Abstract
Work on narrative, story, and storytelling has been on the rise across the humanities and social sciences. Building on significant work on these themes from Indigenous, Black, and Feminist scholarship, and other varied traditions, this piece explores and elaborates the potential regarding the elicitation, sharing, and analysis of stories for nature-society studies. Specifically, the piece examines core contributions along these lines to date, as well as the methodological, analytical, political, and transformative potential of story and storytelling to enrich, broaden, and deepen work in nature-society, political ecology, and environmental justice. All told, focus on story and storytelling, offers a number of relevant and rich openings to understand and engage complex, unequal, and dynamic socio-natures. While these elements have been present in nature-society work from some traditions and lines of inquiry, the time is ripe to broaden and deepen these engagements to more fully imagine, and respond to, key nature-society challenges.
There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.—Maya Angelou
Stories of the land awaken and rekindle these experiences of wholeness inside each and every one of us. Stories help us imagine the future differently. Stories create community, enable us to see through the eyes of other people, and open us to the claims of others. We tell stories to cross the borders that separate us from one another. (Forbes, 2006: 53)
Listen. Listen to my story. Listen to our story. This is reality this is what happened to me, this is what happened to my siblings, ….parents (and) grandparents. (Corntassel, 2009: 154)
Introduction: Living in the world through story
Our lives are made up of stories. Stories are the foundation to the moments and senses that we experience, the relationships that we build, and the ways we relate to landscapes, places, and communities. Myths, lore, and legend serve as the binding glue for cultures, place-making, teaching, and learning. The stories we tell about ourselves help to define and consolidate our sense of self and how we move through the world. They help us connect to the past, and to each other, including enacting connections to place and more-than-human worlds. Stories are mechanisms to help us deal with uncertainty—narratives told through drawing, song, or ritual have long been used to reduce fear, allay doubt, and pose and answer questions about the unknown (Brockman, 2013). What is more, our experiences can be lived again, shared, and even refashioned through story. We have the ability to describe what something felt like, and also to recast those experiences to make them more palatable or empowering as we reenact and share those moments through narrative.
Responding to calls for closer engagement with narrative inquiry, storytelling, and other humanities approaches (Cameron, 2012; Collard et al., 2018; Houston and Vasudevan, 2018; Wright et al., 2012), this piece explores the methodological, analytical, political, and transformative potential of story and storytelling to enrich and deepen work in nature-society, political ecology, and environmental justice. 1 Moving from the broad complement of work associated with discourse and narrative that has long been a focus in such scholarship, and learning from Black, Indigenous, feminist, and allied traditions that understand storytelling as key to knowledge sharing and cultural practices, my aim is to explore and elaborate the potential regarding the elicitation, sharing, and analysis of stories. I argue that while the methodological and analytical potential of such work is in evidence, it is not always explicit, and as such can benefit from elaboration. Added to this, the political and transformative potential of story represent elements that are relatively less well explored, opening opportunities for enriched engagement.
Exploring these themes in relation to the intellectual lineage of critical nature-society studies, and from across broader fields of inquiry in the social sciences and humanities, this contribution aims to deepen and strengthen approaches to explore how and why people narrate and story their worlds, how they emplot themselves through story to share understandings and experiences, and what the implications of such might be for re-imagining socio-ecological relationships, making worlds more liveable, and charting futures and enacting socio-ecological worlds “otherwise.” For those elements that are more well-established, the paper synthesizes storied political ecological, EJ, and nature-society work, and highlights key examples from Black, Indigenous, decolonial, and feminist traditions that clarify this potential, while the latter sections provide considerations to further enliven and rechart these fields of inquiry.
To proceed, I first provide more background on how focus on narrative and story has been taken up, in some cases, and obscured in others across the humanities and social sciences. I then consider examples of foundational Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPoC), decolonial and feminist contributions, and allied nature-society work. While the discussion regarding potential to enrich and deepen these themes for nature-society scholarship is organized according to four themes (methodological, analytical, political, and transformative), there is clear overlap between them. They should thus be read as a guiding framework rather than as an attempt to cleave strong separations across these categories. In highlighting these openings for enhanced engagement, I concur with Cameron (2012) that there is a need for a “more crisp vocabulary and toolkit of how stories can and do challenge and recreate the world.” That being said, I also highlight the need for caution, particularly with respect to the need to learn from and extend existing engagements, as well as necessary and long abiding concerns related to power dynamics and linked issues of expertise, representation, and voice.
As someone who works across the fields of geography, environmental studies, and feminist studies, and who teaches qualitative methods to graduate students in an interdisciplinary environmental studies department, it makes good sense that I have sought to learn from, and crystallize, insights regarding the potential of story for nature-society, political ecology, and environmental justice work. That said, the idea that nature-society studies require more attention to, and theorization of, story would likely read as strange and even ill-founded for BIPoC, feminist, decolonial scholars, activists, or community members who already understand and utilize story as foundational to their cultural, scholarly, community, and knowledge-building practices. As such, it is important to clarify that while I have sought to learn from, and highlight some key insights and examples from these traditions, my target audience for this piece includes scholars and others looking to expand their familiarity with storytelling and linked arts-based methods. The “I” in this piece refers to the author (a feminist political ecologist and geographer of settler origin trained and living in North America), while “We” refers to the broad community of scholars working at the nature-society interface who may not have as yet deeply engaged story in their scholarly and political practice. As Nagar (2013) cautions, there is a need for delicate negotiations between the “I” and the “We” in our work, especially when we understand diverse investments, reciprocities, and commitments or values, even as they undergo continuous revision. My hope is to honor, learn from, and amplify diverse traditions and possibilities to further enliven storytelling practice and scholarship—particularly for those less engaged with these domains of knowledge and practice. I do so acknowledging that many existing and diverse traditions of storied scholarship and activism are ample and rich, and must provide the foundations for any further work moving forward.
Narrative inquiry and increasing interest in story in the humanities and social sciences
Attention to narrative and story has been on the rise across the humanities and social sciences. As observed by Polletta et al. (2011), talk of stories is everywhere—in the 20-year period (1970–1990), there were 587 journal articles on narrative and storytelling. Over the subsequent 20 years (1990–2010), that number grew by 10-fold (∼6000) with engagements in fields as diverse as cognitive science, urban planning, and anthropology (this growth continues apace—a recent search turned up ∼18,000 articles between 2010 and 2018). 2 Undoubtedly, this rise can be thought of in part as a “narrative turn” or “cultural turn” building from poststructuralist work, but might also flow from a diversification of epistemologies and approaches more generally, including the rise of community-based work, feminist work, or diversification of the academy (e.g. the inclusion of more Black and Indigenous scholars).
