Call: Chapters for “Expanded Storytelling Across Media: Creative Practices and Critical Approaches”

Call for Chapters:

Expanded Storytelling Across Media: Creative Practices and Critical Approaches (Routledge)
http://commlist.org/archive/all/2025-all/msg00163.html

Editors:
Dr James Calvert, Associate Professor Kath Dooley, Dr Kim Munro & Dr Ben Stubbs (Members of the Expanded Storytelling Lab, Creative People, Products and Places Research Centre, The University of South Australia)

Deadline for submissions of abstracts: March 24, 2025

This edited collection, which is contracted with Routledge, sets out to highlight, explore and interrogate innovative contemporary storytelling approaches against a backdrop of evolving technologies and delivery platforms.

‘Expanded Storytelling’ can be defined as narratives told across media, platforms and virtual and physical spaces that experiment with and/or break away from traditional storytelling methods and structures, giving rise to new perspectives. This can include but is not limited to fiction and non-fiction stories told with extended reality (XR), immersive, locative, playable, generative and interactive technologies. It can also include live art and performance, site-based work, mobile media and installation. Expanded Storytelling is not limited to the mode of delivery and exhibition, although that is part of it. Rather, it challenges how stories are told through non-linear and multilinear structures, challenging the hero’s journey, or monomyth, while preferencing feminist, queer, decolonial, other-than-human and lesser heard perspectives. The collection includes critical accounts of practice (interviews with practitioners) and reflections on creative practice research to provide insight into these new approaches and perspectives.

Taking a multi-disciplinary approach, Expanded Storytelling Across Media: Creative Practice and Critical Approaches interrogates not only what stories are told but the “who”, “how” and “where” of the telling. This includes explorations of story structure, approaches to narration and interactive devices. The stories that receive analysis in the book’s chapters invite audiences into new modes of experience that “rethink our reliance on certain tropes, traditions, knowledge, disciplines and canons” (Hanney 2024, 114). This analysis of new storytelling approaches and practices, spanning across disciplines including screen production, journalism, and game design, is the book’s central theme.

This book considers the intersections between art practices, technologies, fiction and non-fiction storytelling, to foreground new methodologies for story creation, the expression of new voices, and the impacts for audiences, small and large. In doing so it highlights tensions between analogue and digital approaches, and traditional and emerging practices. Rather than focus on new technologies per se, the book seeks to interrogate the ramification of these technologies for the art of storytelling.

Grounded in qualitative analysis methods and creative practice research, the book chapters may involve the critical discussion of new projects, working methods and/or self-reflections on practice undertaken by scholars/practitioners. While methods of textual analysis can present insights into storytelling structures, practice-related researchers ‘push this examination into a more direct and intimate sphere, observing and analysing themselves as they engage in the act of creation, rather than relying solely on dissection of the art after the fact’ (Skains 2018, 84).

While foregrounding emerging storytelling practices, the collection also seeks to engage with critical theories such as feminist theory, posthuman, and/or queer theory with the aim of highlighting the ways in which expanded storytelling encourages new forms of knowledge production and/or communication, new expressions of lived experience, and a critique of prevalent cultural narratives. To date, digital and/or immersive media has emerged as a significant platform to explore diverse human expression, human conflict, climate change (Markowitz et al. 2018) and the Anthropocene (Scott-Stevenson 2020), and it is hoped that chapters can shed further light on these phenomena.

The collection is also interested in discourses of decolonisation, a process that breaks down the dominant ways of thinking that have historically shaped the arts and humanities. In the context of storytelling it calls for a reconceptualisation of story components such as ‘structure’, ‘character’, and ‘point of view’. Prevailing ideas related to these elements are  often rooted in Western notions of storytelling, such as ‘the Hero’s Journey’ (Campbell 1949/2004), which tend to overlook the perspectives and contributions of the historically marginalised—the colonised and the ‘Other’.

The book will also include a database of projects mentioned in the chapters, with links to access works online (where possible). As such it will function as an important resource for postgraduate students and their supervisors, as well as creative practitioners more broadly.

The editors invite contributions that discuss or explore storytelling, in a critical manner, in relation to the following topics:

  • Subjectivities- e.g.- Queer, feminist, decolonial, other-than-human
  • Working with communities- Co-creation, accessibility, open source
  • Community-based, participatory and/or co-created stories (large or small)
  • Generative AI- e.g.- Ethics of tested and unregulated technologies, co-creation
  • Telling complex or impossible stories- e.g.- addressing climate change through expanded storytelling
  • GLAM (Gallery, Libraries, Archives and Museums) sector collaboration and/or disruption
  • New journalistic approaches: after the VR boom (AR, XR and news games).

Contributions may take the form of:

  • 2000 – 3000 word interview based texts (short articles featuring an interview with practitioners that is contextualised and receives critical analysis in regards to storytelling techniques/methodologies/approaches.)
  • 6000- 8000 word research articles interrogating the author’s own practice (including references)

In both cases, contributions will foreground critical accounts of practice that are interrogated to consider the themes outlined above. While seeking to shed light on projects produced in a range of industry, community, creative and research contexts, and at varying budget levels, noting new methodologies for project development and delivery, the various chapters may also note impacts and benefits for audiences, communities and the creators themselves. The book is particularly interested in lesser heard voices, such as those from the global south.

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

In the first instance please send a 300-word ABSTRACT, which identifies your chosen format chapter format (short or long). This should include at least three references that indicate your theoretical and/or conceptual approach.

Please also send a 200-word AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY.

Submitters will be notified of selection by May 2025 and full draft chapters will be expected by November 2025. We expect publication of the book in late 2026 or early 2027.

Please email submissions to: <Kath.Dooley /at/ unisa.edu.au> and <Kim.Munro /at/ unisa.edu.au>.

Questions can be sent to the same email addresses.

Deadline for Abstract submissions: Monday 24 March 2025

Please note that there are no monetary charges associated with publication as part of this collection.

REFERENCES

Campbell, J. (1949/2004). The hero with a thousand faces (Vol. 17). Princeton University Press.

Hanney, R. (2024). One myth to rule them all and in the darkness bind them: a critical examination of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey. Media Practice and Education, 25(2), 113–122.

Markowitz, D. M., Laha, R., Perone, B. P., Pea, R. D., & Bailenson, J. N. (2018). Immersive virtual reality field trips facilitate learning about climate change. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 2364.

Scott-Stevenson, J. (2020). Finding shimmer: Immersive non-fiction media and entanglements in virtual nature. Digital Culture & Education, 12(2), 1-18.

Skains, R. L. (2018). Creative practice as research: Discourse on methodology. Media practice and education, 19(1), 82-97.


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