Rethinking Fables in the Age of Global Environmental Crisis

The fable is a literary genre characterised by its unique focus on nonhumans: in a fable, animals, other organisms, and even non-living forms take centre stage to tell their stories. It has a long global history and has played a significant role in shaping human cultures and ways of thinking; we live with a multitude of talking and humanised creatures, which have inhabited and enriched our languages and cultural imagination. Despite, and because of, this, fables have been controversial and often highly criticised as a mode of representing nonhuman worlds. They have been seen as false representations of nature, or even as the embodiment of our anthropocentric attitude, which leads us to use nonhumans to tell human stories. Recently, however, there has been an increased appreciation of the fable as an important cultural form to re-evaluate our relations with nonhumans. Fables crucially offer a unique means of addressing current challenges to human-centred ways of thinking, while being knowledgeable about the risks of anthropomorphising nonhumans. Moreover, Aesop's fable, 'The Crow and the Pitcher,' has been used by scientists as a framework for their experiments. This use of a fable as a scientific paradigm is not without its critics, but it supports the idea that the fable is a biocultural form, shaped by our observations of, and interactions with, other species.
'Rethinking Fables in the Age of Global Environmental Crisis' aims to bring together scholars, animal experts, artists, theorists, and practitioners of the fable, to examine the importance of animal (and other nonhuman) fables. The team includes leading scholars of the fable, and collaboratively we will work towards developing new theories and practices of the genre. The project will adopt innovative and critical approaches to the subject to foster lively discussions and interdisciplinary collaborations, not only within the arts and humanities but also with social and natural sciences. It will engage with a wide range of texts (literary works, scientific discourses, archival materials) and cultural practices (art, theatre, media, anthropology, etc) as 'fables'. We will also collaborate to produce new fables, befitting to tell stories of our times, in collaboration with artists, creative writers and animal experts. At the same time, we will celebrate the richness of the fable tradition as world literature by drawing on fables of different cultural and linguistic traditions, including non-European and indigenous fables, alongside new and innovative fables. At the heart of this project is the appreciation of the fable as an art of multispecies storytelling, associated with political, moral, and educational values: the fable typically comes with a moral of the story, which teaches us to be better humans. We will draw on the power of the fable as a versatile tool and important resource, which can help us to think differently about pressing global issues and the environmental, political, and technological challenges we face. By engaging critically and creatively with the fable, we seek to evaluate the nature of our relationship with other species, including exploitation, domestication, and cooperation, and to learn to be a better fellow species.
This project will develop an interdisciplinary network through a series of workshops and a conference. Our discussions, key findings, and experimental 'fables' will provide the basis for a multimedia interactive online exhibition about the fable genre, which will be richly illustrated with images of fable manuscripts, visual arts, museum objects, animal photos, etc. Some of the pages will be dedicated to addressing the global environmental crisis and other contemporary challenges, explored through multispecies engagements with fables. This project will generate a series of fable-themed podcasts and a co-edited essay collection. The concluding conference will be accompanied by a public storytelling event in Canterbury.