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- Convenors:
-
Inkeri Aula
(Aalto University)
Sofia De La Fuente Garcia (University of Edinburgh)
Alicia Núñez-García (University of Edinburgh)
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Short Abstract
This panel explores the entanglements of nature, heritage, and identity in different storytelling contexts. We invite transdisciplinary approaches to heritage as sites for personal and collective identity formation through lived experience and ecological intimacy, but also digital engagement.
Long Abstract
This interdisciplinary panel explores entangled relationships between nature, heritage, and identity. We invite papers that draw on anthropological, psychological, archaeological and other perspectives to consider cultural heritage as dynamic spaces of ongoing identity-building, where nature and culture intertwine.
Individuals and social groups engage with tangible and intangible heritage in particular places through storytelling, sensory experience, and changing environmental relationships. At the intersection of personal memory and collective history, these engagements can evoke meaningful narratives that demonstrate how people experience themselves within broader ecological and cultural assemblages, particularly in times of environmental and societal change.
Storytelling can foster a sense of ecological intimacy – felt connections with the more-than-human world – that plays a key role in identity formation and existential meaning-making. Encounters with cultural heritage, such as outdoors site visits, related nature-based activities like foraging, or more intangible and existentially motivated frameworks including ritual, song, and embodied presence, can support cultural continuity and creative reimagining. These encounters often involve profound engagements with the more-than-human environment as a source of meaning and belonging, increasingly mediated by digital technologies.
We welcome submissions focused on empirical or theoretical investigations into the relational processes between nature, cultural heritage and identity in the context of storytelling. Contributions may also explore how digital technologies – such as immersive digital tools, online archives, and interactive media – may be woven into these processes. We seek to incentivize cross-disciplinary dialogue on how heritage is continually reimagined and narrated through co-constitutive interactions with land, memory, and one another.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Tuesday 16 June, 2026, -Paper short abstract
Walking interviews and a storytelling workshop at the Calanais megalithic sites show how engagement with heritage and landscape fosters meaning, belonging, creativity, and life purpose, then further amplified through digital and hands-on tools for ecological and cultural intimacy.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how the Calanais megalithic sites in Scotland foster identity through encounters with nature and cultural heritage. Drawing on ethnographic walking interviews and a storytelling workshop conducted as part of the INT-ACT project, we explore how these ancient landscapes—deeply embedded in their natural surroundings—function as spaces of healing, present-moment awareness, ecological attunement, and belonging. Participants describe experiences of inspiration, creativity, and life purpose emerging from engagement with the standing stones and their surrounding environment, highlighting the relational entanglements between people, place, and the more-than-human world.
We also consider digital and hands-on tools developed as part of INT-ACT's off-site installation, including an interactive demonstrator, which extends the intangible cultural heritage of these experiences to others and offers new forms of ecological and heritage intimacy. By integrating empirical insights with a theoretical lens on storytelling, sensory experience, and heritage as dynamic relational spaces, this paper contributes to understanding how tangible and intangible heritage practices support personal meaning-making, creativity, and continuity. The Calanais sites illustrate how heritage encounters—both in-person and mediated—cultivate belonging, imagination, and life purpose in contemporary environmental and societal contexts.
Paper short abstract
This paper will explore how locals on the Isles of Lewis and Harris experience and respond to environmental changes and island industrialization projects through engaging in conservation projects, nature education, and community building.
Paper long abstract
In the Outer Hebrides, tensions over land-use often arise over questions of how to use previous crofting lands (e.g. for tourism or renewed crofting), and how to manage the nearby sea, either by creating protected zones, increasing fishing, or using the space for more renewable energy production. To better understand these tensions, it is critical to investigate the different motivations for these various types of land-use and how they connect to both the commodification and care of natural and cultural heritage. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on conservation, language revitalization, and tourism in the Outer Hebrides, I argue that what motivates commodification and care in this context is a commitment to maintaining a sense of “authenticity,”—though notions of what actually constitutes 'authenticity' vary. I focus in particular on the problem of 'double binds' (Eriksen 2016) and pervasiveness of market environmentalism, both of which make it difficult for development and conservation to avoid the problematic entwinement of commodification and care of nature and culture. Further, I examine the role of stories and local histories of natural and cultural heritage used collectively by people to cope with environmental and economic changes as a community. I show that through these stories and histories, which capture but also perform the authentic, we can illuminate the complex ties and contradictions between sustainability and economic growth, and the ways both are framed as continuous with the authentic environmental and cultural heritage of the region.
