Retelling the Urban Fox: Collaborative Storytelling for Urban Biodiversity

In this paper, I will present the outcomes of and reflections on my project “Retelling the Urban Fox: A Collaborative Fairy Tale”, which I conducted as an Inclusion, Participation and Engagement fellow at the School of Advanced Studies, London. Through participatory, creative and digital research methods, this project sought to uncover the ways in which the writing of collaborative fairy tales with other community members influences participants’ perceptions of urban biodiversity, with a focus on urban foxes. It recruited 30 adult participants from the borough of Southwark and consisted of three stages: an initial survey assessing participants’ pre-existing associations with and emotional reactions to urban foxes; a one-day storytelling workshop, run by artist Elizabeth Dearnley, which resulted in the compilation of collaborative fairy tales about urban foxes; and a final evaluation of how the participants’ associations and emotions surrounding urban foxes had changed after the workshop.

The findings of the project give a broad range of insights into how writing fairy tales can influence humans’ perceptions of urban foxes. For example, many participants joined the project with an ambivalent and anthropocentric view on foxes, finding them “beautiful” and “cute” while at the same time perceiving them as “noisy” and “a nuisance”. These perceptions changed after the storytelling workshop: literary and sentiment analysis of survey responses indicate that participants became less interested in the foxes' aesthetic qualities, and more interested in their habitat and behaviours ("curious", "resilient", "catches mice"). At the same time participants often made a fox the protagonist of their tales, using their perspective to explore imagined, oftentimes utopian versions of their community. This hints at the possibility of leveraging urban foxes and other animals to support communities in envisioning desirable futures. In their surveys, participants said that the collaborative writing process had caused them to pay increased attention to their encounters with foxes and other animals, and had sparked curiosity about their ways of life. It also connected to them to an “imagined community” of other humans looking out for foxes, strengthening their feeling of a shared space and community.