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.

About the Author
Julia Christensen is a geographer and creative writer born and raised in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, on the ancestral homelands of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation. She holds a Canada Research Chair in Northern Governance and Public Policy at Memorial University. She was previously a Trudeau Foundation Scholar.

Christopher Cox is an assistant professor of Indigenous and Minority Language Issues in the School of Linguistics and Language Studies at Carleton University. His research focuses on issues in language documentation, education, and revitalization, and he has been involved with community language programs in western and northern Canada for the past twenty years.

Lisa Szabo-Jones, a photographer and Trudeau Foundation Scholar, holds a PhD from the University of Alberta and teaches literature at John Abbott College. She is co-editor of Sustaining the West: Cultural Responses to Canadian Environments (WLU Press, 2015).


Book Information
ISBN 9781771122191
Author Julia Christensen
Format Paperback
Page Count 226
Imprint Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Publisher Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Weight(grams) 370g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 13mm