Interview: In Conversation with Dr Victoria Leslie

In this blog post, we interview Dr Victoria Leslie, who is a Research Fellow for the Diverse Marine Values Project at the University of Portsmouth. To find out more about Victoria's work, you can contact her at Victoria.leslie@port.ac.uk or follow the project hashtag on Twitter: #DiverseMarineValues

About Victoria

Dr Victoria Leslie is a Research Fellow at the University Portsmouth working on the SMMR Diverse Marine Values project. With an English Literature and Creative Writing background she is especially interested in place writing and the role of storytelling in environmental research. She is a member of AALERT (Arts and Artists in Landscape and Environmental Research Today) and also the author of a short story collection, Skein and Bone (Undertow Books) and a novel, Bodies of Water (Salt Publishing).

Q: Can you tell us about your background? What drew you to your chosen topic and why? How did your research/creative practice start to take shape?

My background is in English Literature and Creative Writing with a special interest in environmental literature, coastal folklore and New Woman literature. Many of my research interests found fruition in WetlandLIFE, an environmental research project led by the University of Greenwich and funded by NERC, AHRC, SRC and DEFRA under the Valuing Nature programme. Selected as a writer to join the team, the project considered the economic, environmental and cultural values of wetlands, allowing me to explore how narratives can convey a multiplicity of values. Over the course of the project I wrote short stories, ran creative writing workshops, created narratological installations for exhibitions and developed an initiative to turn bird hides on the Avalon Marshes into interactive creative writing spaces. The stories, poems and drawings collated from this initiative were then digitised on the WetlandLIFE website contributing to a place-based storytelling network. More details can be found on WetlandLIFE’s website including my blogposts on the project, its rationale and impact: http://www.wetlandlife.org/

Working on WetlandLIFE, within an interdisciplinary team made me realise how much I wanted to work in environmental research, as well as recognising the unique contribution the arts and humanities bring to environmental discourse and inter and transdisciplinary working. Environmental sensibilities have always driven much of my creative practice as well; the fictional worlds I am most compelled to depict are often dominated by water. Aptly, it feels as if there is a certain fluidity between my research and practice, my critical and creative thinking and disciplinary interests.

Q: What are you working on at the moment?

I am currently working on a UKRI environmental research project funded by the Sustainable Management for Marine Resources Programme (SMMR). The Diverse Marine Values project, led by the University of Portsmouth, brings together a transdisciplinary team of researchers and practitioners from within and outside of the marine research sector with the aim of eliciting community-held marine values across its three test sites: Portsmouth, Chepstow and the Shetland Islands. A particular focus on creative arts-based approaches often excluded from marine policy contexts—including filmed interviews, theatre and digital storytelling—is being employed to capture voices and create dialogue and exchange, before considering how existing marine governance can be adapted to take better account of these diverse values in policy and management decisions. I am working across a range of work packages but currently engaging local communities using film and storytelling. Significantly in this project, arts-based research is being used as a means of knowledge generation not solely as a tool for communication and dissemination, which is so often its role in interdisciplinary collaborations. I am also editing a book chapter for a monograph reflecting on the experiences of artists and writers working within environmental research and editing a short story collection inspired by much of the coastal folklore I explored as part of my PhD thesis.

Q: Can you tell us about a piece of scholarship you have read recently on the subject of ocean literacy/ coastal policy/littoral spaces that particularly inspired you?

Victoria Whitworth’s Swimming with Seals (Head of Zeus, 2017) exemplifies particularly well the merging of different literary modes: memoir, natural history, literary analyses, in exploring connection with place. Framed around Whitworth’s habit of wild swimming off Evie Beach in Orkney, the text weaves together personal experience with the author’s musings on literature and history, showcasing how creative non-fiction is particularly adept at voicing the many ways we conceptualise place. Whitworth’s book especially appeals since it draws so much on Orcadian and Shetland folklore, which reflects my own research interests and continues to speak to my current engagement with island communities and storytelling culture.

Q: What methods have you found most effective during your research?

One of the methodologies we are using to elicit community-held marine values in the Diverse Marine Values project is called Community Voice Method (CVM) - an interviewer-led approach for engaging diverse voices and creating discourse and engagement around deliberative values. This approach involves designing an interview guide and recruiting participants through snowball sampling. The documentary film that is produced as a result of the filmed interviews is used as a deliberative tool to generate further discussion in targeted workshops within the community.

Q: What is the one thing you would like our readers to know about your work? (This can be an exciting finding, an anecdote, or even a quotation).

Part of the appeal of joining the WetlandLIFE project was due to the fact wetlands are often represented in literature as foreboding and menacing places, as liminal wastelands, the domain of the monstrous and marginalised. Peter Coates refers to Cultural Ecosystems Service ‘hotspots’, as places that are valued because of a ‘link with a renowned poem, painting or novel.’ In engaging with wetlands, I began to engage with and contribute to a counternarrative. Rescuing cultural ‘coldspots’ by imbuing them with literary and artistic significance champions the power of the arts to add value to the way we interpret the world around us, but it also highlights the fact that dominant narratives and viewpoints are perpetuated time and again. These considerations certainly motivate and challenge me to think about how we tell stories about the environment.

Our blogs

Regular news and insight from our many poets, writers, educators and facilitators

Interview: In Conversation with Dr Victoria Leslie