The range of work that considers narrative extends from attention to different worldings brought into being through story (Blaser, 2009), to linguistic interest in how narratives cement linked social-political hierarchies (e.g. citational practices related to the gender binary, Butler, 1990). A large body of work also considers the power of language and discourse in other ways as well, for instance, Veland et al. (2018) highlight the centrality of narratives as part of the socio-psychological infrastructure that provides “coordinates for movement through and manipulation of the world around us…”; indeed, they suggest that “each narrative constrains and enables what is thinkable and sayable about the past, present, and future” (Veland et al., 2018: 42). While a focus on narrative could extend to the range of ways that discursive practices and language condition our senses, experiences, and social worlds, for purposes of this discussion, I am most interested more narrowly in story and storytelling—how we construct story lines, how these stories help us to emplot ourselves, and our experiences, and also to navigate relationships and changes in complex and dynamic socio-natural worlds. As defined by Pezzullo (2001), narrative, or story, “refers to symbolic actions—words and/or deeds—that have sequence and meaning for those who live, create or interpret them (2).” While story might be understood as a subset of narrative inquiry (as discussed below), a focus on story and storytelling might more strongly accent creative, fictional, and artistic elements, while maintaining attention to deriving insights from language and action more generally.
While academic discussions beyond literary studies have been turning attention to narrative and story in the last several decades, it is clear that storytelling has long been important for many cultural and knowledge practices, from African and African American storytelling (Borona, 2017; Crawford, 2019; Kohl and McCutcheon, 2015), to Yemeni poetry (Miller, 2007), as well as for Indigenous lifeways, ontologies, and knowledge practices across the globe. Indeed, it has long been recognized that storytelling, poetry, song, and oral teaching are foundational for many cultures, and are often key for learning, sharing, and the transmission of values or legal frameworks (Daigle, 2016). The storyteller is often considered as a sacred knowledge keeper, as it is understood that elders and medicine people “shape communities through the spoken and written word” (Sium and Ritskes, 2013: 5), and that storytelling binds people together through shared spiritual and social practices and sharing of traditions and practices (Simpson, 2011). These and other Indigenous authors have also highlighted the centrality of story to establish and transmit foundational principles and legal doctrines, with stories encoding key laws and relationships—between communities, as well as between people and other species and non-living beings (Borrows, 2002; Napoleon and Friedland, 2016; Todd 2017a; Wright et al., 2012).
While I explore some of these ideas and insights in the pages that follow, it is essential to acknowledge these many deep and varied traditions and practices centered on story. For those particularly interested in the relevance of story for Indigenous knowledge, I refer those readers elsewhere, particularly to rich literatures offered by Indigenous thinkers and scholars, the depth of which is beyond the scope of this piece (see citations above, and in sections below). African and African American traditions also centrally highlight story. I have similarly tried to provide brief entry points along these lines, especially where they clearly connect directly with political ecology and environmental justice. However, again, it is not possible to do justice to the breadth and depth of this work in a few short pages. It is also important to recognize the importance and centrality of narrative inquiry for the work of historians and anthropologists, literary and cultural studies (this has long been a strength in English, ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities), as well as in other threads of feminist, decolonial, and postcolonial scholarship. Many interventions stemming from these traditions have sought to decenter notions of expertise, or to blend storylines to explore critical collaborative engagements for research (e.g. see discussion of the work of Richa Nagar and the Sangtin Collective, below, or work of Wright et al., 2012, for instance). Learning from these diverse traditions, and also drawing from psychology and other interdisciplinary domains, is the goal for what follows, specifically to illustrate key openings and avenues for enriched exploration for environmental justice, political ecology, or nature-society studies.
Before moving on, it is also critical to acknowledge another backdrop that similarly undergirds much of the discussion that follows relates to broad and longstanding debates regarding ontology, epistemology, and ideas of “truth” that have long been interrogated in science studies, philosophy, and allied fields. As detailed by Blaser (2009), while much work in political economy and political ecology focuses on situated perspectives of natures (consistent with an idea that there is one nature and many culturally situated perspectives of it), work in political ontology emphasizes instead that there are multiple natures (highlighting ontological concerns with the multiplicity of worlds, and how they come to be). Attention to narrative necessitates and foregrounds considerations related to varied knowledges of socio-natures (epistemic considerations), as well as broader ontological concerns, including what different socio-natures are, and how they come to be (Blaser, 2009). As Houston and Vasudevan (2018) suggest (drawing on Blaser), narrative is useful precisely to blur some of the boundaries between the real and imagined, disrupting core tenets of Western scientific understanding. Working toward enhanced attention to narrative necessarily requires drawing from diverse analytical threads—from Indigenous or Black feminist thought, to continental philosophy, postcolonial studies, Science and Technology Studies (STS), or other fields that consider varied modes of “truth” telling, who is authorized to speak, whose stories are heard, as well as the ways that communities construct meaning of the world and our role in it.
Attention to story in nature-society work: Foundations and key examples to date
There are several key contributions and that have clearly set the stage to consider the importance of storied environmental justice, political ecology and nature-society studies. This section works through a range of existing examples to explore this potential, before outlining key propositions related to how to this might be further enriched and deepened.
A subset of relevant nature-society work draws centrally from post-structural political ecology and critical discourse analysis, highlighting the consequences and importance of power-laden discourses or frames, such as those associated with deforestation, degradation, or crisis (Escobar, 1996; Watts, 2000). Among key examples clearly situated in the realm of nature-society scholarship, Hajer (1995) and Dryzek (1997) are among those heavily cited contributions that highlight the importance of discourses (e.g. notions of crisis) to condition understandings of, and responses to, environmental issues. As Dryzek details, the very category of the environment itself has shifting meaning—consider for instance the ways that swamps eventually became known as wetlands, while certain beloved plant species under colonialism later came to be understood as “invasives.” His work forcefully suggests that such shifting language and meanings are important for tracing evolving “politics of the earth.” Braun’s (2002) pivotal work on colonial legacies and representations and politics of forested landscapes on Canada’s west coast created a number of openings for a rich body of work on “social natures” and the value of postcolonial theory to evaluate diverse constructions of nature and their associated contestations. The work of Escobar (1996) on development discourses has similarly been influential—as he documents, ideas of underdevelopment marked nearly two-thirds of the world as in need of developmental intervention, leading to a suite of programs that have altered nature-society dynamics across the globe (see also Roe, 1991).
A suite of other examples similarly call attention to the importance of discourses that position certain locales or populations as “backwards” or “uncivilized”, regions as empty or “uninhabited”, or ecosystems as “deforested” or “degraded”, often making those sites subject to colonial or developmental intervention, or as available for resource exploitation (Daigle, 2018; Davis, 2004; Fairhead and Leach, 1995; Willems-Braun, 1997). Yet other contributions affirm the strength of critical work on discourse in nature-society fields: from analyses focused on neoliberalization discourses in environmental governance (Heynen et al., 2007); to the persistence of Malthusian notions of overpopulation or Hardin’s notion of the “tragedy of the commons” (e.g. Ojeda et al., 2019; Robbins, 2012); to Edenic narratives or notions of the “noble savage” (Slater, 1995); or persistent notions of individual responsibility for environmental care (e.g. Hawkins, 2012; Maniates, 2001). Recent feminist and Indigenous contributors have similarly taken critical perspectives on the narratives of the “Anthropocene”, challenging the implied universalisms and offering possibilities for alternative storylines that more adequately account for coloniality and injustice (Davis and Todd, 2017; Di Chiro, 2018). As summed up by Dryzek (1997), all such examples make clear that “language matters in the way we construct, interpret, discuss, and analyze environmental problems—it has consequences.”
