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- Convenors:
-
Katre Kikas
(Estonian Literary Museum)
Hanne Pico Larsen (Tuck School of Business)
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Short Abstract
The panel focuses on the co-authored, collaborative, multi-voiced written narratives and asks about the role and meaning of nature (or its representations) in those co-narrating events.
Long Abstract
Today, quite a lot of narrating takes place in the written form – in random notes, books, letters, social media platforms, emails, and graffiti. There is a stereotype of writing as a solitary activity; however, the scholars of New Literacy Studies have shown that writing is always situated in a social context – to narrate one’s story in written form, one needs a social position from which to write. Our panel focuses on cases where this social position is shared or co-created by different participants. We highlight written narratives that are multi-authored or collaborative, which include different voices and worldviews, dialogues, confrontations, and negotiations. Besides texts written in conscious collaboration, we also keep in mind narratives that form in the course of longer communications (letters, postcards) or texts embedding the reactions of different people to similar experiences (guestbooks, social media commentaries). Depending on the context of co-narration, these texts often mix visual and verbal modes of expression or use surfaces other than paper and computer screen (sand, snow, toilet doors, etc.).
We encourage presenters to focus on the role and meaning of nature (or its representations) in those co-narrating events. Be it a focal topic of the story, part of metaphorical language, or surface onto which the narrative is created – how does it affect the development of the co-created storyline? What kind of discourses about nature can be seen in those writings? Is nature a common ground or a matter of contestations and negotiations for different participants?
Accepted papers
Session 1 Monday 15 June, 2026, -Paper short abstract
Discussions on climate change online reveal how trust, science, and nature events are negotiated through memes, myths, and everyday observations. By analyzing dialogues in a Facebook group, this study explores how contemporary folklore sustains or resists belief in the climate crisis
Paper long abstract
Climate change is a crisis that resists easy comprehension. Its diffuse, global effects and the complexity of the research confirming human influence on the climate mean that public understanding increasingly rests on trust. In the context of today’s wider epistemic crisis, the very reality of the Anthropocene is called into question in multiple ways. Digital media environments, where narratives, memes, and vernacular expressions circulate, have become fertile ground for analyzing how the climate crisis is debated and contested.
This presentation draws on dialogues from a Facebook group where climate change deniers and supporters meet in discussion. Here, references to “nature” emerge as central: everyday observations of weather, dramatic reports of melting glaciers, and images of natural disasters coexist, serving both to reinforce and to reject the findings of climate science. Narratives are infused with conspiratorial elements, modern myths, metaphors, and memes, alongside hypertextual practices of sharing links to research, news, and weather reports.
By examining these exchanges, I ask how digital forms of storytelling and vernacular creativity shape public engagement with the climate crisis. What roles do myths, anecdotes, and memes play in sustaining doubt, affirming belief, or negotiating trust in science? And what can these practices tell us about the function of contemporary folklore in making sense of—yet also resisting—the most urgent crisis of our time?
Paper short abstract
The talk examines how online reviews of memorial museums may function as mediated witnessing stories. It approaches visitor reviews as small socio-material stories that re-narrate museums’ canonic narrative, and illuminate the online-offline relations in terms of audiences’ narratives practices.
Paper long abstract
The talk examines online reviews as an online trans-formation of offline comments written in comment books/visitor books. It particularly looks at how online reviews on Google Maps Review address memorial or “dark” history museums – museums that convey a tragic historical narrative involving collective/mass violence. Under the premise that memorial museums mediate a canonic narrative, and that some of their visitors’ reviews remediate and renarrative it, the talk argues the following points: a. online reviews may be seen as small/partial stories that individual visitor author and share, and which variously echo the larger institutional narratives museums mediate; b. the relations between small review stories and larger canonic narratives can be conceptualized critically (power-relations and narrative entitlements) and dialogically (à la Bakhtin) through the notion of witnessing. That is, some of the reviews offer a mediated form of witnessing of the historical tragedy; and c. from an audience (audience studies) perspective, two divergent viewpoints are considered: that of the review-writers, who shares their post-visit stories as witnesses, and that of the pre-visit review-readers, who read online stories prior to travel. These divergent viewpoints are intertwined.
