Paper short abstract:

The horizontal collaboration of commoning is vital to successful environmental activism. As academics sharing environmental history with the public through walking tours and social media, we recognize and hope to mitigate gaps between the public and academia and foster a flourishing hybrid commons.

Paper long abstract:

Elemental Tours is a public environmental history project based in Manchester, UK, that aims to foster both place-based and digital communities that share resources regarding the environmental humanities and local environmental activism. This hybrid commons is created through a combination of walking tours focusing on the materiality of Manchester’s environmental history and an online community fostered through social media and an active website.

Manchester’s past is most often presented as industrial, social, and everyday history, much of which is seen as the result of its place in the Industrial Revolution. The city’s radical history, including suffragette and labour activism, and the commoning that the public ownership of these narratives engenders, is a source of pride for many of its citizens.

In this context, a public environmental history of Manchester has the potential to generate tension if presented through the declensionist, anti-capitalist frameworks foundational to the discipline. Many walking tour participants are emotionally invested in the narrative of Manchester’s industrial history and may find an environmental perspective challenging. Elemental Tours seeks to create horizontal connections between academia and the public to grant community participants a strong sense of ownership over this aspect of Manchester’s history.

Part of this is successful communication across lines of class and education, making the material accessible in our tours through suitable language choices and a mix of theory and narrative. Additionally, we are creating space for public contributions to both our walking tour conversations and our online discourse.