Paper short abstract
Shamanism in Southern Siberia entangles heritage, nature, and identity. Sacred sites and storytelling foster belonging and cultural continuity, while wartime Russia’s ecological policies silence Indigenous voices and reshape the meanings of heritage and ecology.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the entanglements of heritage, nature, and identity through the lens of contemporary shamanism in Southern Siberia. Drawing on ethnographic interviews, participant observation, and media analysis, it explores how shamanic practices among the Buryats, Tuvans, and Khakassians function as lived heritage that interweaves ecological belonging, gendered identities, and cultural continuity.
Shamanic sacred sites and rituals are not only spiritual spaces but also forms of intangible cultural heritage that connect communities to land, memory, and ancestry. Storytelling—in the form of oral narratives, ritual speech, and embodied practices—emerges as a key medium through which ecological intimacy and collective identity are negotiated.
At the same time, heritage practices are entangled with broader political realities. In contemporary Russia, shamanism has been mobilised as both a vehicle of Indigenous revival and a tool for state co-option, revealing how ecological and cultural heritage is continually redefined. Since the war in Ukraine, the meaning of “ecology” itself has shifted: resource management has been subordinated to wartime priorities, lowering environmental standards and privileging state needs over Indigenous rights. This has further silenced Indigenous voices, narrowing the space for alternative ecological narratives rooted in heritage and land-based belonging.
By situating shamanism within transdisciplinary debates on heritage and ecological identity, this paper highlights how Indigenous communities in Southern Siberia narrate belonging and resilience through interactions with sacred landscapes, storytelling, and memory, even as they confront colonial legacies and the pressures of ecological change.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines plants as storytellers in reimagining prehistoric narratives. Through ecofeminist, multispecies perspectives and artist-led sensory workshops as case studies, it argues for vegetal agency in reshaping identity, heritage, and our idea of “the natural.”
Paper long abstract
This paper explores how plants can serve as storytellers in the reimagining of prehistoric narratives, particularly those associated with the Bandkeramik (linear pottery) culture and the broader process of neolithization. By adopting an ecofeminist and multispecies perspective, plants are not understood as passive background but as active witnesses and carriers of heritage. Their sensory qualities—such as scent, flavour, and texture—open up alternative ways of engaging with the past and challenge the anthropocentric and colonial framing of dominant archives.
To investigate these ideas in practice, a series of multisensorial workshops was conceived and realized in collaboration with contemporary artists. These workshops, which have already taken place, provide concrete case studies that demonstrate how artistic methods can foreground vegetal agency and invite participants to experience history through embodied, sensory encounters. By placing emphasis on touch, taste, and smell, the workshops created spaces where prehistoric narratives could be reimagined beyond purely visual or textual modes of knowledge.
The paper argues that such approaches not only expand the possibilities of heritage-making but also intervene in wider debates on identity, ecology, and cultural memory. Plants, understood as more-than-human agents, open pathways for reconsidering what counts as “the natural” within narrative practices and for challenging the boundaries between past and present, human and nonhuman, culture and nature.
Paper short abstract
Through storytelling and lived experiences, this research explores Southern African coastal communities’ deep ties to the sea. Personal narratives reveal ancestral knowledge, cultural resilience, and ecological intimacy, showing how heritage, identity, and the more-than-human world are intertwined.