This work on critical discourses of environment, a hallmark of political ecological work of the past several decades, is connected with, but not always explicitly theorized as, narrative or story. Indeed, making clear distinctions between these categories is difficult, if not impossible. That said, different intellectual legacies and methodological and conceptual foci lead to subtle differences in terms of the concerns, scales, or modes of engagement and analysis associated with each. For instance, discourse is more often attuned to broad societal discourses or power-laden knowledges associated with the “archive” (often following from the work of Foucault and critical discourse studies), or hegemonic knowledges (building on Gramsci, 1971).
Narrative approaches are more likely to engage with the specific storyline, plot, or character development in terms of who is the villain, hero, or victim (see example of Fairhead and Leach 1995 on vegetation ideals, racist tropes, and coloniality in the context of Africa). Attention to story might also be more often focused on creative and engagement processes with communities, working to co-construct meaning, and make sense of experiences (the collaborative film-making and community-centered EJ research of Vasudevan is a clear example). Given this, nature-society scholars might seek to work at once to trace and understand broad discourses of “deforestation”, “decline”, or “resilience” in policy or science realms, alongside narrative inquiry that highlights the daily experiences and lived realities of mismanagement, corruption, or deforestation (cf. Doshi and Ranganathan, 2019), including attention to how certain communities are emploted in relation to those storylines, who has the power to author or affect change, or how communities members may choose to recraft key socio-ecological narratives, or share histories of trauma and toxicity with others (cf. Vasudevan, 2012).
While we might focus on these subtle but important differences, there are also many examples that blur easy distinctions between narrative inquiry and discourse analysis, as there are works that use the terms interchangeably. The work by Fairhead and Leach (1995) for instance, suggests that narratives of overpopulation and racist imaginaries of local African populations together fuel broad discourses of vegetative decline and the need for colonial intervention. As well, STS has long been concerned with science as one of many possible storylines, or what it means for people engage with, and find meaning, in different interpretations of their world (e.g. Cruikshank, 2004; Law, 2004; Wickson, 2008). Such examples at once attend to broad-scale power-knowledge dynamics as well as local and specific instantiation and meaning of “scientific” storylines. Linked to these currents, but also somewhat distinct, the subset of narrative inquiry focused on story (detailed further below), might focus attention on how and why certain stories are told, or the emotions that one feels by engaging with a story, the intersubjective experience of storytelling, or what effects certain stories might have on our senses of self, or our community (e.g. the ways that certain stories might be more or less likely to motivate action). In all of these senses, discourse, narrative, and story are clearly linked, even as they likely have slightly different lineage and emphasis.
More tightly focused on the centrality of narrative and story for political ecology and environmental justice, a range of other studies are noteworthy. Among them, we might locate Cronon’s classic exploration of the wilderness ethic in North America (1995), or the power and influence of stories of the earth in relation to notions of environmental crisis or fragility (Jasanoff and Martello, 2004). Cronon also draws on his sensibilities as a historian to highlight the need to engage more fully with the stories that are told, and not told, about natures (1992). Blaser (2013) and others consider the implications of centering particular knowledges and storylines—at once silencing others. He offers that different stories imply different worldings. The corollary is that, indeed, some stories/worldings/ontologies can be wrong, not in the sense of a lack of coincidence with an external or ultimate reality, but in the sense that they “…enact worlds in which or with which we do not want to live” (Blaser, 2013: 552). To highlight several other contributions, Roe (1991), Harris (2009), and Lejano et al. (2013) 3 offer approaches that consider the diverse storylines that are available to be told, how they circulate in ways that are revealing for power dynamics, or to consolidate environmental networks (or discourse coalitions in the case of Hajer, 1995).
Among key environmental justice offerings, Pezzullo (2001) offers an illustration from one of the “birthplaces” of the environmental justice movement, Warren County, North Carolina. Pezzullo draws attention to the inventional resources in community responses to environmental justice concerns, focusing on the ways that narratives might work to sustain or interrupt oppressive environmental conditions. Also focused on the material and storied legacies of toxic waste in Warren county, the suite of work by Vasudevan highlights the rich resources offered by storytelling for environmental justice, from helping to explore how communities make sense of a shared toxic past, or work to chart and communicate hopes for a shared future (Houston and Vasudevan, 2018). Particularly as environmental injustice is often experienced as a practice and politics of misrecognition, and failures to recognize deep connections to land or cultural differences, storytelling can be a key facet to unearth and explore these connections. Attention to story can thus provide key openings regarding “how representations are enacted and contested through social, political and spatial relations of power” (Houston and Vasudevan, 2018: 244).
By recentering storylines on cultural connections to ecologies, or on degradation of ecologies that have been wrought by extraction or environmental change, communities are able to work to narratively make sense of these events, to challenge dominant frames, or to develop collective capabilities and resources to respond to these conditions. As Houston and Vasudevan (2018) highlight, stories necessarily exceed the particular and the personal, as they are also key to developing collective meanings and shared identities and experiences. Similar themes are explored in Houston’s earlier work (2013) on nuclear waste disposal at Yucca mountain, Nevada whereby “storytelling takes on a productive role in transforming localized and individual emotions and experiences of environmental injustice into public knowledge…” (page 417)—“… knowledge in and of a damaged world that in turn can produce different environmental realities (page 421).” In this example, Western Shoshone stories articulated notions of land justice that included cosmological, customary, and kinship relationships with the land, in contrast to legal and political treatment of land as resources or property.
Several other key examples focused on Black geographies help to further attention to these critical themes. For instance, work by Darius Scott (2019) on oral history and farming landscapes shows the power of personal narratives to disrupt dominant framings, forging Black collectivities, and exposing the complex formation of geographic knowledges of place. As well, work on PCB contamination in Alabama engages with sense of place to illumine complex layers of meaning, drawing on the arts, story, and memory. Doing so serves to address the politics of recognition by countering erasures of Black residents’ connection to the landscape—at once challenging techno-centric environmental remediation efforts, exploring possibilities to commemorate past relationships to the land, and imagining other possible (non-toxic) futures (Barron, 2017). In more general senses, Julian Agyeman’s extensive work on “Just Sustainabilities” (e.g. 2008) has worked to shift the narrative on environmental sustainability and mainstream environmentalisms to bring greater focus to equity concerns.
Before moving on, several other contributions are worth noting, even if not focused on nature-society debates. Cameron’s exposition on the importance of story for human geography is a key resource. She highlights three emergent engagements to enhance the disciplinary conversation and repertoire (several of which connect with themes explored further below): first, a focus on “small stories” to highlight everyday experiences, the texture of our lives in “all their particularlity and mundanity”; second, the notion that stories can be central to transform social and political worlds through political and ethical practices and performative dimensions of storytelling, and third, story can be useful to consider affective and non-representational geographies of increasing interest even as she notes that “the use of narrative to express these geographies has not been explicitly addressed or evaluated” (Cameron, 2012: 575). The work of Richa Nagar and the Sangtin Collective also offers foundational insights, particularly to think through the political, analytical, and creative potential of storytelling and co-authorship. Their work highlights the considerable opportunity to blur the boundaries between politics, activism, and knowledge production, and to do so in a way that is sensitive to power geometries and the politics of voice and representation (e.g. Nagar, 2013, 2014, 2019).
