Multisensory multispecies storytelling to engage disadvantaged groups in changing landscapes

PARKINSON, CLAIRE (PI)
Mills, Brett (CoI)
Satchwell, Candice (CoI)

Centre for Human Animal Studies

University of Lancashire
University of East Anglia

Status	Finished
Effective start/end date	1/02/20 → 31/01/22

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The project will use multispecies storytelling to engage disadvantaged groups in the north west in decision making processes about landscape and land use. The project follows on from the successful AHRC 'Connecting disadvantaged young people with landscape through arts', 'Stories2Connect' and 'Multispecies Storytelling: More than human narratives about landscape' projects, all of which use storytelling in participatory ways. These projects have worked with disadvantaged and disabled young people, children, and diverse groups of community farm users. The methods and learning gained from previous projects are being brought together and synthesised to engage new audiences, collaborate with new stakeholder organisations and develop new themes of work. Specifically, the project will use multispecies storytelling to develop multisensory artefacts about landscape that capture the voices of marginalised communities and disadvantaged groups and respond to a variety of different ways of making sense of the world. Understanding a landscape from the 'memory' of an oak tree, 'seeing' the land as a bee might, experiencing a space as a soundscape or through touch or smell invites thinking about landscape and land use from different perspectives, through other timeframes and scales. Multispecies approaches have been effective in engaging people with issues related to biodiversity loss and climate change and can encourage identifications and connections with land, environments and other species who inhabit them. They also prompt consideration of whose stories about landscape are being told, and who is enabled to tell them.

Multisensory multispecies storytelling to engage disadvantaged groups in changing landscapes

Project Details

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