Urban Lifewor(l)ds

Footsteps, Futures, and Narrative Repair

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.59490/footprint.18.1.6932

Abstract

This article focuses on narrative encounters between people, cities, and stories, and the narrative, material, and futuristic urban plotting. It explores how people engage with narrative heritage, its objects – not just neoliberal wet dreams and dystopias, but also speculative street theatre, participatory utopian fiction, orature, or lyrics – and the practices of co-writing, reading, and listening to ask, beyond Henri Lefebvre, not simply ‘who has the right to the city’, but who can narrate its shared pasts and futures, and how. In the paper, I treat stories and urban architecture as interwoven and co-constitutive modalities of heritage preservation, destruction, repair and futurescaping, drawing attention, after Don Mitchell and Sara Zawde, to the narrative affordances of built landscapes as ‘metaphors to live by’ and to the design-making force of narratives and words. The narrative heritages I center on are, therefore, not simply literary texts but diverse narrative acts, including narrators, different media, spaces, and situated rehearsals of public and collective sci-fi storytelling, writing, and listening for togetherness and less violent futures. The article meanders across several urban narrative situations: ‘Society of the Future’ showcases designed by students after dystopian novels and urbanscapes in Boston; speculative heritage live action role-play (LARP) in the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, US; ‘wave writing’ experiments in Trondheim/Tråante, Norway; and Søstrene Suse’s Radiokino listening sessions in the footprints of Sámi Elsa Laula Renberg across Scandinavia. It concludes with a reflection on the archives of narrative ‘repair’ and urban otherworldliness as pedagogies of non-necrotic futuring.

Author Biography

Hanna Musiol, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Hanna Musiol (PhD, Northeastern) is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature and Merited Academic Educator at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and an affiliated faculty of the Human Rights Institute at State University of New York at Binghamton. Her interests include literary and transmedia aesthetics, justice, and critical pedagogy, with emphasis on migration, political ecology, and environmental and human rights. Her research and teaching practice centers on site-specific and community storytelling, and she regularly co-organizes city-scale curatorial, art, and civic engagement initiatives. Beyond transnational research networks, Musiol collaborates actively with grassroots storytelling ensembles such as Literature for Inclusion and Poetry without Borders.

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Published

2024-09-30