Contribution short abstract:

This talk focuses on environmental storytelling in sites dominated by extraction, toxicity, and industrial storytelling. It follows diverse urban narrative ensembles that resist necrotic industrial plots and aim to repair the broken narrative ecosystem through collective narrative acts.

Contribution long abstract:

This talk addresses the challenges of environmental storytelling work in the urban spaces of Global North and “high Nordic” colonialism and extractivism in the US and Europe, dominated by “story factories” and platforms for industrial storytelling. Drawing on the work of AbduMalique Simone, who recognizes that “people are [vital urban] infrastructure,” this talk follow instead diverse urban footsteps and their narrative footprints in Binghamton, Trondheim, and Tampere, exploring how collective and site-specific narrative practices resist necrotic industrial plots and aim to repair the broken narrative ecosystem. The talk will meander across several narrative situations that challenge “aesthetic austerity” and its reductive genres of public storytelling, centering on several emancipatory environmental acts: maps and archives of grassroots narratives in Hiedanranta, Finland; trans-Atlantic speculative work and ‘wave’ writing experiments in Trondheim and Binghamton; and, Søstrene Suse’s Radiokino listening repair sessions across Scandinavia. The talk will conclude with a reflection on the practices of narrative ‘repair’.