MESH Master Class
Juli 14, 2025 | 09:00 – 17:00
Application required, deadline June 15, 2025
Meeting and Starting point: MESH, EAI Library, 3rd floor, (Weyertal 59 (back building), 50937 Cologne)
Field Observations: Königsforst, Cologne
Afternoon Session: GSSC, Rom 3.03, 3rd floor (Classen-Kappelmann-Str. 24, 50931 Cologne)
How do we, scholars and creative writers, write about disasters in multispecies worlds? How do we move between fieldwork and fiction? In connection with the 2025 MESH symposium on Disaster Preparedness in Multispecies Worlds, we organize a writing workshop associating field observations and creative writing, as a masterclass with Thom van Dooren, Mariagrazia Portera, Heidi Bayoumy, and Burak Sezer. The workshop aims to explore the links between fieldwork and fiction: How do we position ourselves as writers? How do we transform what we know and experience from a threatened multispecies world into writing? Which voices and perspectives do we immerse in and render visible by writing, and how? We propose to investigate these questions guided by our four mentors, through four approaches of the literary studies and humanities: field philosophy (Thom van Dooren), environmental aesthetics (Mariagrazia Pontera), youth literature (Heidi Bayoumy), and narratology (Burak Sezer).
The workshop will take place for one day on July, 14, 2025 and will be divided in two parts. In the morning, the “field” part of the workshop will take us to “Königsforst,” a forest reserve in Cologne which has come to wider attention in the wake of a series of unprecedented and unusual forest fires. We propose to contact local park rangers and biologists to better evaluate the impact of the forest fires and learn about mitigation schemes, but also to understand the impact of the pine-bark beetle as another serious threat to arboreal flourishing. After a little guided tour through the Königsforst, our four mentors will continue to guide four groups of students and scholars on field observations in the forest as a basis for creative writing. The afternoon will be a practical writing session guided by the mentors for participants to process the learned material, relay their emotions and affects, hopes and anxieties, and write the multispecies stories collected during the morning.
The workshop will be open to MA and PhD students including postdoctoral researchers and accommodate a limited number of twenty participants.
To participate in the Masterclass, please send us a short letter of motivation (no more than 250 words) by 15 June 2025, stating your professional and personal interest in the topic and your current research project and/or study programme.
Contact: Jenny Wasem
The workshop and masterclass is organized Léa Lacan, Christoph Lange and Burak Sezer and is part of the GSSC & MESH Fieldwork and Fiction Research Group.