Youths’ Storytelling through Zines as Precarious Suturing of Hope/Despair and Other Binaries (Poster 4)

• In Event: Attending to Climate and Environmental Hope, Despair, and Repair Through Storytelling

Abstract

Objectives
Zines are self-published booklets that combine art and narrative. Their history as an outlet for voices silenced in mainstream media encourages a remixing of ideas and an outlet for youth advocacy (Brown et al., 2021). We studied youths’ storytelling via zines during a critical place-based learning (CPBL) unit for middle school youth about a local creek (Gruenewald, 2003). We asked: 1) How do youths’ zines reflect and disrupt binary thinking? 2) What world-building do youth do with zines?

Framework
We developed a metaphor of precarious suturing to theorize the role storytelling can play in CPBL. Storytelling can suture different onto-epistemologies—ways of being and knowing—for healing purposes. Stories can suture nature and culture, illustrating interconnections between human and more-than-human (MTH) thriving (Hayes & Tanner, 2015). Stories can recognize healing and trauma together. Suturing may not completely heal trauma—it leaves scars. Though environmental fiction can present resources for critique and imagination of alternative futures (Phillips et al., 2022), it still often suffers from a “colonial crisis of imagination” (Truman, 2023), demonstrating the precarity of world-building.

Methods & Data Sources
From a total of 32 student projects, we analyzed the 11 zines that included fictional storytelling with exploratory (Saldaña, 2016) and motif coding (Mello, 2002) and identified three story types: hero, speculative fiction, and identity-infused stories. We chose one story illustrating each category for further analysis. Using conceptual coding (Saldaña, 2016), we analyzed youths’ descriptions of stories in interviews.

Results
Zine storytelling leveraged students’ agency to engage with environmental issues on their terms, which led to provocative world-building.
The Hero Story. A crayfish and human save a snake caught in a plastic six-pack ring. The story: 1) complicates the narrative of non-agentic nature needing rescue by agentic human saviors; 2) disrupts the “humans-bad/nature-good” narrative; and 3) illustrates the precarity of individual heroism (Figure 1).

Speculative Fiction. A crayfish, fish, and snake warn about the dangers of pollution and runoff, ending with two possible futures for Willow Creek. The story: 1) sutures real and imagined worlds; 2) portrays animals as complex beings; 3) illustrates relational futuring, highlighting relations with community, environment, and selves (Figure 2).

Identity-Infused Storytelling. A queer, blue-haired tween pairs up with two protagonists who represent mashups of DC and Marvel comic characters to fight the pumpkin, algae, and Santa Claus-like villains over creek pollution. The story: 1) draws on youths’ identities as queer, worried, comic-loving, earnest, funny teens who are also angry with adults; 2) sutures anxiety and empowerment, seriousness and humor. (Figure 3).

Significance
This study: 1) reinforces storytelling as a way to attend to youths’ climate-related anxiety; 2) suggests the importance of transdisciplinary approaches to climate and environmental education given the productivity of storytelling; 3) highlights youths’ world-building as all zines somewhat disrupted nature/culture binaries, addressed both sides of the hope/despair dialectic, and unsettled narratives of non-agentic MTHs through perspective-taking; and 4) demonstrates the promise of precarious suturing for analyzing youths’ climate-related stories.

Authors

• Heidi Carlone, Vanderbilt University

• Hannah H. Ziegler, Vanderbilt University

• Tessaly Jen, Vanderbilt University

• Zachary C. Conley, Vanderbilt University

• Blaine E. Smith, Vanderbilt University