Rethinking Fables in the Age of the Environmental Crisis (Final Conference)
May 22-24, 2025
Woolf College
University of Kent, Canterbury, UK (and online)
Keynote speakers
Vinciane Despret (University of Liège, Belgium)
Becoming fabulous Humanimal with Michel Serres
Susan McHugh (University of New England, USA)
Just Fairy Tales? Beyond the Scientific Schism between Plant and Animal Fables
with a Storytelling Event
featuring Suniti Namjoshi, Terefe Mitiku, Matilda Leyser, Kathryn Kirkpatrick, Cass Lynch, Chris Danta, Lesley Harrison/Alex South/Emily Doolittle)
‘Rethinking Fables in the Age of Global Environmental Crisis’ is an AHRC-funded networking project that explores innovative approaches to the fable genre. Since its launch in June 2023, we have held several fable-themed workshops in 2023 and 2024. This final conference at the University of Kent in 2025 builds on these earlier workshops, with the aim of bringing together, consolidating, and further developing the fable storytelling network. We are delighted to announce that Prof. Vinciane Despret, the philosopher of science and author of What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions (2016) and Prof. Susan McHugh, the author of Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human-Animal Stories Against Extinction and Genocide (2019) will be joining us in Canterbury as our keynote speakers. The conference will also feature many leading animal studies scholars, including Erica Fudge, Robert McKay, Chris Danta, Matthew Chrulew and Boria Sax.
The conference will culminate in a storytelling event at the Gulbenkian Theatre in Canterbury. We are delighted to announce that Suniti Namjoshi, the distinguished fabulist and author of The Blue Donkey Fables (1988), Aesop the Fox (2018) and many other fables, will be taking part in the event. She will be joined by other fantastic fabulists, including the poets Kathryn Kirkpatrick and Cass Lynch, who will share some ‘fables’ written for this project, the folklorist Terefe Mitiku, telling a traditional fable from Ethiopia, and the zoo-musicologists Emily Doolittle and Alex South with their fable-in-music, which they have produced in collaboration with the poet Lesley Harrison.
Please visit our conference page