative, and what role nature and camp elanikud (residents) play in co-creating the Bunyip vis-à-vis encounters with the Bush. Through seated and on-site walking interviews and archival breadcrumb trails, I consider how these stories draw upon a cultural bricolage of Aboriginalist, colonial pan-Australian, and Estonianised mythologies, while affording children’s encounters with the Bush and serving as a moment of generative, collaborative storytelling.