Narrative in Question project receives RPF award

Posted on 1 September 2016

A new ICNS initiative called "Narrative in Question" has secured an award from the University Research Priming Fund, providing for a dedicated programme of interdisciplinary seminars and visiting speakers in spring and summer 2017.

The Narrative in Question project will run from January to June 2017, and will feature a full programme of York speakers from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, as well as a series of external speakers, with a culminating symposium/ workshop in the summer: see the programme here

The use of stories across disciplines, in a variety of media, in fictional and non-fictional forms, and for multiple purposes has become in itself a focus of inquiry for current research into the rhetoric and ethics of narrative’s communicative force, and behind that, its fundamental sense-making role in cognition. The Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies at York has already provided a forum for several collaborative and interdisciplinary projects and activities mining this vein, including the Narrative in the Humanities workshops, the Interactive Narrative theme and the Narrative and Complex Systems network. The conception for the Narrative in Question project is to capitalize upon the vitality of narrative-related research at York and use shared issues of narrative to define a new interdisciplinary research formation, in the process establishing York as a centre of excellence in the field.

The key to this initiative is that the question of narrative will provide a conceptual hub for dialogue amongst participants with widely divergent individual research agendas. The core proposed activities are the seminars of the Narrative in Question forum, which will feature individual research projects in which the issue of narrative is fundamentally at stake. All project participants will share a concern to put narrative in question, whether as a theoretical concept, as a mode of discourse or cognition, as a particular corpus or tradition, as a set of formal devices and techniques, as a use of specific media, or as a research methodology.

The York dialogue will be supplemented by a concurrent series of talks from external speakers in the field of narrative studies, both in the UK and Europe. Visiting Professor Mari Hatavara from the Narrare Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies, Tampere, will also contribute throughout the spring term.