The annual online symposium Around the Fire, organised on Friday 21 November 2025 by the Centre for Creative Ethnography, Queen’s University Belfast, invites academics and students who are engaged in creative writing experiments to read and listen to each other’s work. In the spirit of sharing stories around a campfire, the contributors will take turns to perform a diversity of pieces. Works can include, but are not limited to, poems, songs, short stories, plays, fragments of longer novels and scripts. Performances can also include visual elements (graphic novels, sketches, paintings, photography) and sound (music, soundscapes, film, audio fragments). The performance style is optional, as long as attention is paid to the mode and quality of delivery and the opportunities and limitations of the digital environment. We welcome experimentation and cross-pollinated genres.

The theme of this year’s meeting is "entanglement."

Human existence is inseparable from other entities. To be entangled doesn’t simply mean the intertwining of two distinct objects: "Entanglement suggests that the very ontology of entities emerges through relationality; the entities do not preexist their involvement” (Kirby 2011, 76). Viewing reality as emerging from entanglements offers new approaches to more-than-human ecologies, to how we produce and consume, to designing creative practices on new ontological and epistemological grounds, and to reimagining our political negotiations of common worlds.

While entanglements may promise multispecies recuperation, they also carry inherent risks tied to the inevitable consequences of human extractivism and the myth of exceptionalism. We encourage participants to experiment with ways of representing entanglements where "we are at stake to each other" (Haraway 2016, 55). The human role in precarious presents and futures emerges without the safety net of mastery over seemingly separate and controllable nonhuman realms: it is a process of becoming-with-in other planetary stories. The existence of Earth's dwellers depends on more-than-human entanglements.

Each contributor will have up to 15 minutes. Throughout the day, there will be several opportunities for participants to discuss specific themes in break-out rooms.

This year’s Around the Fire Symposium is organised by CFCE affiliates Lukáš Senft and Maruška Svašek.

If you wish to contribute to the Symposium, please send a 200-word abstract and a 100-word bio to CFCE@qub.ac.uk by 30 September 2025.