Telling Stories: The Humanities in an Age of Planetary Agenda-Setting
At a time when demands for change are increasingly urgent, and more and more planetary agendas are being set, this project explores how humanities scholars at Exeter and UBC can engage critically with the opportunities and challenges these agendas pose for our disciplinary expertise, methodologies and perspectives. We investigate the significance of story-telling to agenda-setting, both because stories serve to naturalise certain ways of thinking about and acting in the world, and because they can invite and inspire meaningful social and cultural engagement and action.
The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a focal point for our project. Having gained traction but also met with resistance from stakeholders within and beyond academia, the 17 SDGs focus on ending poverty, protecting the planet and improving people’s lives and prospects; they open up a diverse range of agendas with which to engage different disciplinary perspectives and facilitate interdisciplinary as well as outward-facing dialogues.
The age of the Anthropocene is an age of national and planetary agenda-setting. Globally universities are important in both setting these agendas and building the interdisciplinary research teams to tackle them. But too often here the expertise from the Humanities is ignored or considered only as a contextual “add-on.” How, then, to allow the Humanities to meaningfully participate in setting the agenda?
This collaboration arose from a Visiting International Academic Fellowship (VIAF) awarded to Castricano/Young in 2019. An interdisciplinary workshop, lecture and a reading group was created to consider how narratives derived from historical research and critical animal studies could be brought to bear upon contemporary issues concerning meat production and consumption, and food systems and land use reform more generally. This work prompted interest in the dynamic relations between cultural forms, social formations and agenda-setting forces, and the capacity for stories to generate “worldly purchase” for “ideas about making, about making relations, about making spaces and orders deliberately and justly” (Kornbluh 2019: 4).
Collaboration History
This current collaboration, entitled Telling Stories: The Humanities in an Age of Planetary Agenda-Setting, arises from a Visiting International Academic Fellowship (VIAF) awarded to Dr. Paul Young (U Exeter) in 2019, who invited Dr. Jodey Castricano (UBC Okanagan) to Exeter to consider how narratives derived from historical research and critical animal studies might be brought to bear upon contemporary issues concerning meat production and consumption, food systems, and land use reform more generally. Dr. Castricano gave a public lecture: “Welcome to the Anthropocene: Now What?”, and participated as a symposium respondent for “Dietary Change and the Past, Present, and Future of Meat Eating”. The visit focused on developing research and teaching priorities and synergies in the fields of Critical Animal Studies and Eco-Cultures, a product of which is the current collaboration between UBC Okanagan and University of Exeter, Telling Stories: The Humanities in an Age of Planetary Agenda-Setting.
On both sides of the Atlantic, collaborators hosted Sustainability on Screen, public film screenings aimed at engaging new and nonacademic publics to with the long term sustainability and planetary justice goals, opening the conversation within the Arts/Humanities,
Stage one of the collaboration occurred at the University of Exeter in May of 2023, including a symposium, Telling Stories: The Humanities in an Age of Planetary Agenda-Setting, and an exhibition featuring work by Tara Nicholson (UBCO) and Corina Wagner (U Exeter), Wicked Problems: The Humanities in an Age of Planetary Agenda-Setting.
View a digital version of ‘Wicked Problems’
The UBC Okanagan iteration of this event, stage two, is split into two days, a symposium at UBC Okanagan, (Day 1) Telling Stories: The Humanities in an Age of Planetary Agenda-Setting on July 19th, 2023, and the (Day 2) Multispecies Storytelling Workshop at the Woodhaven Eco Culture Centre, on July 21st, 2023. Registration for these events is required via the linked Eventbrites.