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.

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 is an assistant professor at Roskilde University in Denmark and a research fellow at the Institute for Circumpolar Health Research. She was previously a Trudeau Foundation Scholar.

Julia Christensen's profile page

Christopher Cox is a linguist in the First Nations Programs and Partnerships unit of Yukon Education providing support for Indigenous language education and revitalization in Yukon. He is also involved in language documentation and revitalization efforts with speakers of Tsuut'ina, a Dene language of southern Alberta, and of Plautdietsch, the traditional language of the Dutch-Russian Mennonites.

Christopher Cox's profile page

Lisa Szabo-Jones is a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar and teaches English at the University of Alberta. She is a co-founder and co-editor of The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment and Culture in Canada and co-editor, with Liza Piper, of Sustaining the West: Cultural Responses to Canadian Environments (WLU Press, 2015).

Lisa Szabo-Jones' profile page