Story Collider at the Joint Congress 2024: Call for Pitches

SSE, ASN, ESEB, and SSB are team­ing up with The Story Col­lider for a sci­ence storytelling show on July 28th as part of the in-per­son por­tion of the 2024 Joint Con­gress on Evol­u­tion­ary Bio­logy (Evol­u­tion 2024)! The theme for this event is “Through­out the Dis­tri­bu­tion,” and will fea­ture 5 stor­ies from 5 dif­fer­ent view­points that rep­res­ent the diversity of exper­i­ences in evol­u­tion­ary biology.

Require­ments:

The only require­ment is that the story must be about you. We’re seek­ing true stor­ies about your per­son­al exper­i­ences with sci­ence to be included in the show. These must be stories—not lectures—with a begin­ning, middle, and end in which you under­go a change.

All you need at this point is the seed of an idea for your story. It can be about almost anything:

• Per­sever­ance and obstacles over­come (wheth­er pro­fes­sion­al or scientific)
• Expect­a­tions upended
• Find­ing com­munity, belong­ing, or accept­ance in biology
• Adven­ture and danger
• Com­ing to a very changed per­spect­ive from where you started
• Being in over your head or a rough day in the field
• Con­quer­ing fears
• Find­ing work/life balance
• Being inspired
• Stand­ing up for yourself
• An import­ant experiment
• Mis­ad­ven­ture, love, or loss
• How you first fell in love with science
• How your work has affected your per­son­al life 

The Story Col­lider pro­du­cers will help you devel­op this idea into an eight-to ten-minute-long story. For fur­ther inspir­a­tion, you can listen to examples of our last Story Col­lider Event in 2019 on Sound­Cloud. 

How to apply:

If you’re inter­ested, please email the Story Col­lider pro­du­cers at stories@storycollider.org by May 17th, 2024 and include a short (1–2 para­graphs) sum­mary of your story and “Evol­u­tion 2024″ in the sub­ject line. 

Dead­line: May 17th, 2024

Primar­ily, the pro­du­cers will look for a strong story arc – a change that takes place in the storyteller from begin­ning to the end. If selec­ted, storytellers will work with our pro­du­cers to devel­op their stor­ies in the weeks lead­ing up to the show.

The storytellers will per­form their stor­ies at the Story Col­lider event at 7:00 pm on July 28th at the in-per­son por­tion of the Joint Con­gress in Evol­u­tion­ary Bio­logy 2024 in Montreal.

This event is organ­ized by the SSE Diversity Com­mit­tee, the ESEB Equal Oppor­tun­it­ies Com­mit­tee, the ASN Diversity Com­mit­tee, and the SSB DEI Com­mit­tee. Email the SSE Diversity Com­mit­tee (diversity [at] evolutionsociety.org) or Misha Gajew­ski, Story Col­lider Man­aging Pro­du­cer (mis­haga­jew­ski [at] storycollider.org) with any ques­tions. We look for­ward to hear­ing your stor­ies at the Joint Con­gress in Evol­u­tion­ary Bio­logy 2024!