Paper long abstract
This research explores the entanglements of nature, heritage, and identity through storytelling and lived experiences of coastal communities in Southern Africa. Drawing on sensory ethnography and oral histories, it traces multiple returns to the sea across Namibia, South Africa, and Kenya, highlighting how human relationships with the ocean embody resilience, ancestral knowledge, and dispossession. First Nations communities, whose connection to the coast spans over 160,000 years, recount histories of aquatic hunting, sacred rituals, and seasonal rhythms, navigating the legacies of colonial displacement and restricted access to coastal spaces. Individual narratives embodied encounters with the ocean as acts of cultural reclamation, ecological intimacy, and identity formation.
The study observes ongoing tensions between leisure, industrial, and conservation uses of coastal lands, showing how human-nature entanglements are continually negotiated amid social, environmental, and economic change. Encounters with the more-than-human world, through ritual, play, or collection of seawater and kelp, sustain cultural continuity, foster belonging, and create spaces for meaning-making across generations.
By foregrounding storytelling, sensory experience, and personal accounts, this research highlights how heritage is dynamic, relational, and multisensory. The sea emerges as both a material and symbolic presence, shaping individual and collective identities while mediating connections between culture, memory, and environment. These insights demonstrate the transformative role of narrative and lived experience in understanding and preserving intangible cultural heritage in Southern Africa.
Paper short abstract
With the backdrop of select narratives of Teyyam, an intangible heritage, that forge connections among the landscape, mindscape and memoryscape, the paper delves into the entanglements of the zoomorphic and folk imagination, the topographical sensibilities, values and identities.
Paper long abstract
A spatio-temporal complex and a live tradition of the North Malabar, the ‘land of lore and looms’, tucked in the Southwest of India Teyyam and the oral narratives associated with it, totam, pave way for critical engagements on nature, storytelling and identity. Encompassing the sacred grove, its verdure, the folk witness an apotheosis in a shared sacred space, aided by oral narratives, to create a sense of collective belonging of identities. An intangible heritage and a cultural continuity, contributing towards the critique of power, Teyyam and the narratives rejuvenate the lore and the land, forging connections among the landscape, mindscape and memoryscape by coding beliefs and values that are eco-centric. With the backdrop of select narratives, the paper delves into the collusion of nature and culture presented in the complex. A multidisciplinary insight into the ecological and cultural dynamics of the narratives seeks to understand the construction of shared meaningful practices for prosperity that are in harmony with nature, reflecting the all-encompassing interdependence in the web of lives.
Paper short abstract
This paper reports on a collaboration between partners in Iceland, Bulgaria, and the United States around thermal waters as cultural heritage and public good. We consider the role of narrative in shaping this partnership and highlighting everyday intimacies to create change on the ground.
Paper long abstract
How do the stories we tell about water shape, constrain, and enable our capacities to recognize and protect water-based traditions as common good? How might narratives created through transnational collaborations expand multiscalar notions of belonging, cultural property, and collective action for change? Both Icelandic and Bulgarian traditions of public bathing in geothermal waters are relatively overlooked, yet warmly embraced contemporary traditional practices in everyday life. Geothermal bathing infrastructures channel a marvel of the natural world to create spaces of intimacy and community across cultures, but the manipulation and privatization of these waters also threatens shared access to a once-collective resource, not to mention the sense of belonging created through water intimacies. This paper reports on an ongoing transnational, public-facing collaboration between NGO partners in Iceland and Bulgaria, and a folklorist-collaborator in the United States, around thermal waters as cultural heritage and public good. Through cross-cultural exchange, joint reflection, and the creation of immersive ethnographic and artistic experiences, our joint project, titled “Water Agoras,” traces the ecological intimacies created through water, at two opposite corners of Europe. Here, we consider the role of narrative in shaping this partnership, not to mention narrative’s capacity to highlight everyday intimacies and create change on the ground. By co-constructing a joint narrative of thermal bathing as transnational cultural heritage, this partnership illuminates how water infrastructures and water-based practices might support grounded action around collective access to and protection of thermal water bathing as cultural heritage.
Paper short abstract
This paper analyses storytelling of anti-mining activists against resource extraction projects in natural heritage sites. Such narratives are a response strategy to new mining sites in the OECD.
