Multisensory multispecies storytelling to engage disadvantaged groups in changing landscapes

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The project will use multispecies storytelling to engage disadvantaged groups in the north west in decision making processes about landscape and land use. The project follows on from the successful AHRC 'Connecting disadvantaged young people with landscape through arts', 'Stories2Connect' and 'Multispecies Storytelling: More than human narratives about landscape' projects, all of which use storytelling in participatory ways. These projects have worked with disadvantaged and disabled young people, children, and diverse groups of community farm users. The methods and learning gained from previous projects are being brought together and synthesised to engage new audiences, collaborate with new stakeholder organisations and develop new themes of work. Specifically, the project will use multispecies storytelling to develop multisensory artefacts about landscape that capture the voices of marginalised communities and disadvantaged groups and respond to a variety of different ways of making sense of the world. Understanding a landscape from the 'memory' of an oak tree, 'seeing' the land as a bee might, experiencing a space as a soundscape or through touch or smell invites thinking about landscape and land use from different perspectives, through other timeframes and scales. Multispecies approaches have been effective in engaging people with issues related to biodiversity loss and climate change and can encourage identifications and connections with land, environments and other species who inhabit them. They also prompt consideration of whose stories about landscape are being told, and who is enabled to tell them.The follow on funding will be used to expand work with organisations linked to the existing projects and enhance the reach and impact of the projects with new stakeholder organisations. Connections with Burscough Community Farm, Rusland Horizons Trust, Blackpool Council, Art Gene, the Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, local artists and professional storytellers will be maintained and new partnerships with the National Autistic Society, Natural England, Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust Martin Mere, Williamson Art Gallery and Museum and The Chapel Gallery will be enabled by the follow on funding. Through the partners, the project will continue to work with community farm users and young people with disabilities and will also include young people with autism, facilitated by the National Autistic Society. The project will, through new and existing partners, expand the geographical coverage of the previous projects further across the north west to reach new audiences through the partner organisations that have agreed to provide venues for exhibitions and events.The project will utilise innovative participatory methodologies and resources developed in the previous projects which will be applied in the co-creation of a new series of multisensory artefacts that will be curated and exhibited at different indoor and outdoor sites across the north west. The multisensory artefacts and environments developed will use multispecies storytelling and, as well as visual aspects, may also employ, for example, sound, smell, space and touch to respond to the needs and understandings of a wide range of potential users, rather than prioritising traditional or limited sensory engagements with the world. The exhibitions will be accompanied by key events to which decision makers from stakeholder groups and those organisations with vested interests in landscape and land use will be invited.