Legitimizing Experience: Embodied and Affective Knowledge Through Storytelling

This article explores how lived experience can be communicated through narrative to evoke embodied and affective understanding. Focusing on industrial tree planting in British Columbia, it combines self-observation and research-creation to examine how storytelling conveys experiential knowledge often overlooked in forest management. A vivid personal narrative highlights the sensory, emotional, and relational dimensions of planting work. Drawing on narratology, phenomenology, and affect theory, we analyze how narrative form can trigger embodied simulation in readers. We argue that such stories provide more than anecdote; they offer situated, emotionally rich insights that foster empathy and challenge dominant assumptions in forest policy. Narrative, particularly in research-creation, complements scientific knowledge by attuning readers to the visceral dimensions of environmental labor.