Paper long abstract
This article analyses the work of anti-mining initiatives and storytelling about preserving natural heritage sites. How activists talk about resumed resource extraction projects can be seen as a response strategy to narratives about resource extraction from (local) political and corporate sides. Mining in OECD countries is highly controversial and is currently experiencing a renaissance for reasons that lead to narrative conflicts; especially in heritage sites. Motives in this context include the implementation of digital strategies and the planned transition to “green” energy, as pursued in the global North.
This article compares narratives and knowledge generation in the context of extractive politics in two regions: the border region between Germany and Czechia, where there is a large lithium deposit, and the Alpine National Park on the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand for gold and coal. We trace the activation of a universal language of justification for resource extraction and equally universal, albeit deeply local, narratives that emerged from engagement with the environment and concepts of nature. The article argues that narratives about contested natural sites and resources are evocative on several levels: they draw on a traditional vision of untouched, magical purity that contrasts with an imagined dystopian future of destruction. The research is based on interviews, media analysis, and participant observation.
Paper short abstract
This project explores and digitally activates the entanglements of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ in the context of historical Europe-Oceania relations and Māori cosmo-ontology through the lens of Indigenous and geological storytelling practices relating to pounamu (greenstone from Aotearoa New Zealand).
Paper long abstract
According to Māori cosmo-ontology, pounamu is engrained with a multifaceted significance that extends beyond the mineral itself – or the ‘object’ or ‘thing’ it is shaped into – and, therefore, beyond what is commonly framed as ‘cultural heritage’ or ‘natural history’. The land where pounamu is found has been subject to historical as well as environmental fluctuations, storytelling practices, and international geological inquiry. Pounamu has shaped and been shaped by encounters between Māori iwi (tribes), between locals and early explorers, as well as natural and spiritual forces.
Setting out by tracing pounamu at European anthropological and ‘natural history’ museum institutions and researching relevant provenances, this project seeks to digitally assemble a kaleidoscope of stories situating pounamu in its net of living relations, reconnecting ‘exiled’ pounamu with its (hi)stories of origin and re-activating its taonga-ness (‘treasure-ness’). By reading pounamu formations – both in museum spaces and in wider ecological landscapes – as archives of combined natural-cultural knowledge, narratives that centre the more-than-human can be unravelled.
Pounamu comes alive in Māori stories that transcend notions of temporality and environment, whereas geologists study pounamu formations and sediments to uncover the Earth’s tectonic history and long-term environmental changes. These comprehensive notions of time and space will be captured through enactive fieldwork, as reflected in in-situ pounamu monitoring, collection and preservation practices in Aotearoa New Zealand; with a focus on related storytelling practices. Insights and assembled stories will be made digitally accessible as part of a collaborative digital archive for Māori communities.
Paper long abstract
In the Rajasthani folk traditions of India, nature functions not merely as a backdrop for sacred narratives but also as an active agent in the processes of deification. This Paper examines how local folk deities - including Pabuji, Gogaji, Tejaji, and regional bhomiyas - have emerged through intimate entanglements between natural landscapes and narrative practices, challenging the Western nature-culture binaries through indigenous cosmological frameworks. Drawing on spatial ethnographic fieldwork and oral narrative analysis, the Paper investigates how specific natural sites - such as sacred groves, khejdi trees, serpent habitats, crossroads, and water sources - become repositories of supernatural agency through storytelling practices. Paper further explores three interconnected dimensions: first, how natural features actively participate in deification; second, how these stories encode ecological knowledge and environmental ethics within community memory; and third, how contemporary transformations - including highway shrines like that of Om Banna (Bullet Baba) - demonstrate the adaptive capacity of folk narratives to incorporate technological landscapes into sacred geographies. The authors will examine how storytelling-events shape both landscape-perception and environmental relationships, to resist anthropocentric frameworks by positioning nature as inherently numinous: neither purely "natural" nor "supernatural" but existing within relational cosmologies. The attempt is to contribute to understanding indigenous ontologies by revealing how Rajasthani folk traditions conceptualize nature-nurture relationships through deification practices, while addressing the themes of human-nonhuman entanglements, archives as living ecosystems, and narrative commons, as repositories of relational knowledge-systems that fundamentally reconceptualize agency, sacred geography, and environmental relationality.
