Earth writing: the evolving role of storytelling in geographical and environmental education

Somerville, Kirsten (2026) Earth writing: the evolving role of storytelling in geographical and environmental education. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

This thesis investigates the diverse Earth writing practices of geographers and educators, and considers their implications in an era of planetary crisis. The investigation focuses on storytelling, a practice often positioned as an alternative to dominant modes of knowledge production, but one that has been inconsistently addressed in geographical and environmental education. The thesis aims to advance the conceptualisation of storytelling by historicising and problematising practices of Earth writing within these contexts. The research brings together literary, geographical, and educational perspectives: it draws particular insights from the geopoetics and ecopedagogy movements to articulate a radical vision of Earth writing as a critical-creative praxis with the potential to enact cultural transformation. This vision frames a historical analysis of Earth writing that unfolds through two parallel cuts: the first exploring scholarly debates around the writing of geography since the formalisation of the discipline; the second exploring educational engagements with storytelling since the emergence of the environmental education movement. The first “cut” traces the development of a minor tradition of geographical storytelling through the textual analysis of scholarly sources dating back to the late nineteenth century. The second is focused on a corpus of 227 educational journal and magazine articles published between 1972 and 2022, deploying the computer-assisted techniques of keyness analysis and concordance analysis alongside interpretative textual analysis to identify shifts in the dominant discourses over the fifty-year period. Four distinct discourses are identified, each promoting radically different conceptions of the pedagogical role of storytelling: story as resource, story as experience, story as way of knowing, and story as transformation. In both of these cuts, the debates in play disclose deeper struggles over the authority and agency of different actors in the reading and writing of the Earth. This inquiry contextualises the recent turn towards storytelling in geographical and environmental education, highlighting how underlying tensions and complexities within this turn must be addressed in order to realise its transformative potential.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Additional Information: Supported by Scottish Graduate School of Social Science (SGSSS) through an ESRC Studentship.
• Subjects: G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > G Geography (General); L Education > L Education (General); P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
• Colleges/Schools: College of Social Sciences > School of Education
• Supervisor's Name: Dunkley, Professor Ria and Philo, Professor Christopher
• Date of Award: 2026
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2026-86013
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 10 Jun 2026 09:47
• Last Modified: 10 Jun 2026 15:25
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.86013
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/86013

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