In this academic article, Sarah draws out the academic consequences for literary studies of the storylistening work, arguing that public criticism (criticism attending to the function of stories in order to convey their cognitive value to public reasoning) needs to be part of an ecosystem of plural methods crucial to the vitality of the discipline in the twenty-first century.
Category: Academic
Sarah gave a talk and contributed to a discussion on a panel on applied science fiction at the the Royal Anthropological Institute’s conference on Anthropology, AI and the Future of Human Society. She spoke about storylistening and why science fiction matters for public reasoning about artificial intelligence.
In this academic article, Sarah and co-researcher Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard present the findings of their interview study exploring the influence of leisure reading on the scientific practice of contemporary AI researchers (funded by the Royal Society). The research is mentioned in Storylistening in relation to stories and the collective identities of researchers; and one of the categories of influence explored in WAIRR is stories functioning as narrative models, connecting this work explicitly to one of the storylistening functions. For a non-academic summary of the article, see this LSE blog.
Sarah presented a paper at an academic conference on the uses of literature, drawing on material from Storylistening and from her forthcoming article, ‘Functional Criticism’, which builds on (but departs in significant ways from) existing work in postcritique. The paper established conflicting views of the value (or not) of literature and literary criticism in the history of the discipline, before presenting Storylistening‘s four functions of stories as integral to teaching literature informed by a functional critical perspective. The goals of such teaching include developing narrative literacy, encouraging interdisciplinarity, and teaching skills in deploying a variety of literary critical methods (including less common ones, such as sociological). The paper argued for the classroom encounter with texts to be one premised upon an open-mindedness essential for the generation of new knowledge. The presentation slides are available below.
In April, Sarah presented material on decolonising the future, climate change, and N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy from Chapter 4 of Storylistening at an academic conference: the annual meeting of the British Society for Literature and Science. Her talk was part of a panel on Literature, Science and Policy, with presentations also given by Professor Genevieve Liveley, on narratology and cyber security policy, and by Lt Col David Calder, on science fiction’s critical utility in a military context. You can listen to the presentation here:
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.