Researcher(s):
Georgia Reid
ENVS course(s): 295 Initiated: February 2017 Completed: April 2017 Go to project site
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The environmental engagement project you find documented here is the product of a meandering process! My initial proposal offered a gathering of art submissions, on the topic of the Willamette River, in the form of a "zine" (independently published creative magazine). I didn't know who (people) or what (scholarship), exactly, it would contain. So, as the scholarship component wasn't too strong, the project transformed into one that would bring stake-holders along the Willamette River into conversation by passing along a tangible "river vessel" (a "Gathering of Waters" project); this engagement project also became bound up in ethnographic research (on the Willamette River) I was conducting in another one of my classes. When these plans, too dangerously entwined, were thwarted by the inability to find materials necessary for carrying it out, I detached the project from the river to broaden its scope (i.e. people engaged). I chose the ArcGIS Story Map platform as my medium for connecting action, and the project became "Gathering Voices". In a final twist, the scholarship component was beefed up and the project became "Your Place or Mine?": a project guiding people in telling stories of their place through the digital platform of a Story Map. These two ArcGIS Story Maps were launched in digital and interactive display at Festival of Scholars, Spring 2017.
The environmental scholarship included in this project is made accessible to a public audience: place theory, wicked problems, dialogic communication and actor-network theory are introduced in the form of a narrative story map. A second, crowdsourced story map (embedded below) accepts story submissions, encouraging participants to share brief stories, stimulated by concepts described in the narrative section. The story maps is a platform for the connecting action -- the process of storytelling -- through which people engage, in a digital public, with others' stories and available scholarship.