From these conceptual foundations and starting points, the next section seeks to delve further to highlight other aspects related to the potential relevance and richness of story and storytelling for understanding and engaging complex, unequal, and dynamic socio-natures. While this section has highlighted key contributions that directly engage nature-society questions to showcase the state of knowledge on these themes to date, exploration of the propositions below draws on scholarship, insights, and examples from diverse fields and debates to elaborate this potential—from feminist, decolonial, Indigenous studies, to psychology. In so doing, it is possible to think through different topics for exploration, allowing consideration of key questions, such as: How might story and storytelling enable subtle yet important shifts in terms of scale, methods, politics, and analytics to enrich our work, and bring additional concerns and insights to our attention, particularly to open up new imaginative and political opportunities to imagine socio-ecological relations “otherwise” (Collard et al., 2018)?
Toward enriched attention to story in critical nature-society scholarship
Methodological potential: Marginalized voices, challenging expertise, and representation
Perhaps the most well established and recognized potential of story and storytelling relates to method—it has been well established that story and narrative can enable engagement of marginalized and underrepresented communities, can challenge notions of expertise and knowledge hierarchies, and can be helpful to critically examine and challenge representational practices in research and writing (cf. Wright et al., 2012, cites by Nagar, as above). As such, story helps to underscore concerns that have frequently been highlighted by feminists, Indigenous knowledge keepers, and others related to the ethics and practice of research.
At a fundamental level, much of the data associated with qualitative research, from interviews, focus groups or otherwise, are essentially narratives. When we ask a question as part of an interview, our respondent responds by constructing a narrative—facts, characters, and elements are tied together as a story, relying on familiar and available tropes and narrative structures. There are also particular tellings that emerge as a function of the particularities of the interview—the time and place, as well as the interaction between the researcher and the respondent. Writing up of results also relies on conventions and norms of story as well as broader constraints of power-laden discourse, or common frames of explanation (e.g. a story of deforestation that relies on and reaffirms shared understandings). Despite the centrality of story to much scholarly work, many researchers often do not directly theorize and engage in discussions of key concepts related to story, or narrative inquiry, per se. A heightened recognition regarding the centrality of story to much of our collective work might allow us to pose different questions for analysis: What are ways that different people chose, or were able, to narrate the importance of this event/issue for their lives? How did the story emerge in relation to other complex elements of human experience, as linked to memory, emotion (e.g. frustration, desire), or other sensory experiences (smell, touch, or visual aesthetics)? As Cruikshank et al. (1990) highlight, there is a need to more adequately attend to the what, how, and why people narrate their lives, rather than taking this as “data” to illustrate other processes of concern.
Story and storytelling have also been shown to be particularly important to engage underrepresented and marginalized communities, and to promote broader goals of knowledge democracy—offering potential to shift the power dynamics of knowledge creation. As summarized by Ingram et al. (2014), narrative inquiry can draw out hitherto unheard voices, with a democratizing effect on policy discourse. Ottinger (2017: 43) similarly sums up this potential: Storytelling is not only a powerful way for community members’ voices to be heard but also a mechanism for weaving together individuals’ heterogeneous experiences into collective knowledge about a place, its history, and the threats posed to it by pollution or industrial development … EJ storytelling gives community groups a way to refuse dominant narratives about them, and advance their own, alternative understandings of their communities … and what their future should look like.
Related to notions of expertise, it has been highlighted that traditional question–answer interviews may fall flat if community members have been made to feel that they are not “experts” in the topic under discussion, or if the topic of focus is one that is particularly difficult to address. Children also may not respond well to formal questioning, but might be more able to engage with creative arts-based approaches, including storytelling (Etchison and Kleist, 2000). The work of Erin Baines and Beth Stewart (2011) on post-conflict realities in Uganda is instructive. In this context, women’s experiences of violence were too charged and difficult to discuss in a classic interview setting where truth telling was the only currency. 4 Revising their approach, these authors shifted their methodology to explore storytelling around an outdoor fire at night—consistent with local customs. Sometimes silent, sometimes sharing stories, the women were able to weave together fictions and realities, creatively sharing their individual and collective experiences in ways that did not have to reveal the “truth” of the violence they had endured. In turn, sharing in this way allowed women to feel that they were not alone—fostering a sense of collective solidarity. Examples of this type show the creative potential of story, opening up possibilities for creatively oriented community-engaged research, enabling healing by being able to share and be heard, and by fostering senses of collective experience and solidarity. Another provocative example that creatively weaves diverse stories from multiple women is the work of the Sangtin Collective and Richa Nagar (2006). Here again, the eight women involved in collective journaling and storytelling blended their individual biographies together in a narrative in a way that again avoided exposing the difficulties they had endured as individuals, and instead allowed them to address the collective experience of what it meant to be girls and women living and working in villages in India. In so doing, they were also able to share tears and laughter, and address complex issues of caste, class, gender, and sexuality that marked their experiences. Here, having both the creative outlet of arts-based engagement, and also the ability to express pain and difficulty through modes of expression of their choosing (including fictional accounts and blended stories) are key. As well, these examples highlight the ability to story “community” experiences rather than focusing on individuals—encouraging senses of shared solidarity.
Another example that highlights the democratizing potential of storytelling, particularly in working with marginalized communities (cf. Lejano et al., 2013), work by Rao (2015) details Dalit women’s stories about their own lives, calling attention to the way the women were able to exercise agency and voice in their narratives, speaking to issues of pain and violence, gains and losses, but also importantly—love and desire. Rao argues that in so doing, the women were able to add complexity, nuance, and humanity to the research, thereby disrupting singular narratives of the Dalit experience that only focus on marginality, victimhood, or injustice. Rao’s (2015) example again speaks to the power of creating space for resistance and empowerment that comes with telling one’s own story. In another example, a participatory video project we undertook with marginalized and underserved communities of Ghana and South Africa lead to increased self-confidence, a strengthened sense of connection to other community members, and new senses of inspiration to push for change. Feeling a commitment to engage on issues where participants had previously felt unauthorized to speak, those who worked on the community video also expressed new-found senses of empathy for others in their community who were facing difficulties related to water and sanitation (Tremblay and Harris, 2018). As such, the storytelling and engaged research both brought new research insights to the fore, but also fostered senses of collective engagement in ways that brought about shifting emotional-affective and political subjectivities in relation to resource conditions and access (cf. Sultana, 2015, see Walsh, 2012 and Tremblay and Harris, 2018).
Another key contribution that provides strong orientation for efforts to enrich our work on story and environmental change, Rob Nixon (2011) highlights the strategic challenges in literature, in journalism, and in representational practice of writers, critics, and researchers. He does so through focus on “slow violence” to highlight the relative invisibility of certain environmental injustices—highlighting the need for new narrative strategies to attend to such violence. While his analysis focuses on fictional works, similar reflexivity about our narrative strategies could usefully extend to all modes of analysis, to carefully attend to the range of stories that researchers choose to tell, and our specific practices as we do so (see also Adamson, 2018, for overview of other key approaches related to environmental fiction, including creative sources and insights that might be gleaned from creative fictional approaches). Applied to EJ scholarship, work by Moore et al. (2019) centered on the challenge of using GIS and other available data to tell different sorts of stories about environmental justice concerns, offering another illustrative example of the methodological potential of story. Houston and Vasudevan (2018) highlight the ways that fictional and non-fictional narratives can help produce new meanings and realities related to the politics of recognition important for EJ, Alaimo (2010) offers examples of autobiographical accounts that trace the marks of environmental injustice on ill-health and the body (for example, focusing on the work of Audre Lorde’s writing on her experience with breast cancer), while the overview by Newman (2012) on toxic autobiography similarly underscores the potential of activist and autobiographical literary works to contribute to shifting senses of environmental politics.
