We are hugely excited to let you know that our next Morgan Centre conference will take place at the University of Manchester, UK, 21-22 June 2027. We are delighted to share our call for abstracts with you.

The theme of the conference is ‘Living Stories’.

With this conference, we want to create space to discuss, and build scholarship around, the intimate entanglement between stories and life. Broadly conceived, we want to consider how stories are not only narratives we tell, but part and parcel of processes of living. Hence, this conference engages with stories as something people live and how stories themselves may be considered to be living as well.

We use stories and story-telling to make sense of our lives and relationships, but they also, in turn, create the conditions, the relationships and the milieu in which we navigate life and lived experiences. Over time, stories may create the conditions of the characters that we share our lives with, the moralities that we live by, our ways of seeing the world and our lives within it, that shape who we are, how we live and what we become. Simultaneously, we may be required to create narratives out of lives and experiences according to pre-set and not necessarily well-fitting social rules, ideas and expectations. Stories might be shared widely, be contested, be political. They may only exist as fragments, be unspoken, or operate only on a level of what can be sensed or implicitly understood. Thinking about stories in this way means we are also thinking about what counts as a story and how stories may or may not need telling to be felt and experienced. We are interested in the myriad and varied ways in which we live, not just tell, stories in their many varied forms.

We also seek to understand how stories may, in themselves, be understood to be ‘living’ things that may change over time. They may come to take on a life of their own; one way we can think about this is by tracing the lives of stories as they change and have shifting resonances over time. When we turn our attention to stories as living, we may bring into view their entanglements with people and relational lives, or the effects and powers they have, and the way in which change over time. We are interested in the relationships between how lives unfold and the lives of stories.

In all of this, we are interested in stories as they operate, shape and become entangled with conditions of living in all social relationships, from intimate to public lives. This includes the relationships between institutional or officially sanctioned stories and everyday living, and the way in which they interrelate and entangle.

We welcome abstracts along these and other lines of inquiries:

What might it mean to say that we ‘live’ stories?

How does the what, where, how and when of stories matter for how they become part and parcel of life? Material, digital and other contexts for living stories

What does it mean to tell stories in changing social, cultural, global contexts?

What forms do stories take and how can we understand storytelling beyond words, text and the verbal?

How might we trace stories that cannot be told? Fragments, secrecy and the not spoken

How might we live fragments or moments of stories and how might they circulate, and be managed or navigated?

How might we live stories over time?

How does stories impact living everyday lives and all manner of relationships?

How might we study the lives of stories and their temporal relations?

How might stories manifest through things, images, and the senses?

What does it mean to live a life that does not translate into a tellable story? The relationships between life, experience, stories and their political, cultural and structural influences

What are the methodological challenges of thinking with stories?

What is the affective power of stories?

What is a story? The (in-)coherences to stories and storytelling; messiness, spontaneity and moments.

Who tells stories and how does that matter? Authorship, power and relational dynamics

How does individual, shared and collective storytelling work?

We welcome presentations in creative formats (from talks, to conversations, to performances).

Abstract submission date deadline: 18 December 2026

Please submit your abstract using this form: Living Stories Conference 21-22 June 2027 Abstract Submission – Fill in form: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=B8tSwU5hu0qBivA1z6kad5qqQKOwbitDuw6-IarpkSFUNVZDWkNLSFVYTzVJRTFEU0xQTzNFTUVaSC4u

Please spread the word, and we look forward to seeing you in Manchester in June 2027!

The Morgan Centre Conference Organising Committee