[Commlist] Call for chapters - Expanded Storytelling Across Media: Creative Practices and Critical Approaches (Routledge)

CALL FOR CHAPTERS

Expanded Storytelling Across Media: Creative Practices and Critical 
Approaches (Routledge)

Editors:

Dr James Calvert, Associate Professor Kath Dooley, Dr Kim Munro & Dr Ben 
Stubbs, (Members of the Expanded Storytelling Lab, Creative People, 
Products and Places Research Centre, The University of South Australia)

This edited collection, which is contracted with Routledge, sets out to 
highlight, explore and interrogate innovative contemporary storytelling 
approaches against a backdrop of evolving technologies and delivery 
platforms.

‘Expanded Storytelling’ can be defined as narratives told across media, 
platforms and virtual and physical spaces that experiment with and/or 
break away from traditional storytelling methods and structures, giving 
rise to new perspectives. This can include but is not limited to fiction 
and non-fiction stories told with extended reality (XR), immersive, 
locative, playable, generative and interactive technologies. It can also 
include live art and performance, site-based work, mobile media and 
installation. Expanded Storytelling is not limited to the mode of 
delivery and exhibition, although that is part of it. Rather, it 
challenges how stories are told through non-linear and multilinear 
structures, challenging the hero’s journey, or monomyth, while 
preferencing feminist, queer, decolonial, other-than-human and lesser 
heard perspectives. The collection includes critical accounts of 
practice (interviews with practitioners) and reflections on creative 
practice research to provide insight into these new approaches and 
perspectives.

Taking a multi-disciplinary approach, Expanded Storytelling Across 
Media: Creative Practice and Critical Approaches interrogates not only 
what stories are told but the “who”, “how” and “where” of the telling. 
This includes explorations of story structure, approaches to narration 
and interactive devices. The stories that receive analysis in the book’s 
chapters invite audiences into new modes of experience that “rethink our 
reliance on certain tropes, traditions, knowledge, disciplines and 
canons” (Hanney 2024, 114). This analysis of new storytelling approaches 
and practices, spanning across disciplines including screen production, 
journalism, and game design, is the book’s central theme.

This book considers the intersections between art practices, 
technologies, fiction and non-fiction storytelling, to foreground new 
methodologies for story creation, the expression of new voices, and the 
impacts for audiences, small and large. In doing so it highlights 
tensions between analogue and digital approaches, and traditional and 
emerging practices. Rather than focus on new technologies per se, the 
book seeks to interrogate the ramification of these technologies for the 
art of storytelling.

Grounded in qualitative analysis methods and creative practice research, 
the book chapters may involve the critical discussion of new projects, 
working methods and/or self-reflections on practice undertaken by 
scholars/practitioners. While methods of textual analysis can present 
insights into storytelling structures, practice-related researchers 
‘push this examination into a more direct and intimate sphere, observing 
and analysing themselves as they engage in the act of creation, rather 
than relying solely on dissection of the art after the fact’ (Skains 
2018, 84).

While foregrounding emerging storytelling practices, the collection also 
seeks to engage with critical theories such as feminist theory, 
posthuman, and/or queer theory with the aim of highlighting the ways in 
which expanded storytelling encourages new forms of knowledge production 
and/or communication, new expressions of lived experience, and a 
critique of prevalent cultural narratives. To date, digital and/or 
immersive media has emerged as a significant platform to explore diverse 
human expression, human conflict, climate change (Markowitz et al. 2018) 
and the Anthropocene (Scott-Stevenson 2020), and it is hoped that 
chapters can shed further light on these phenomena.

The collection is also interested in discourses of decolonisation, a 
process that breaks down the dominant ways of thinking that have 
historically shaped the arts and humanities. In the context of 
storytelling it calls for a reconceptualisation of story components such 
as ‘structure’, ‘character’, and ‘point of view’. Prevailing ideas 
related to these elements are  often rooted in Western notions of 
storytelling, such as ‘the Hero’s Journey’ (Campbell 1949/2004), which 
tend to overlook the perspectives and contributions of the historically 
marginalised—the colonised and the ‘Other’.

The book will also include a database of projects mentioned in the 
chapters, with links to access works online (where possible). As such it 
will function as an important resource for postgraduate students and 
their supervisors, as well as creative practitioners more broadly.

The editors invite contributions that discuss or explore storytelling, 
in a critical manner, in relation to the following topics:

Subjectivities- e.g.- Queer, feminist, decolonial, other-than-human

Working with communities- Co-creation, accessibility, open source

Community-based, participatory and/or co-created stories (large or small)

Generative AI- e.g.- Ethics of tested and unregulated technologies, 
co-creation

Telling complex or impossible stories- e.g.- addressing climate change 
through expanded storytelling

GLAM (Gallery, Libraries, Archives and Museums) sector collaboration 
and/or disruption



New journalistic approaches: after the VR boom (AR, XR and news games).

Contributions may take the form of:

2000 - 3000 word interview based texts (short articles featuring an 
interview with practitioners that is contextualised and receives 
critical analysis in regards to storytelling 
techniques/methodologies/approaches.)

6000- 8000 word research articles interrogating the author’s own 
practice (including references)

In both cases, contributions will foreground critical accounts of 
practice that are interrogated to consider the themes outlined above. 
While seeking to shed light on projects produced in a range of industry, 
community, creative and research contexts, and at varying budget levels, 
noting new methodologies for project development and delivery, the 
various chapters may also note impacts and benefits for audiences, 
communities and the creators themselves. The book is particularly 
interested in lesser heard voices, such as those from the global south.

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

In the first instance please send a 300-word ABSTRACT, which identifies 
your chosen format chapter format (short or long). This should include 
at least three references that indicate your theoretical and/or 
conceptual approach.

Please also send a 200-word AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY.

Submitters will be notified of selection by May 2025 and full draft 
chapters will be expected by November 2025. We expect publication of the 
book in late 2026 or early 2027.

Please email submissions to: (Kath.Dooley /at/ unisa.edu.au) 
<mailto:(Kath.Dooley /at/ unisa.edu.au)> and (Kim.Munro /at/ unisa.edu.au) 
<mailto:(Kim.Munro /at/ unisa.edu.au)>

Questions can be sent to the same email addresses.

Deadline for Abstract submissions: Monday 24 March 2025


Please note that there are no monetary charges associated with 
publication as part of this collection.



References

Campbell, J. (1949/2004). The hero with a thousand faces (Vol. 17). 
Princeton University Press

Hanney, R. (2024). One myth to rule them all and in the darkness bind 
them: a critical examination of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey. 
Media Practice and Education, 25(2), 113–122.

Markowitz, D. M., Laha, R., Perone, B. P., Pea, R. D., & Bailenson, J. 
N. (2018). Immersive virtual reality field trips facilitate learning 
about climate change. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 2364.

Scott-Stevenson, J. (2020). Finding shimmer: Immersive non-fiction media 
and entanglements in virtual nature. Digital Culture & Education, 12(2), 
1-18.

Skains, R. L. (2018). Creative practice as research: Discourse on 
methodology. Media practice and education, 19(1), 82-97.



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