The talk conceptualizes some of the review stories as digitally mediated witnessing, examining their structure as hybrid socio-material texts that are shaped by the platform’s narrative affordances. Examples are from prominent taken from iconic memorial museums in Kigali (Rwanda), Hiroshima (Japan), Phnom Penh (Cambodia), and Yerevan (Armenia).
Paper short abstract
The autoethnography-based presentation on geocaching focuses on written online-narratives of various lengths (or “logs” as referred to in the game terminology) that can be found on a shared website of geocachers. These also include entries inspired by nature
Paper long abstract
Geocaching is a real-world treasure hunting game, in which participants use navigational techniques to hide and/or seek small containers. The hobbyists themselves create and update the information needed for playing – geocaching webpages are used to store both the locations of the caches and reports from those who have gone to seek them. Various forums are also used for discussing geocaching experiences.
As a result, a common archive or online diary has been formed of the coverage of geocaching over the years (since 2001 in Estonia). By posting entries about their game activities on the geocaching website, participants contribute to keeping the game information up-to-date, ensuring that the game can take place. Therefore, the content on the website reflecting the hobby is multi-authored, collaborative, dialogical, usable and re-readable asynchronously whenever anyone wishes to do so and forms the shared tradition of the geocachers’ community.
In addition to the information vital for the game, geocachers write down their observations of nature in online logs. In forums, even more detailed stories are told about their experiences in nature. These narratives would not exist as such if their authors did not practice geocaching, i.e. a hobby is a context that frames the narratives. In these stories, we find depictions of humans acting in nature, and descriptions of current states and changes of natural places, as well as encounters with representatives of flora and fauna.
The presentation focuses on the specifics of “nature writing” in geocaching and how participants relate to nature.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines multi-voiced narratives of the Slovenian diaspora in Australia, including SALUK writers, showing how nature—as home or foreign—shapes hybrid identities, belonging, and co-created stories bridging memories of Slovenia and experiences in Australia.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores how nature and community identity intertwine in written, multi-voiced narratives of the Slovenian diaspora in Australia. Examined examples include migrants’ letters, postcards, community newsletters, and contemporary online posts, showing that nature functions as both an important theme and metaphor, often appearing as a welcoming “home” or an intrusive “foreign” presence. Special attention is given to Slovenian writers active within the literary circle SALUK (Bert Pribac, Marcela Bole, Pavla Gruden, among others), whose works provide valuable insight into literary multi-vocality connecting Slovenian heritage with the Australian landscape. Through these texts, questions of what constitutes home for individual authors frequently emerge: is it Slovenia, Australia, or something in between? Slovenian emigrants, in dialogue between memories of their homeland’s nature and experiences of their new environment, construct hybrid discourses in which nature serves as a site of connection, negotiation, and symbolic bridging between “here” and “there.” The paper demonstrates how such co-narrating practices are central to understanding diasporic identities and the role of nature in their ongoing (re)construction.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines nature’s role in co-authored narratives in literary museums, focusing on Long Ying-Zong’s works(Taiwan). It explores how nature is presented and re-created in multi-voiced storytelling, shaping meanings and fostering interactions among texts, environments, and participants.
Paper long abstract
Long Ying-Zong (1911-1999) was one of the few writers from Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule to receive a prestigious Japanese literary award. His award-winning work, "A Town with Papaya Trees", uses the sultry heat and fragrance of the South , symbolized by the tropical fruit papaya, as a metaphor for the self-identity and life struggles of the shrub people. As hi his other literary works, descriptions of the mountains and carious plants, natural light, shadow, color, and smells of his hometown often contain metaphors that connect the story’s axis or characters, with a duality of appearance.
In 2020, the Long Ying-Zong Literary Museum in Beipu, Taiwan, was established following restoration of historic sites. This allows literary texts and narratives to intersect and reinterpret reality. By incorporating various nature elements from literature, the Long Ying-Zong Literary Museum explores diverse narrative methods and practices, such as natural indigo dyeing, walking through the town and mountains depicted in literary landscapes, and utilizing different materials, to preserve and convey nature through the museum. For various participants, through the medium of the literary museum, nature is the cornerstone of extending culture and dialogue in a multi-layered narrative carrier.