By decentering notions of facts and expertise and by working to engage others through narrative and storytelling, there is clear potential both to bring more attention to those who experience and live with the effects of environmental change. In so doing, research praxis can be more collaborative and potentially more (or differently) meaningful for affected communities (Hall et al., 2013; Margerum and Robinson, 2015). In this way, such approaches fit well with other efforts recognize and acknowledge communities more fully as political agents and holders of knowledge about challenges that affect them (Keremane and McKay 2011; O’Reilly and Dhanju, 2012). For work on EJ in particular, harms can be reproduced by speaking of toxicity and racism in abstract or measurable terms, and as such there is often a need to focus on the lived, proximate, embodied, and everyday experiences of those injustices (Houston and Vasudevan, 2018).
While recognizing this potential, we must remain sensitive to the limits of these approaches, particularly given concerns of speaking for others, as well as the ongoing concerns of representation and the multiple silences that persist (Cornwall and Fujita, 2012; Spivak, 1988). As Nagar (2013) cautions, while co-authoring stories has clear potential to forge alliances and write against relations of power that produce social violence, and to collectively imagine and enact visions of social change, work of this type demands an ever present “engagement with the complexities of identity, representation, and political imagination as well as a rethinking of the assumptions and possibilities associated with engagement and expertise” (Nagar, 2013: 1). As many critical scholars have acknowledged, attention to story necessities consideration of representational practices—“speaking for others”, or with respect to who decides which stories are told and not told (cf. Mohanty, 1991; Spivak, 1988). As Cronon (1992) explains, by writing stories of environmental change, we decide what is included and excluded, relevant and irrelevant, empowered and dis-empowered—in so doing we “inevitably sanction some voices, and silence others” (p. 1350). As such, while there is clear potential to invert some power dynamics through story, attention to power remains central.
While debates on the ethics and power dynamics of research, voice, and representational practices have long emphasized similar concerns, particularly from feminist and decolonial perspectives (e.g. Arsenault et al., 2018; Cruikshank, 1998; Mohanty, 1991; Spivak, 1988), it is clear that narrative inquiry and focus on storytelling centers and amplifies such considerations, and may also give us new tools to engage these issues. All told, there is significant scope to recalibrate the importance of narrative in our methodological engagements and writing praxis (cf. Cole, 2002), to reflect on the implications and power dimensions of our narrative choices, to bring in literary and autobiographical writing more to nature-society work, remaining ever-present to the associated silences and absences.
Analytical potential
As the above discussion makes clear, there are clear analytical openings offered through attention to story. Specifically, story can serve to connect individual experience to broader social-political concerns in ways that bridge scales, highlighting topographies of power and resistance (see Katz, 2001; Martin, 2005). With story, we can also analyze how and why individuals understand and emplot themselves, especially in relation to human and non-human “others.” As well, work in story provides key possibilities for emergent interest in the embodied, emotional, and affective meanings and experiences of diverse and changing socio-natures. For instance, recent attentions to themes such as hope, shame, or climate grief are themes for which a focus on story may be particularly well matched (Head, 2016). Relatedly, telling stories with non-human protagonists, allowing time travel of ancestors to give advice to those in the present, or offering storylines that challenge tropes of dreaded impending climate crisis might be critical to center Indigenous experiences and approaches (e.g. Whyte, 2018).
As Cameron (2012: 579) notes, “the concept of story focuses attention on the relations between personal experience and expression and its broader context, and upon the interpretation of those relations” (see also Cruikshank, 1998). Highlighting the work of Edward Said, Cameron also emphasizes the power of a “single story, a novel, a poem –and the broader social and cultural processes within which that story is articulated” (Cameron, 2012: 578). As such, stories are never solely about the individual, but can be revealing to expose elements of the broader political economic, historical, or structural context. For instance, we can imagine NGO retellings of environmental decline in their communities in ways that explicitly connect them to broader struggles or movements (e.g. EJ activists who might connect to Black Lives Matter), allowing storied emplotments that highlight existing or aspirational connections and linkages across places, themes, and movements (see Ranganathan and Balazs, 2015). As such, we can engage stories to understand how they reveal topographies of power and resistance, including key points of connection and linkage.
Narrative mapping has been one particular strategy that has been offered to reveal both individual experiences of environmental issues, as well as broader patterns and power dynamics, notably by calling attention to the points of divergence and convergence across narratives. Identifying key resonances and disconnections between stories that circulate about a particular topic, we might find that some from diverse actors share key elements (plot, character, or resolution), or that some refashion certain elements to resist and contest dominant storylines. We also might then identify those elements of stories that are so taken for granted, so given, that they are not subject to contestation or resistance, even among diverse actors who we might otherwise expect to challenge those notions (Gramsci, 1971). Work by Harris (2009) engaged a narrative mapping approach to reveal dissonant and shared storylines about environmental change in Turkey, revealing that common storylines were shared from sources as divergent as the European Union, smallholder peasants in Kurdish areas of southeastern Turkey, and by Turkish state agents—these overlaps were revealing to highlight key elements of power that operate across scales.
As another example that considers scalar dynamics implicit in diverse stories that are told, work on pesticide exposure in banana production by Brisbois (2016) shows that scientific discourses from public health and epidemiological perspectives often stress local considerations (e.g. social determinants of health), while narratives of local farmers highlight multi-scalar processes political economic considerations (e.g. highlighting histories of inequality, the role of transnational corporations, or linked structural concerns). Here again attention to narrative and story is critical to investigate how and when issues are narratively emploted as “local” concerns, and when, how and whether transnational actors or institutions are highlighted (see also Maniates, 2001 on individualizing narratives in environmental discourse, as well as Kurtz, 2003 on narrative frames important for EJ work). While potentially familiar to many who work in political ecology and EJ, such examples nonetheless serve to illustrate the types of analytical openings that might be amplified with enriched attention to the tools and concepts associated with narrative inquiry and storytelling.
Focus on story opens up opportunities to analyze shared experience, senses of the self, difference or otherness, providing key openings to analyze questions of subjectivity and inequality. As Elliott (2005) describes, narrative is central to how individuals constitute themselves and is a means by which we negotiate our sense of self with others. As such, it is one of the most powerful resources we have to organize our experiences and activities, as well as to decipher and convey meaning to those around us—highlighting concerns related to difference and inequality, allowing us to connect to key concerns in critical race studies, feminist political ecology, and similar efforts (Mollett and Faria, 2013).
