To mark the publication of Professor Uma Kothari’s new co-authored book, Stories of Place: Geographies of Meaning, Memory and Connection, we interviewed Uma about the story behind the book and the relationship between stories and the places from which they emerge. In the conversation below, Uma and Louisa Hann, GDI’s Research Communications Officer, discuss everything from the slippery definition of the story to the ethics of storytelling within academic contexts.

 

Louisa Hann: Tell us how the book came about…

Uma Kothari: The book was put together through the Storying Geography Collective, an international group of academic researchers. It began when eight of us, all members of the Institute of Australian Geographers, responded to a call for short stories during the height of COVID. The call was inspired by the sense of disconnectedness some of us were feeling during lockdowns – an attempt to make sense of our experiences and see whether they resonated with those of our friends and peers.

So, we all set about writing our stories and sharing them with the group, which revealed an amazing diversity of experiences. We’d meet online and discuss our stories, and I was confronted with how difficult others were finding lockdowns and isolation – quite a contrast with my own happier experiences.

As we started identifying commonalities and differences between our stories, we were able to craft an overarching narrative about the pandemic and its effects. And we were struck by the ways in which this narrativization worked differently to more conventional research approaches. Often, you start with a theme and use stories to reveal something about that theme. Our collective approach kind of inverted this dynamic, creating a broader narrative from stories or fragments of stories – a process we reflect on in an article for GeoHumanities. We continued working together, online and in person, thanks to various pots of funding, turning our attention to how our individual storytelling methods could contribute to understandings of place, which became the focus of our new book.

 

LH: So, how has your work with the collective shaped your interpretation of the term ‘storytelling’? As storytelling gains traction within certain research contexts, I think we sometimes see these acquisitive imperatives emerge – expectations that we can collect precise truths or discrete forms of knowledge by mining stories. What do you make of this? What’s the different between, say, testimony and storytelling?

UK: The first thing to say is I would differentiate between an anecdote, a story, and a narrative. Conventional storytelling tends to adhere to a certain structure, containing plots, characters, events, experiences, and the techniques through which such experiences are recounted. But in our book and the GeoHumanities article, we understand stories in a slightly different way. For us, stories take the form of what Ben Okri calls “whispers from beyond”, fragmentary happenings and memories that push from past into present and may be shared and interpreted in all sorts of ways.

So, we weren’t really concerned with seeking any kind of truth in the way academic researchers often aspire. Rather than discover whether a certain thing has definitively happened or is happening, we turn our attention to how people make meanings out of experiences and place them within wider narratives. Storytelling is also so expansive, allowing you to imagine what the world could look like or might have looked like.

While I think it’s inevitable that you lose something when retelling events of the past, you also gain something in the storying process. Let’s just take my parents as an example. As they got older, they’d forget certain incidents or people but reminiscing together, they could often fill in each other’s memories in generative ways. Rosy anecdotes tended to dominate, and as time went on this process provided novel insights, despite their departure from whatever truth might mean.

 

LH: Yes, I think that’s true even of fictional writing. Through the process of imagining these novel worlds and characters you can’t help but filter everything through your own experiences. And sometimes you’ll hit upon an idea dredged up from memories you haven’t accessed for years, and you wonder about the extent to which time has warped these memories.

UK: Yes, exactly, because you don’t necessarily have all the tools you need to recount the whole story. With academic research, you might have reams of data, a conceptual framework, and rigorous analysis with which you create an argument that aims to convince. When you’re embarking on a story, you’re engaging in a more contingent and collective process, though you might not realise it. You shape your story in a certain way and unleash it into the world, allowing for any number of interpretations and revelations.

 

LH: Exactly – the relationship with your audience or readership is so much more fluid in the storytelling mode. Let’s stay on this topic of audience for now, then, and touch on the ways in which stories are disseminated. How do the ways in which stories are produced and consumed privilege certain voices or topics?

