Activating the Heart is an exploration of storytelling as a tool for
knowledge production and sharing to build new connections between people
and their histories, environments, and cultural geographies. The
collection pays particular attention to the significance of storytelling
in Indigenous knowledge frameworks and extends into other ways of
knowing in works where scholars have embraced narrative and story as a
part of their research approach.
In the first section, Storytelling to Understand, authors draw on both
theoretical and empirical work to examine storytelling as a way of
knowing. In the second section, Storytelling to Share, authors
demonstrate the power of stories to share knowledge and convey
significant lessons, as well as to engage different audiences in
knowledge exchange. The third section, Storytelling to Create, contains
three poems and a short story that engage with storytelling as a means
to produce or create knowledge, particularly through explorations of
relationship to place.
The result is an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural dialogue that
yields important insights in terms of qualitative research methods,
language and literacy, policy-making, human-environment relationships,
and healing. This book is intended for scholars, artists, activists,
policymakers, and practitioners who are interested in storytelling as a
method for teaching, cross-cultural understanding, community engagement,
and knowledge exchange.