Another analytical opening relates to the power of story to reveal key elements of the embodied, lived, and emotional-affective experiences of socio-natures. As explained by Ingram et al. (2014), stories are a key way that people relate feelings, and the impact and importance of their experiences. In this way, storylines are key to capturing the “cultural, aesthetic, and psychological elements of the significance of the environment for people” (Ingram et al., 2014: 14). As Sultana details, analysis of: narratives … allow us to understand more fully the ways that resource geographies affect everyday lives …. (as well as) how emotions are part and parcel of the ways that people access and use a resource, one that is viscerally important to their very survival. (Sultana, 2015: 169)
In sum, we see traces of the ways that story can help to uncover the complex topographies of power, subjective and relational dimensions, as well as inequalities and emotions that are central to everyday and material struggles over resource use, access, and conditions. The difference between an approach that aims to get at “what changes are occurring” and one that seeks to distill “what meanings people might attach to those changes” is subtle, yet important. A focus on narrative, story, and storytelling usefully helps to shift analytics from the first toward the second, amplifying and providing new resources for emergent themes of interest. Given the rising interest in concepts such as climate grief, environmental subjectivities, or politics of hopelessness/hopefulness related to environmental change, this potential is all the more apposite (Cunsolo and Ellis, 2018).
Political potential
Politics has already been highlighted in many of the examples above—including those related shifting senses of the self and others, the politics of doing research, the politics of scale related to narrative frames, or through focus on how emotions might spur political action. Even with these overlaps, there are several additional political possibilities worth noting, including using story imaginatively to create alternative storylines to envisage new socio-ecological futures, possibilities to bring together plural voices to build collective policy responses, or to foster senses of belonging, empathy, or critical solidarities.
To elaborate such possibilities, Gibson-Graham’s consideration of the affective, embodied, emotional dimensions of storytelling underscores the capacity for stories to create emotional opening[s] that enabled people to move “from an emotionally draining narrative [e.g. of regional destruction]”… “to open, even exuberant responses to our questions about counterstories and alternative activities” (p. 137). Here Gibson-Graham (2006), Cameron (2012), and others speak to the ability of stories to affect and inspire people, rather than merely represent and convey meaning. In particular, the ability to “imagine something otherwise” and speak to alternative possible futures has particular relevance. Pezzullo (2001) speaks to such possibilities referencing notions of interruption and invention drawing from the work of Adrienne Rich—suggesting that we “must invent what we desire,” with strategic acts of invention as key to our ability to resist oppressive or unwanted conditions.
In terms of the potential with story to emplot ourselves differently in relation to people, events, or more-than-human natures, consider the creative potential of historical or science fiction, or fantasy (imagining what might have transpired to lead up to particular events, or radically differently configured worlds and futures, see work by Adamson, e.g. 2018 for discussions of cli-fi and other aspects of environmental fiction). Overlapping with the democratizing potential of narrative, we can see that there are ways to open up new lines of inquiry, and retellings, asking “what if” precisely to upset and challenge dominant storylines. Again, stories need not be “true” to offer such challenge. Part of the value of stories is due in part to the fact that they can disrupt “boundaries between real and imagined” (Houston and Vasudevan, 2018). Recall the powerful intervention by Rachel Carson in her book Silent Spring (1962). Carson wove actual situations that had occurred in different locales together into an exaggerated dystopian foretelling to highlight the risk of chemicals in our environment. This served as a cautionary tale that helped to change policies and regulations related to chemical use to avoid the realization of the imagined world expressed in the book’s pages—one where songbirds no longer sang (see discussion in Dickinson, 2012; Newman, 2012; or Nixon, 2011). The broader discussion of toxic autobiography offered by Newman (2012) details the ways that a reliance on storytelling, as with nature writing before it, allowed authors to call attention to the degradation that they were living with in ways that similarly led to regulatory reform, at times also allowing racialized and marginalized communities from disparate locales to understand themselves as part of a common environmental justice cause.
There are innumerable other examples that demonstrate the important role that fiction (and music, poetry, theater, or other arts) plays in political and countercultural movements. As one example, the Entitlecollective’s (2017) ToxicBios project focused on “guerilla narrative” drawing on oral history, videos, images, and other art and narrative forms to “recover the historical and narrative depths environmental (in)justice, not only occurring in places (and not only known by experts and scientists who study in labs) but also known in the lives, bodies and memories of people.” In this example, narrative is creatively and strategically deployed to challenge dominant “ways of knowing” that value data, facts, or statistics of “parts per million” over than the embodied and lived experience of people who live with toxicity on a daily basis. The focus is instead on allowing these individuals to tell stories of their lives and experiences to draw out insights and realities of environmental injustice (see Wright et al., 2012 for exploration of story to also draw out territorial and more-than-human dimensions as well).
In highlighting the importance of storytelling for those who live with realities of environmental justice most acutely, Houston offers that “storytelling is a powerful way of exploring these discernable truths—where shared capacities for suffering, as well as for shaping and sustaining better worlds exist alongside each other” (2013: 432–433).
Outside the EJ and arts realms, more conventional policy efforts have also relied on creative storytelling to think through scenarios of possible futures including methods such as backcasting where community members decide on shared visions for the future, and then are able to think through the steps that they would need to take, collectively, to realize that outcome (Brooks and Brandes, 2011). The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment offers a visible example from biophysical science, with reliance on four different storylines for possible future worlds, from “technogarden” to “global orchestration” to help think through our shared response to the biodiversity crisis. In another example from planning, Goldstein et al. (2015) highlight the potential of collaborative storytelling, stressing that by inviting diverse stories from different members of the community, people feel valued and included—as such storytelling is a key step to be able to collaboratively work together to develop shared policy responses. Yet other contributions have focused on the centrality of story to environmental politics and coalition building. Among them, Hajer (1993) suggests that stories can play a critical role in creating discourse coalitions—while beliefs may not be shared, shared storylines may nonetheless help to provide a shared basis for understanding.
Through other examples and interventions, we can see the ways that stories serve to provide structures, logic, and meaning for events and experiences, often consolidating solidarities or senses of cohesion (for individuals and communities). This stems from the intersubjective and relational aspects storytelling practice—it is always at once about the story, and also how the story is heard, received, and welcomed (or not) in a particular context. As such, the telling and listening to stories creates new types of social (or political) interactions. In this vein, Young (1996) refers to the potential to share experiences in ways that might evoke sympathy, while particular narratives can also forge proximity (sense of connection) or maintain distance (sense of difference).
Ingram et al. (2014), following Ingold, understand stories as performances that connect and build complex relationships between humans, between humans and place, and between humans and other beings. Consider the ways that stories about our collective past, or future, are often central to nationalism or understanding of community (e.g. the importance of shared history for imagined community as emphasized by Anderson, 1991, or the centrality of monuments and shared myths, origin stories, or heroes to build senses of collective identification and belonging).
Related to building community, and critical solidarities, several examples help to further illustrate this potential. Recall the examples noted earlier (e.g. Sangtin Collective) where the sharing of stories allowed the participants to understand themselves, their experiences, and their communities differently. In the example of violence against women in Uganda, we also saw how sharing of stories served to build a collective sense of shared solidarity (cf. see also Mumby and Putnam, 1992 on the ways that sharing of emotional experiences can give way to feelings of community and coherence of purpose). In our participatory video example as well, respondents highlighted heightened sense of voice and engagement in issues affecting their community, and also empathy for the situation of others, contributing to a heightened sense of community connection (Tremblay and Harris, 2018).
