In May, the Narrative Practices Lab took an exciting excursion to Paris to attend the 2025 Narrative Matters conference which was held at The American University of Paris and Université Paris Cité. Comprising an afternoon of workshops and three days of exciting, interdisciplinary research papers, the conference brought together a wide range of international scholars to reflect on the conference theme of ‘Disparate Narrative Worlds’. We certainly relished the chance for our own world of the Lab and the Discovery Research Platform to come into conversation with so many divergent and interesting topics, disciplines, and perspectives.
Particular highlights included a panel exploring ‘Who Tells About Illness and How?’, which featured diverse presentations about what modes, metaphors, forms, and explanatory frameworks are drawn on in narrating or describing illness. In particular, it raised questions about how we respond to the narrative or epistemological crisis that illness can cause – what we draw on to respond to a moment when everything we had known before falls away. We took away some exciting reading suggestions – particularly this chapter by Prof Hel Spandler on the role of cartoons in contesting or refusing psychiatric knowledge. We also really enjoyed the panel ‘Disparate Worlds and the Challenge of Dialogue: Insights from Narrative Hermeneutics’. Papers were wide ranging, but with a firm eye towards the political and ethical implications of narrative practice, particularly in the current political climate.
And we were delighted to be able to attend a panel by our esteemed colleagues in the Measurement Lab on ‘Neurodivergence x Narrative’ – a real advert for the methodologically ambitious and innovative work of the Platform. Dr Louise Creechan drew on George Eliot’s novella ‘The Lifted Veil’ to demonstrate how neurodivergence might operate at the level of narrative to critique the realist mode, while also reflecting on her own neurodivergent scholarly practice to ‘unmask’, so to speak, the norms of academic writing. Dr Anna Stenning talked about Laurence Sterne’s ‘Tristam Shandy’ and the novel’s use of storytelling, character, and communicative style to engage readers in rich, playful, neurodivergent language games. Finally, Dr Nicola Simonetti offered a radical reassessment of co-authorship in neurodivergent memoirs to understand them as spaces of neuromixed collaboration. The panel was extremely well attended, and prompted exciting discussion of disciplinary norms, canonical texts, and lived experience. A triumph!
In our own panel, entitled ‘Co-existing with Uncertainty: Narrative, Care and Community’, Dr Claire Jeantils and Dr Veronica Heney shared their work on epilepsy and anxiety respectively. Claire’s paper explored missed, excluding, and imposed communities, considering frustrating historic norms around narrating epilepsy in healthcare practice, in society, and in fiction. She then discussed how narratives might, instead, provide communal spaces of care through intertextuality and polyphony. Veronica’s paper drew on qualitative data to explore the complexities of representing anxiety through humour and comedy – discussing the ways that this often seemed to participants like a mode that misrepresented, dismissed, or minimised their experiences. Veronica suggested that it might be important to hold in tension all the ways that comedic texts might feel like a good fit for representing anxiety (like their fast pace and quotidian settings) with their difficulty conveying the weight and difficulty of living with anxiety everyday. The Q&A session was very lively, with lots of thought-provoking comments from the audience.
We were sad to bid farewell to Paris – not least to all the wonderful baked goods we indulged in throughout the week – but we left with lots to think about, lots to talk about, and even some stories to tell!