Paper short abstract
This paper focuses on Mary Howitt and Tony DiTerlizzi’s The Spider and the Fly. Through the creation of this picture book, DiTerlizzi participates in a collaborative counterpontal narrative across time, with Howitt’s poem, but also with other fables, cautionary tales and genres such as silent film.
Paper long abstract
Many picture books are collaborative and subversive projects by nature. Rather than simply supplementing the words on the page, William Moebius suggests that a true picture book contains two “semi-autonomous and mutually attractive chains of meaning” (2011). In other words: while these visual and verbal texts can work together, they often work independently as well.
In this paper, I focus on the picturebook The Spider and the Fly (2003), in which Tony DiTerlizzi reproduces Mary Howitt’s 1828 poem of the same name with new illustrations. By doing so, I argue that DiTerlizzi becomes a participant in a collaborative narrative constructed across time. I suggest that Howitt also frames her poem as a part of a larger narrative. Her poem was initially published with the subtitle “a new Version of an old Story,” inviting readers to place her poem in conversation with other narratives, such as Aesop's fables and other cautionary tales. I argue that DiTerlizzi uses intertextual references and artistic style to pay homage to other adaptations of this story, such as the 1916 silent film of the same title. DiTerlizzi reproduces Howitt’s poem faithfully, but I suggest that through the addition of images, DiTerlizzi fills gaps in the narrative, with visual and verbal texts working in counterpoint. DiTerlizzi uses his visual text to suggest that while the the fly’s words (polite refusals) suggests she understands the danger, they do not match her actions (accepting forward invitations), ultimately leading to her demise.
Paper short abstract
The paper focuses on the co-narrative and dialogic side of family guestbook tradition of Estonia. It looks at the different ways the writers use references to nature to situate themselves and their relation to the host in time and space.
Paper long abstract
The paper focuses on the family guestbook tradition in Estonia. Family guestbooks are volumes kept at homes where friends and relatives leave different texts concerning their visit or their relations to the host at that particular moment or in the past. These works, gradually completed over a long period of time in collaboration with many people, are a kind of hidden archive of writing styles, social relations and societal changes of different periods.
Family guestbooks belong into the sphere of vernacular or everyday literacy – people who write in them use and blend different generic models, style registers and ways to position oneself. There are several possibilities to look at the guestbooks as a site of co-narration. Firstly, we can look at the volumes as a kind of co-authored oevre, created by social circle of one person or household in the course of the time. Secondly, we can look for co-narration and dialogues on the level of single entries or clusters of entries formed around one event; though there are monologic entries that are directed unanimously towards the host, we can also see a dialogic entries that either relate with the other entries on the same page or make meta-commentaries about the guestbook tradition itself. In the centre of my paper are guestbooks of two families from the second part of 20th century and I am especially interested how the writers use references to nature to situate themselves and their relation to the host in time and space.
Paper short abstract
The paper will explore which natural phenomena were used in creating the narrative of the legendary part of the Lithuanian chronicles. How are they related to humans and how do they shape the relationship between individuals, the community, and the surrounding environment?
Paper long abstract
Medieval chronicles were often collective works that served to shape the imagination about the past and promote a better understanding of oneself. Although chronicles usually had political content, they also contained descriptions of nature that served certain functions.
This paper will analyze the legendary part of Lithuanian chronicles, in which separate functions of nature can be distinguished. Given that the legendary part of Lithuanian chronicles is folkloric in nature, it reveals authentic features of worldview in the context of cultural anthropology. There are four of them in the narrative:
Nature as a provider of food and clothing, or economic function.
Nature as a sphere of defense or military function.
Nature as beauty or aesthetic function.
Relationship with nature through ritual, or the religious function of nature.
This paper will seek to present these four aspects of nature in greater detail, analyzing specific examples and contextualizing them in terms of the features of the identity being constructed.