In yet another example, Tinsley et al. (2010) highlight the power of narrative (in this case connected with bodily movement through dance) to elaborate storylines of shared struggle and resistance, as well as articulations of shared dreams. Among the autobiographical reflections in the volume, an African American woman raised by a white family in the U.S. recalls the power being able to connect her own experience, and her own body, to other women’s stories of what it means to be “out of place” through dance. She tells of the ways she came to understand her body and experiences living as a racialized woman differently—building narrative connections, providing a sense of community with other racialized women, and forging a sense of connection with the thousands of other women who had engaged in similar movement over the centuries.
Here we see the power in story to connect to others, and to longer historical narratives and shared struggles—enabling novel understandings of community and the self. Consider that when read poetry, or fiction, these experiences are meaningful for us not only as an escape, but precisely in that these stories give us a way to relate our own stories and experiences to the characters and unfoldings on the page. There is a sense of meaning-making, attachment, and connection that is possible through story—allowing us to understand that we are “not alone” and “we matter.” Highlighting such possibilities, recent research has highlighted the possibilities of fiction to help build resilience and senses of empathy, particularly as young readers relate to the situations and characters in books (Oatley, 2016). In terms of fostering senses of connection, work on Indigeneity and decoloniality has also highlighted the power of story to connect not only to other humans, but also to other more-than-human beings, and to land and territory (Borrows, 2002; Hayman, 2015; Schulz, 2017), including stories that convey teachings, laws, and governance practices over generations (see also Borona, 2017 on the role of storytelling for forest communities in Kenya, especially to maintain community knowledge in the context of colonization).
All such touchpoints make the political potential of story abundantly clear—from the sense of empowerment gained through being able to tell one’s own story, to the ways that stories might inspire policy change, or the ability to connect to broader histories and cultural repertoires, as well as strengthened senses of collective experience and solidarity.
Transformative potential
Apart from the transformative potential already highlighted regarding methods, analytics, and politics, are there yet other ways that story might provide openings to transform nature-society research, or enable shifts in our shared socio-ecological worlds? Possible examples relate to decolonization, dealing with grief, uncertainty, and other complex emotional-affective dimensions of rapidly changing socio-environmental worlds, and possibilities to recraft narratives in ways that might foster resilience and help to adapt to ongoing changes.
With respect to decolonization, the potential, indeed centrality of story for Indigenous communities, theorizing, and resurgence has been noted. Sium and Ritskes, for instance, highlight the need for more complex engagement with story to highlight the ways that “stories in Indigenous epistemologies are disruptive, sustaining, knowledge producing, and theory-in-action. Stories are decolonization theory in this most natural form” (Sium and Ritskes, 2013: 2). Citing Tuck and Yang (2012) and other Indigenous scholars, they offer that “stories … work to not only regenerate Indigenous traditions and knowledge production, but also work against the colonial epistemic frame to subvert and recreate possibilities and spaces for resistance” (Sium and Ritskes, 2013: 3). It is imperative to go deeper to engage this potential as it relates to Indigenous resurgence, to challenge colonial narratives, and to work toward decolonizing knowledges, methods and research (Arsenault et al., 2018; Corntassel, 2009; Daigle, 2016; Kuokkanen, 2007; Simpson, 2001, see also Crawford, 2019 for discussions of the role of storytelling for resistance among Black communities). Story is one vehicle as well where it is possible to imagine figuring non-human others more centrally in forging decolonial futures in ways that also honor, value, and witness responsibility and ethical proximity to more-than-human earth others, whether these be raven, coyote, or dingoes (Bird Rose, 2011).
Another reality of our world where stories offer particularly rich transformative potential relates to the uncertainty, grief, loss, and other complex emotions related to climate change, extinction, and other difficult socio-ecological realities. Again, story, including fictional storytelling, can be key to our analysis of and responses to, such concerns. In Flight Ways, van Dooren (2014) tells “extinction stories” in ways that deals with such complexities, focusing on human–avian entanglements to connect us emotionally and ethically to the loss of the dodo bird or threats to Black-footed Albatrosses. In so doing, Van Dooren highlights loss of life, in ways that enable grief, witnessing, and senses of wonder. The work calls for new types of storytelling that attends to mourning crows, and that centers the violence and shifts in human–avian interdependencies as many species hover at the edge of extinction.
Emphasizing other aspects of transformative potential, Brockman (2013) offers that stories have always been essential to human history, and are likely to be particularly useful for things that are uncertain, to allay doubts about events past, or to cast hope or potential in terms of the present or future. Recent work in psychology has furthered the idea that stories serve as psycho-social resources that help to foster resilience, empathy, and enable us to navigate difficult situations. Recent evidence highlights the potential of literary fiction to foster empathy in children, while also providing them with tools to be more prepared to deal with unfamiliar or difficult situations in their own lives (Chiaet, 2013). This has been highlighted in the EJ realm for instance, engaging stories to make toxic areas more “liveable”, providing coping resources to deal with safety, value, and forging more healthy futures (Vasudevan, 2012). Highlighting the complex realities of “solastalgia” or the loss, pain, and distress experienced with the of destruction of places we are connected to, whether through tree removal, dam building, or other types of environmental degradation, Albrecht (2005) highlights the potential for healing from drama, art dance, and song, and other cultural expressions (see also Nxumalo, 2016).
There is yet further potential with story to help adapt to adversity and change—a theme of clear relevance for environmental justice and political ecology. A key theme among researchers who focus on resilience in social work and psychology is precisely to consider how the same event or conditions can lead to radically different outcomes or senses of well-being for certain individuals (i.e. how and why some are able to “bounce back” and persist in the face of adversity, cf. Shah et al., 2017). Otherwise stated: how is it that similar experiences can lead to such radically different storylines in our lives? Some see key difficulties as moment of loss and hopelessness, while others might emphasize these as moments of rebuilding, learning, and strength (e.g. “when life gives you lemons”). Story is central to the ways that people give meaning to experiences, drawing out negative elements, or “silver linings (making lemonade).”
Apart from how we assign meaning to difficult events through story and emplotment, the retelling of stories of the past also can have the effect of altering our own sense of those events, or how we experienced them. Again, from a neurologic perspective, Brockman (2013) notes that storytelling—just as sleeping and dreaming—helps to consolidate new learning or memories. He discusses the power of story to recast past experiences, with opportunities to performatively shift and recreate memories with each retelling, and thus are subject to disruption. 5 Psychologists have documented specific neurological pathways whereby telling a positive story (or the act of smiling/laughing) can actually create a positive neural feedback in ways that enhance well-being—while dwelling on negative stories can have the opposite effect (even to the extent the act of complaining can entrench negativity, Bradberry, 2017). By laughing at a misfortune, we experience pleasure and positive social interaction that can help to recast that painful experience in new light.
