Narrative Terrains: Navigating Fragmented Worlds is a two-day virtual symposium in April of 2026 asking architects, writers, sculptors, community organizers, painters, and more to explore how storytelling and space structure their work across multiple media. In a time of global transformation—marked by ecological crisis, social upheaval, and shifting cultural existences—narrative has emerged as a critical tool for reclaiming memory, imagining futures, and reconfiguring the built environment. Narrative is also a politically contested tool, often hewing close to power, restricting nuance, and being weaponized for exclusionary political movements and “official accounts.” Narrative Terrains asks its participants and audience to wade into this difficult field and imagine new—and reformulated—methods for narrative resistance.
The symposium, held for the first time this spring, centers on the themes of “Fragments and Futures.” The participants will tangle with the importance of and difficulty with narrative to their work from design and art to teaching and community organizing. We will deal with the remnants of multiple pasts in the current world and imagine methods for storytelling with and toward multivocality, open frameworks, and space itself, beyond the word.
The symposium asks:
How is narrative—whether spatial, visual, sonic, or speculative—being mobilized to surface hidden histories and challenge dominant paradigms?
How do perception, memory, and metaphor shape the way we experience and design space?
What does it mean to teach human existence through design?
How can storytelling become a method of resistance, care, and collective imagination?
Through presentations, workshops, and roundtable discussions, Narrative Terrains invites participants to share work that engages storytelling, life practices, and the politics of space—across drawing, writing, sound, performance, and pedagogy.
Each day features a workshop taught by working artists, a series of presentations by teachers and practitioners and a roundtable of the participants, and a keynote talk.
The first day of the gathering—Teaching Existence: Storytelling as a Pedagogical Tool—focuses on how educators use narrative to shape design pedagogy, surface marginalized histories, and cultivate critical spatial awareness in students. It also asks how we, as teachers and students, might engage critically with a world rife with slanted stories constructed by and toward power, state and otherwise.
The second day—Designing Existence: Narrative as Spatial Practice—explores how practitioners use perception, metaphor, and speculative methods to design spaces that reflect, challenge, or reimagine cultural identities.
