Spatializing Narrative is an annual micro-conference organized by David Tamés (Northeastern | LinkedIn) and Celia Pearce (Northeastern | LinkedIn).
Each year, the event explores a specific theme with space and narrative as the common thread that ties the events together. We created this conference to help artists, media makers, and experience designers better understand how real, hybrid, and virtual space works in narrative and how narratives work in real, hybrid, and virtual spaces. Space has often been considered a setting for stories, however, it can be so much more. Spatializing Narrative explores the expanded role of space in narrative experience in terms of symbolic meaning, emotional engagement, organization, and more to evolve our understanding of storytelling across the continuum of real, hybrid, and virtual space. The name of the conference was inspired by the book Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet by Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu that builds a bridge between narratology and geography to deepen our understanding of human spatial experience and narrative poetics.