About Us

The Untold Stories project is a joint multimedia collaboration between GARN and the USFQ Speculative Hub Research Network to create a living, community-driven archive for our times.

In this time of social distancing, crisis, and rupture of the fabric of our certainties, paying attention to human-nature relationship and the unsustainability of our global socio-economic structures and environmental practices has become a matter of present and future survival. The Untold Stories: Listen to Nature and People platform seeks to open space for more careful, attentive and creative reflections about how we live in the world with others (human and non-human).

The Untold Stories platform is a citizen humanities project open to whomever wishes to express themselves. The platform offers the possibility to share submissions through a variety of creative forms of attentiveness towards our more-than-human worlds (photography, sound experiences, painting, written word, songs, stories).

In inviting users to engage with the question of what it means to live with human and more-than-human others in entangled worlds of precarity and uncertainty the platform seeks to garner the potential of storytelling for legitimizing and empowering diverse, local, individual and experiential connections to our common worlds.  Here we are using Deborah Bird Rose’s (2011) definition of story as a method of doing the world. The platform takes up anthropologist Anna Tsing´s invitation to cultivate “arts of noticing” (2015) and attentiveness towards our more-than-human commons, as a means of learning to sense and participate with our worlds in fuller, more complex, and engaged ways. These arts of noticing require both paying attention to the entangled worlds of human and non-human, but also of shaping meaningful responses.

Can we together imagine a nonviolent, socially just and ecologically balanced world? Can we put forth images of a world in which we live in harmony with nature, and where Human, Collective and Nature Rights are fully guaranteed? We hope this becomes a space for collective reflecting on what it would mean to learn to co-construct more caring and balanced futures for an Earth Community towards Earth Jurisprudence (Cullinan, 2002).

All suggestions and contributions are welcome!

If you wish to participate in the project, let us know!

The Untold Stories platform is part of The USFQ Speculative Hub’s Living Archive: a multi-site citizen humanities research project. As part of The Living Archive, the platform will be included in other spaces and forms of performativity beyond the online archive. This will include, place-based interventions, public galleries, academic writing, and workshops. The platform will also support environmental, nature and multi-species justice initiatives.

The Archive is covered under the Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Works Cited

Bird Rose, Deborah. 2011. Wild Dog Dreaming (Under the Sign of Nature). Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Cullinan, Cormac. 2003. Wild Law. A Manifesto for Earth Justice. Green Books.

Tsing, Anna L. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Project Team