Encountering climate vulnerability through narratives and places

This chapter advances the importance of place-based storytelling in understanding and responding to climate vulnerability. From an environmental humanities cross-disciplinary perspective that brings together methods from cultural geography and literary studies, the chapter will discuss two examples of storytelling practices that are situated in, and responsive to, place in two regional Australian communities. It does so through the lens of place and narrative based storytelling practices which are generated through collaborative, locally grounded, and more-than-human contexts. These narratives illuminate both how climate vulnerability is experienced and contested in regional places, and also how our understanding of this needs to incorporate situated, embodied, and discursive methods that extend dominant empirical and extractive frameworks. It makes the case that a storied, emplaced and community-generated understanding of climate vulnerability is a critical addition to more classically empirical approaches.