From September 28 – 29, 2023, Chris and Christoph organized a hybrid two day workshop on Fables of Fulfillment: The Material Horse in Context of Interspecies Literacy. The workshop included a field excursion to an equine facility in Cologne (riding and training stable) where the participants turned their attention to actual horse-human encounters; exploring and discussing with equine practitioners of diverse backgrounds how interspecies communication works To that effect, the participants documented by using an experimental exercise of situational conversation analysis with audiovisual methods (filming, photographing, voice recording).

The event also included the screening of the short documentary The Bardia on September 28, @7PM. The film was introduced and discussed by Gwyneth Talley (film maker, producer, and visual anthropologist). The Bardia (2021) is a documentary film that follows Amal, a Moroccan woman from Kenitra. After giving birth to her second child, the leader of a Moroccan tbourida team–––a dramatic sport of horsemanship and riflery––navigates 3 years of limbo as she struggles to compete again. The producer Gwyneth Talley and main star Amal Ahamri talked about the filming, producing and continuing story of what it is like to be a woman in the horse world in Morocco.

Rather than viewing fables as fixed moral tales, the Fables of Fulfilment explored them as both an “art of multispecies storytelling” and a “versatile tool and important resource, which can help us to think differently about pressing global issues and the environmental, political, and technological challenges we face” (see Nagai 2023, Hartigan 2015).  The workshop’s main focus lied on the materiality of horse interactions and addressed situated forms of interspecies literacy that simultaneously enable/inform concrete encounters and account for embedded sociopolitical discourse and a multitude of inequalities. One possible point of reference are the connections of wellbeing of work equids in the context of community resilience in the face of environmental and humanitarian crises (Clancy, Watson, and Raw 2022).

Therefore, an impressive list of equine scholar, practitioners, and horse experts attended the workshop, including:

• Adil Ait Ougram (Ait Ben Haddou, Morocco)
• Miriam Bibby (University of Glasgow)
• John Borneman (Princeton University)
• Margaret Derry (University of Guelph)
• Yasser Ghanim (Cairo, Egypt)
• Kristen Guest (University of Northern British Columbia)
• Hylke Hettema (Leiden University
• Donna Landry (University of Kent)
• Helen Wadham (Manchester Metropolitan University) & Kate Dashper (Leeds Beckett University)
• Saria Almarzook (Humboldt University & Arden University)

For the detailed programme click here.