Considering such possibilities, a focus on the power of narrative is central to several emergent subfields of therapeutic practice, including some types of family therapy (Etchison and Kleist, 2000). Therapists might encourage those working through past trauma to focus precisely on recasting stories in ways that avoid assigning blame, thus being able to forgive and move toward more positive familial relationships. Here, it is not to say that hurt or disappointment did not occur, but there is a purposeful effort to shift the emotions of an experience, and contribute to healing regarding past events. A related example draws from anthropological illness narratives, whereby people retell their stories to emphasize agency and positive choices to be able to cope more effectively with health difficulties one has experienced, offering examples of power and potential of positive story telling (see also Lane et al., 2014; Lee, 2009). Applied to themes in political ecology and environmental justice, we can think through a number of linked questions related to how and why some might view and narrate experiences differently, or ways that the different types of stories we tell might contribute to resilience, or vulnerability, or help to forge healing and liveability?
Linking back to methods, we can also seek to learn directly from research praxis that might contribute to well-being in communities we study. Many researchers might notice the benefits that some interviewees experience by being able to share their experiences, or the particular energy that might emerge in a focus group discussion. Indeed, elements of talk therapy and practices such as journaling or “writing pages” rely on the understanding that writing down and processing experiences, sharing one’s story, and especially having someone listen (or “mirror”), can be therapeutic. As already noted, there are examples that bring this directly to the research setting to provide opportunities for participants to experiment with deep listening, journaling, or even creative fictionalizing to foster shifting senses of the self, involvement in a community, or empowerment/well-being. An interesting example involves the use of storytelling to find new ways to relate to illness experiences, one’s family, or one’s own body. The “Cancer’s Margins” research project focuses on queer embodiments and realities of cancer and related health care treatment in Canada. The project not only documents how queer individuals navigate the cancer experience and associated technologies and institutions of “care”, but also uses storytelling and filmmaking to encourage those who have experienced cancer to retell and even remake their stories (Bryson and Stacey, 2013). In this sense, the “truth” of the experience is not the focus, but the project rather explores the creative and therapeutic potential of retelling one’s own story. This can be empowering as it is only the author who knows which painful elements that are indeed “true,” and which elements were added for flourish, or to recast a negative experience in more positive light (examples included participants retelling their cancer stories with themselves as a superhero allowing them to transcend their bodily experience, or fictionalizing family supports which may not have been there). The key is to tell the story in the way that one chooses—offering provocative counter to the investments in “truth-telling” that are so often privileged in research. Applied to nature-society studies, we can think through possibilities for the ways that story might fundamentally challenge what research is, or could be, with possibilities to reorient work towards healing, or fashioning alternative futures.
Of course, one must be cautious and not overstate such potential, it will not be appropriate nor desirable to simply try to recast negative realities and experiences in the name of “building resilience” (or encourage victims who have experienced hardship to do so, cf. Kaika, 2017). As many have reminded us, we also need to think carefully on how and whether stories are told, or heard, and what the possibilities of such are (drawing from the work of Pratt, 2009)—as such is always “structured by a political and ethical field that is not as malleable and open to possibility as we might hope” (from Cameron, 2012). Nonetheless, there is likely room to learn from other fields to explore the potential of positive storylines in our work, particularly to help build fruitful collaborations, or shared goals and meanings (Coghlan et al., 2003). 6 Doing so can open provocative lines of inquiry in terms of how research engagements might be more positive, enriching, healing, or solutions-focused. This meshes well with the efforts of many communities to resist narratives of crisis, impoverishment, or victimhood (see Mohanty, 1991, also Rao, 2015 example of Dalit women noted earlier), or the imperatives to tell positive stories of environmental change to avoid stimulating fear and worry (e.g. Boyd, 2015). As well, storytelling to focus on aspirations, alternatives, or spaces to imagine and wonder (Houston and Vasudevan, 2018) may be particularly needed and powerful in the face of hegemonic framings where there appear to be “no alternatives” (Ferguson, 2010). If the context is one of loss and grief, engaging with story can also provide a way to dwell with that loss, and deal with the emotions that ensue. As described by Todd (2017b), reading aloud the stories from those who had endured residential schools in Canada (#ReadTheTRCReport) provided space for a “performative, intra-active, affective and circulatory unfolding” in ways that enabled her as a reader to “enact reciprocity, love, accountability and caring”—a crucial step in a politics of decolonial resistance, reconciliation and dealing with loss to be able to “face uncertain futures and the continuity of precarious worlds as we know them (pp. 137–8).”
Conclusion
The goal of this piece has been to highlight the utility, and perhaps even necessity, of enriched engagement with narrative inquiry and story-telling, among a suite of other creative and critical approaches, for political ecology, environmental justice, and nature-society studies. Through a discussion that highlights existing work along these lines, attending to interlinked methodological, analytical, political, and transformative potential of story, I have offered some starting points for such enrichment. Many of these themes have been present in our discussions and toolbox to date, and indeed, many of these elements have been foundational to the work of BIPoC, feminist, and decolonial scholars. Yet, it also seems that the time is ripe to delve more deeply into story, and to find new avenues to enrich and broaden this engagement. Particularly at a moment when alternatives are so sorely needed to more fully imagine, and respond to, key nature-society challenges.
It is also possible that enriched attention to story may also serve to center more radical elements of, and contributors to, environmental justice, political ecology, and nature-society work. As Pulido and De Lara (2018) discuss, the need to center environmental justice work around abolitionist social movements and organizing, they see clear potential to do so in ways that will more explicitly highlight the centrality of Black radical thought, interracial organizing and decolonial thinking. Similarly, there is reason to be hopeful that recentering story in nature-society scholarship might serve to recalibrate these fields in ways that pivot around key contributions from Black, Indigenous, decolonial, and feminist scholars, at once enlivening the radical or liberatory aspects of these scholarly and intellectual traditions.
As Brockman (2013: 452) notes: “the task of a good playwright, a good listener, a good doctor, is not necessarily to know which stories are true, but rather to know which stories count.” The same is true for our research, writing, and policy engagements. Blaser (2013) also provides a clear call to attend further to narrative. He writes: there is a clear need to carve out spaces to listen, and to tell other stories about ourselves, to engage in kinds of worlding that might be more conducive to a coexistence based on recognizing conflicts rather than brushing them off as irrelevant or nonexistent…certainly there are no guarantees of such an attempt but we cannot even begin to tell such a story without engaging the stories of others seriously. (p. 559)
Highlights
Explores work to date on narrative and story for nature-society studies.
Highlights the potential of narrative inquiry for political ecology, environmental justice, and nature-society studies
Learns from traditions where work on story has been central to deepen and broaden this potential.
Among well-explored themes, narrative inquiry has potential to serve decolonialism and knowledge democracy goals, among others.
Less well-explored ways that narrative inquiry includes transformative and creative potential of storytelling, such as ability to build solidarities and notions of collective vision, or to transform memories and build futures.
Fictional storytelling also is fruitful for research practice, community engagement, and envisioning more just and sustainable nature-society relations.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to sincerely thank those who made recommendations on further readings and other suggestions for improvement to this manuscript, including: Joanne Nelson, Nicole Wilson, Sameer Shah, Kiely McFarlane, and other members of the EDGES collaborative at UBC, as well as Drs Nadia Harris, Hannah Wittman, Malini Ranganathan, Nik Heynen, and three anonymous reviewers.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funding support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (grants: 435-2018-0316 and 453-2013-1145) and the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia are also gratefully acknowledged.