UK: It’s a good question that we don’t talk about enough. We tend to focus on stories accessible in print or other widely disseminated media, but most stories aren’t written down.  There are millions of ephemeral stories that never make it to the page or are even shared. They’re not part of the public record, meaning they’re not part of our collective memory so can’t challenge the more dominant tales that shape how society works and reproduces itself.

Inevitably, the stories of those who aren’t recognised or venerated by cultural institutions go overlooked and unheard. This curtails our access to marginalised worldviews, but it also impacts our ability to play with storytelling frameworks. When we wrote the GeoHumanities article, for example, we played with form and used a table to tell one of our stories, something publishers usually don’t appreciate. Even something as simple as using non-conventional punctuation or a change in font can impact how you tell your story.

 

LH: It’s interesting what you note about the privileging of the written word, especially in universities. You can return to the written word over and over again, allowing you to interact with it and take it apart over time. The ephemerality of the spoken word means you remember it in different ways, generating novel meanings.

UK: Yes, you have this distance from the story with the spoken word. It changes shape and form, and you’ll often come up with new events or meanings when you retell it. That’s sometimes the agony of writing things down – it fixes things.

 

LH: So, let’s change our focus a little to talk about place, as you’re all geographers doing this work. When did you start thinking about stories in relation to place?

UK: Yes, of course, most of what we write is about space and place. I suppose I’d like to emphasise the simple fact that stories always take place – where you tell a story and where the story takes place shapes how you tell a story. When we were writing our stories for the collection, we all considered how place was telling us something about ourselves or our experiences.

Many of our stories considered the importance of the more-than-human – the way that a river has rights just like a human has rights, for example. Maria Borovnik’s chapter recounts a walk that she takes by a river, and that more-than-human relationship is brought into sharp focus as the place brings out the story. She’s listening carefully and respectfully to the environment, allowing the story to emerge as she walks.

 

LH: Yes, I noticed this idea of the more-than-human was threaded through the book, especially in the introduction. Could you say a little more about that?

UK: This is an important shift we’re seeing within geography, I think. We’re grappling with the fact that humans are just one element within a much bigger world. Thinking about place helps us to look beyond our human experiences, to how the more-than-human shapes these experiences.

For example, Natalie Osborne’s story in the book is about how non-human elements are entering her house – ivy and insects etc. It just shows how we’re so completely enmeshed and this realisation serves a political purpose when we consider the future of the planet. Our time here on the planet is so short in the grand scheme of things. How are we going to be good custodians of the Earth?

 

LH: Remaining on this point of your role as geographers, I wonder whether your focus on storytelling made you reflect on your ways of working? What kinds of ethical challenges did you consider?

UK: We were very clear from the beginning that what we’re doing isn’t new – we know that storytelling is an ancient practice. We wanted to break out of the academic impulse for novelty – the impulse to locate precisely what our contribution is doing differently. That was a real positive, I think. We just put a plethora of stories out there, allowing other people to start creating a narrative around them, rather than using stories to confirm this or that idea.

We also considered how a certain conception of stories, and storytelling methodologies, have dominated many social science disciplines. Academic research that is based on gathering stories often involves asking people to tell us about their lives without necessarily considering their relationship with the storyteller, thinking about who tells the story and whose stories are heard, and the potential for stories to change shape and size. They don’t necessarily appreciate that stories alter as they’re shared and interpreted – something which can interfere with an academic’s desire for concrete answers.

So, it’s vital we listen with a particular kind of attention. Rather than collect stories and try to shoehorn them into existing epistemological frameworks and methodologies, why don’t we consider how stories change methodologies? Stories are more than data, and so many stories go unheard. I’m worried that as academics we’re going to try to delimit stories and storytelling as a discrete methodological technique, when the beauty and power of stories lie in their unruly and protean nature.

 

LH: That’s a great note to end on. Thanks for a great conversation, Uma!

Read Stories of Place: Geographies of Meaning, Memory and Connection open access.

Photo by Timo Volz.

Note:  This article gives the views of the author/academic featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the Global Development Institute as a whole.

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