StoryPlaces: In Conversation: Nature versus Culture: Where does natural history take us? Event
- Time:
- 15:00 - 17:00
- Date:
- 12 October 2016
- Venue:
- Bournemouth Natural Science Society, 39 Christchurch Road, Bournemouth, Dorset BH1 3NS
For more information regarding this event, please email Dr Verity Hunt at V.Hunt@soton.ac.uk .
Event details
'In Conversation' with author, broadcaster and curator Philip Hoare; writer, birdwatcher and BBC radio producer Tim Dee; Mary Thornton and John Cresswell from the BNSS.'Nature versus Culture: Where does natural history take us?' We seem more disconnected from nature than ever before, yet popular interest in the natural world has never been greater. From the ‘new nature’ books by authors such as Helen Macdonald and Robert Macfarlane, to the perennial news media interest in natural science stories, to the latest cute YouTube clip, we are seem obsessed with a world we may be losing. Our panel discuss this fascinating meeting of human and natural history, as embodied by the wondrous and historic collection of curiosities in the Victorian home of Bournemouth Natural Sciences Society. The talk will be followed by authors of the StoryPlaces location-aware stories talking about the challenges and opportunities of writing 'for and within the place', bringing the museum, its curiosities and collections to life outside.
‘In a quiet Bournemouth backstreet lays a hidden gem: a treasure cabinet of natural curiosities...’
The Bournemouth Natural Science Society occupies a substantial, towered Italian gothic Victorian house, built in Bournemouth in 1879. The premises are part-museum, part-laboratory, part-urban temple to learning. Its rooms are lined with wooden cases and chests whose many drawers contain butterflies, eggs, mineral specimens, fossils and archaeological remains in the tradition of nineteenth-century collectors such as General Pitt Rivers. The house and its contents, its histories and its characters, offer a remarkable new resource for literary interpretation.
StoryPlaces has EXPLODED the many stories that make up the BNSS, tales about its collections, its history and people and the natural world, out across Bournemouth. We have created a collection of location-aware short stories inspired by the BNSS to be read on-the-go on your smartphone around Bournemouth Seafront, the town and Winter Gardens.
We will be launching the stories at a series of events themed around place and the natural world in the Bournemouth Arts by the Sea Festival, Saturday 8th – Saturday 15th October 2016.
StoryPlaces is a Leverhulme-funded interdisciplinary research project at the University of Southampton (English and Electronics & Computer Science) that explores the poetics of locative literature.
Come and meet the project team at our stall in the Lower Winter Gardens!
EVENTS ARE FREE & OPEN TO ALL
Further details of events can be found at;
The Bournemouth Natural Science Society & Museum