Malmö University, 13-15 May 2025.
The Centre for Imagining and Co-Creating Futures hereby invites for the 4th symposium at Malmö University on the theme of storytelling and collaborative future making. The actual symposium will take place 13-14 May 2025. The 15th of May, we combine with the rest of the centre for a seminar on better stories with Professor Andrea Pető, Central European University and guest professor at Malmö University. We plan to construct a varied program with paper presentations, workshops and spaces for dialogue.
For the symposium, we invite a varied group of scholars from disciplines like design studies, leadership and organization studies, communication, comics research, art, architecture, education and urban planning. The theme Storytelling and Collaborative Future Making addresses collaborative responses to making a sustainable and common future within diverse areas mentioned above. A common thread in the symposium is to explore the role that storytelling can have in crafting ethical foundations for work, organization, design, architecture, education and urban development. Storytelling and collaboration for earthly survival mix with questions concerning how to collaborate and organize for human rights.
While the 17 SDGs have been successful in mobilizing attention to questions concerning sustainability and inclusion, the embedded idea of balancing profit, people, and planet in actual strategies and practices seem to be off-track in practicing sustainable and inclusive
development. Sustainability and inclusion are more and more at risk of becoming empty signifiers. Therefore, this symposium presents new ideas, concepts and approaches that allows for new understanding of how to work with all aspects of sustainability. The symposium
explores new ideas and approaches that mix storytelling and collaboration with questions concerning human rights and our relations to nature. These approaches might range from new
embodied, relational, and material understandings of storytelling, the problematic and complex relations between small stories and grand narratives, visual narratives/comics, the relations between places, spaces, and stories, post-human, transhuman and storytelling for Gaia, feminist, transgender, or queer storytelling.
We also invite contributions of how to research and write differently in ways in which we take upon us our earthly responsibility. Such contributions may be inspired by engaged scholarship, reflexive inquiry, post-qualitative inquiry, or speculative fabulation. Finally, we also invite new approaches to understand the details how we work and collaborate and how they mix with issues concerning human rights and nature. These might comprise ideas from performative approaches
to accounting, logistics, learning, collaboration, and planning. If you want to join us, please submit an abstract of app. 500 words by 16th April 2025 to one of the organizers, Kenneth
Mølbjerg Jørgensen, Gunnar Krantz or Per-Anders Hillgren. The event is free of charge. We don’t offer any accommodation, lunch, or dinner. We will make space for social arrangements in Malmö and organize a joint meeting place for dinner for those who are interested. Please send any queries to Kenneth, Gunnar, or Per-Anders using the following emails. The venue for the symposium will be announced later.
Best, Kenneth, Gunnar, and Per-Anders
Kenneth.molbjerg-jorgensen@mau.se
per-anders.hillgren@mau.se
gunnar.krantz@mau.se