Paper short abstract
This research uses participatory photography to examine how natural elements are interpreted by Dong villagers as markers of agricultural time, ancestral presence, and spatial orientation. It considers how visual narratives express embedded environmental knowledge and local cultural values.
Paper long abstract
This research draws on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the Dong village of Tang’an through a Photovoice project, to explore how natural elements are encountered, remembered, and interpreted in everyday life. Situated in the mountainous region of Guizhou province in southwest China, Tang’an is one of the first-generation ecomuseums jointly established by the Chinese and Norwegian governments. As an early institutional experiment, it integrates village life, cultural practice, and environmental context within a framework of community-based heritage.
Participants in the project used cameras to document their surroundings from their own perspectives. Among the photographs and reflections, recurring attention was given to natural elements such as tung blossoms, cedar trees, water systems, and terraced fields. These were not selected as aesthetic motifs, but appeared as temporal indicators, spatial markers, and references to ancestral presence. For instance, the phenological stages of the tung blossom were described as corresponding to different phases of agricultural work, while cedar trees were associated with ritual boundaries and long-standing village orientations. These associations emerged organically through participants’ commentaries and image-making, reflecting long-term patterns of engagement with place.
The visual and verbal narratives generated through this process offer insight into how natural elements are integrated into local systems of value, identity, and place-making. Beyond its analytical value, Photovoice proved to be an effective method for engaging with community perspectives on environmental change. The findings may offer useful contributions to local dialogues concerning natural resource management, conservation strategies, and community resilience and development within heritage-oriented rural contexts.
Paper short abstract
The research presents a practice-based, participatory methodology that challenges nationalist ethnography, opening dialogues through fragments of the multispecies ecology of nomadic pastoralism. It explores how oppressed fragments become active agents in regenerating Anatolian pastoralist knowledge.
Paper long abstract
After being marginalised for centuries by colonial and nationalist narratives, nomadic pastoralist practices have emerged as a vital focus of interdisciplinary ecological research focusing on regenerative and dynamic ecologies. In the Anatolian context, sedentarisation of nomadic pastoralists played a key role in shaping society and the landscape during the modernisation process from the late Ottoman period to the Republic of Turkey. Meanwhile, Turkey’s nationalist ethnography appropriated the nomadic pastoralist culture into the foundational mythology of Turks in Anatolia. Instrumentalising it as a national identity silenced the ecological knowledge that pastoralists developed over centuries in dialogue with diverse ethnic groups and immobilised dynamic ecological practices.
Today, the few remaining nomadic pastoralists face significant challenges in maintaining seasonal migration in Anatolia, while their culture is displayed in state museums. Drawing on decolonial feminist scholarship and archival practices, this research brings together fragments of nomadic pastoralist practices from southern Anatolia, including materials, tools and skills related to their crafts, fiction and non-fiction narratives in various media. Through installation and event formats, the project opens a space for sensory experience, collective learning and dialogue on the commons of pastoralist practices across geographies. It encourages critical reading of nationalist narratives and contributes to the regeneration of suppressed ecological knowledge.
Initiating dialogues guided by fragments intertwining the multispecies ecology of nomadic pastoralism, the research presents a practice-based, participatory methodology that challenges nationalist ethnography. It explores how fragments of the oppressed can become active agents in the regeneration of Anatolian nomadic pastoralism's cultural and ecological heritage.
Paper short abstract
Mermaiding reimagines waterscapes as enchanted intangible heritage. This paper explores how individuals identifying as mermaids, sirens, and selkies forge intimacy with lakes through embodied practice, renewing connections between folklore, identity, and wellbeing.
