Posted in News on Aug 08, 2025.
What does it mean to write about disaster in a world shared with trees, beetles, moss, and microbes?
On July 14 2025, a group of students, scholars, and writers stepped into the forest—and onto the page—to explore how fieldwork becomes fiction, and how storytelling can carry multispecies voices through fire, threat, and transformation.
The informative introduction into the forest area was made by forest ranger and forest educator Anna Katharina Coker. Then the day was led by Nsah Mala PhD, Mariagrazia Portera, Heidi Bayoumy & Burak Sezer, with a mixture of walking, witnessing, and writing. We asked: How do we write from within disaster, not just about it?
This workshop was part of the 2025 MESH Symposium on Disaster Preparedness in Multispecies Worlds. The workshop was organized by Léa Lacan, Christoph Lange & Burak Sezer and is part of the GSSC & MESH Fieldwork and Fiction Research Group. It was further supported by the EUniWell - European University for Well-Being Seed Funding Project „MESH Well“ and the UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES Coalition Hub for Planetary Wellbeing of the Universität zu Köln.
