Sarah contributed to an episode of the first series of the University of Cambridge’s podcast – Mind Over Chatter – to explore how stories relate to climate change. She was in conversation with Richard Staley (Reader in the History and Philosophy of Science department and co-lead on the Making Climate History project) and Lord Martin Rees (cosmologist, astrophysicist, and Astronomer Royal).
The episode was produced by Nick Saffell, James Dolan, and Naomi Clements-Brod.
Sarah tried out some early ideas from the Storylistening book at the UNESCO Futures Literacy Forum in Paris in December 2019. She was interviewed at the event and talks here about her hopes for the storylistening session, what she understands futures literacy to be, and how stories are crucial to imagining the future and making decisions in the present.
Sarah joined Mark Honigsbaum historian of epidemics, UNESCO’s Head of Futures Riel Miller, philosopher Rupert Read, and fellow literary scholar and New Generation Thinker Dr Lisa Mullen for a discussion with Matthew Sweet about thinking about the future, uncertainty, and stories.
Claire and Sarah were pleased to trial some early work on stories as anticipatory models in the context of AI at an international symposium at Örebro University on Anticipation and Anticipatory Systems: Humans Meet AI.
As part of the Royal Society’s Reimagining Science project, in May 2019 we were involved in hosting a one day workshop on Narrative and Science with the Royal Society and the British Academy. Sarah wrote one of a number of stimulus papers commissioned by the academies. The paper on the function of stories is an example of early research for the book which led to the four function chapter structure of Storylistening. It’s superseded of course by the further research conducted over the following two years, but remains interesting perhaps as an insight into the development of our thinking.