Paper long abstract
Based on ongoing ethnographic research, this paper explores how individuals in the contemporary Scandinavian mermaiding community, bring encounters with lakes and sea shores into sites of reimagining the landscape. Swimming, free diving and dancing in monofins while holding their breath beneath the surface , practitioners describe how local waters become familiar companions, sites of belonging, and personal transformation.
These creative practices emerge not only as engagements with folklore through playful visual means, but as serious responses to the pressures of late modern life. Many begin mermaid swimming in response to burnout or distress, discovering in the waterworld a way to imagine alternative ways of being and to reconnect with nature, with themselves, and with others—human as well as more-than-human.
Mermaiding reveals water not as an anonymous landscape but as a participant in heritage and identity, reshaping how humans imagine and enact belonging within more-than-human worlds. These embodied practices show how heritage is continually remade in water, generating new identities and intimacies that challenge modern disenchantment and sustain the presence of folklore in everyday life.
Paper short abstract
Psychedelic experiences (PEs) influence our perception of ourselves and the World. We investigate how different aspects of the Self are expressed in personal accounts of PEs, using the PENS dataset and applying a hybrid approach combining qualitative analysis and natural language processing.
Paper long abstract
Psychedelic experiences (PEs) can deeply influence the perception we have of ourselves and the world around us. Previous research has shown the study of such episodes to be effective for investigating the nature of, and the connection between, selfhood and environment. In everyday experience, Self and World are typically experienced as distinct. The Self is often understood as a coherent construct composed of various interrelated aspects, such as the perception of our body, a sense of agency, a sense of identification, and the narrative Self.
During PEs, the Self–World boundaries may dissolve. Participants report experiences of dissolution (e.g., Self-loss, Self-expansion) and/or ecological intimacy, especially when the experience unfolds in natural settings or involves personally foraged substances. These practices emerge as forms of living heritage, transmitted through embodied and word-of-mouth traditions. Such experiences often evoke sensory and narrative engagements with the more-than-human world, with their associated traditions as spaces for identity-building, and are even referred to as 'rites of passage', in some participants' narratives.
This exploratory study investigates how different aspects of the Self are expressed in personal stories of PEs. We use the PENS dataset, which comprises narrative responses about PEs from 185 residents of Scotland. These narratives reveal diverse themes, from connection with community, land, and inherited foraging practices to the perceived dissolution of personal boundaries. A hybrid approach combining qualitative analysis and natural language processing supports the identification of recurring aspects of the Self across subjective, ecological, and heritage-related dimensions.
Paper short abstract
Through the lens of slow activism and contemplation, this research paper will focus on the temporal and ecological experiences of practitioners and main actors in the field of crafts-making in Palestine. It aims at approaching crafts-making as a site for storytelling and heritage ‘re-work’.
Paper long abstract
This paper aims at approaching crafts-making as a site for storytelling and heritage ‘re-work’. It will critically present and discuss personal and collective stories of young artisans in Palestine, where the settler colonial project and the daily resistance of its conditions shape the initiatives of artisans and their spatial and temporal experiences, their values, intergenerational knowledge, performances, relations to land and environment, and power dynamics by which their work is surrounded.
Through the lens of slow activism and contemplation, this research paper will focus on the temporal and ecological experiences of main actors in the field of crafts-making. It will provide an insight into their daily stories of obtaining and treating raw materials, their relation to the land, and the complex agencies enacted in this creative field.
The ethnographic fieldwork will be conducted in multiple locations in Palestine. The researcher will conduct regular visits and go-alongs and will participate in day-to-day activities of craftspeople. Studied initiatives include farming, furniture making, accessories, and pottery.
This paper will provide an analysis of the materialization of slowness in crafts-making with emphasis on the ecological and cultural assemblages of raw materials, the land, and intergenerational knowledge and skills. It will also analyse contemporary narratives mediated through slow cultural practices. While doing so, the paper will unfold inter-relational social and cultural elements of the contemporary heritage movement in Palestine while providing a contextual anthropology of those who remained in the occupied land. It will centralise Indigenous intergenerational theoretical and practical knowledge and narratives.