Chapter 10 Fox tales, community concerns: why collaborative storytelling matters

Introduction

This chapter tells a story of unexpected findings, and of how remaining open to what creative critical work has to tell us can lead us down exciting new pathways. Between October 2024 and March 2025, the project ‘Retelling the Urban Fox: A Collaborative Fairy Tale’ set out to explore the power of fairy tales to impact humans’ relationships with urban biodiversity – more specifically with urban foxes. Foxes have played a central role in historical and contemporary fairy tales across different media: we find foxes in popular medieval narratives such as Reynard the Fox (twelfth century), in the character of Mr Tod in Beatrix Potter’s stories (1912), all the way to Wes Anderson’s well-known, contemporary film Fantastic Mr Fox (2009), based on Roald Dahl’s book of the same name (1970). In these tales, foxes are depicted to incorporate a multitude of different attributes, such as cunning and intelligence, but also bravery and insightfulness.

Such nuance is rarely found in public discourse on urban foxes. Despite an increase in research that acknowledges these animals as an integral part of biodiverse urban ecosystems,¹ many city-dwelling humans continue to view them as invasive and threatening ‘pests’.² The perception of urban foxes in London poses a particularly potent example for these negative associations; media discourses of recent years have reinforced one-sided narratives of urban foxes, accusing them, for instance, of carrying rabies and other dangerous diseases.³ An especially prominent assault on the reputation of urban foxes was a series of reports of alleged ‘baby-snatching’ incidents according to which these animals had broken into homes to attack babies and small children. For the most part, these claims were shown to be either unfounded or blown out of proportion;⁴ however, a study undertaken by the Daily Telegraph in reaction to one specific fox attack in 2010 suggested that it left a negative impact on city-dwellers’ perceptions of foxes, and wildlife in general.⁵

‘Retelling the Urban Fox’ sought to explore the extent to which these negative depictions were reflected in the views of the project’s participant base, and whether writing fairy tales about urban foxes, given these animals’ long-standing tradition as story protagonists, would impact these views. In literary studies, fairy tales are often attributed an ‘explanatory and utopian core’ that enables those telling or writing them to envision possible and desirable futures⁶ – a phenomenon that Marek Oziewicz terms the ‘anticipatory imagination’ evoked by folk and fairy tales.⁷ In fairy tales, an ‘intentional synthesis of magic with the concretely mundane’ takes place to tell stories that speak to contemporary concerns such as food and financial scarcity or poor family relations.⁸ In his article ‘The Meaning of Fairy Tale within the Evolution of Culture’, Jack Zipes draws on a broad range of cultural historians such as Walter Burkert to show how ‘tales can be related to basic human needs, rituals, customs, and the resolution of problems in human adaptation to changing environments’.⁹

The fairy tale’s enduring relevance in human culture – evident in a constant stream of newly produced films, video games and written fairy tales – is, to a large degree, due to its adaptability.¹⁰ In her article ‘Why Fairy Tales Matter: The Performative and the Transformative’, Maria Tatar points out how ‘the stories themselves function as shape-shifters, morphing into new versions of themselves as they are retold and as they migrate into other media’.¹¹ This quality, in turn, is rooted in its accessibility as a genre: having been traded orally and across different media for centuries, fairy tales share a set of narrative elements such as characters, tropes and types of plot progression that are recognisable even across cultural spheres,¹² making them easy to discuss and adapt in groups of people from different backgrounds. These qualities of the fairy tale have made it a popular genre for use in creative, community-based and action research. Vivian Labrie, for instance, found that using folk tales in her research gave rise to ‘fresh frames of reference that allowed collective thinking outside the box and long-lasting appropriations of specific issues’.¹³

This focus on specific issues has been applied successfully to environmental topics and issues. Both Rachel Harcourt and others, as well as Else Talgorn and Helle Ullerup, undertook studies in which participants explored desirable environmental futures by telling stories about climate adaptation from the planet’s perspective, thus encouraging empathy for non-human actors.¹⁴ In an energy research context, Sea Rotmann explored the uses of a fairy tale ‘story spine’ for the co-design of more effective behavioural interventions,¹⁵ while researchers at the University of Lancaster mobilised fairy tale characters as metaphors for existing research around renewables, cars and plastics in order to communicate energy research and facilitate adaptation processes.¹⁶

My use of fairy tales for ‘Retelling the Urban Fox’ was also based on my own research, which showcases how fairy tales were used by nineteenth-century women to engage with contemporary discourses on gender and national identity.¹⁷ As a literary scholar and cultural historian by training, I was keen to employ my skills of literary and narrative analysis within the context of creative data gathering, and to make use of the accessibility of the fairy tale – and the fox’s long-standing role within it – to examine if and how creating literature can impact community members’ views on the urban biodiversity surrounding them.

However, as the project unfolded, it became clear to me that there were broader implications emerging from it that spoke to the potential of literature, and literary research, for social and societal change. Apart from providing insights into participants’ perceptions of urban foxes, the project also provided insight into the value of literary production in the form of collaborative storytelling. As this chapter will show, the genre of the fairy tale and the ways in which participants interacted with it were central to the creative processes that emerged from the storytelling activities. This chapter will use critical reflection as well as narrative analysis on the qualitative data collected to showcase two important creative processes that emerged throughout the workshop: exploring community needs and navigating difficult conversations. In so doing, the chapter discusses the value of literature and literary research within the context of creative data collection using storytelling.

Project setup and participant base

‘Retelling the Urban Fox’ consisted of three stages. Stages one and three involved surveys, one to be completed before the storytelling workshop and one after, which asked participants to respond to a series of questions and prompts. The surveys drew on mixed methods taken from the social sciences and anthropology, as well as creative approaches to data collection. They included, for example, Likert scales which asked participants to respond to statements on urban foxes, such as ‘I am worried that urban foxes will harm people, animals or objects I care about’, indicating the extent of their agreement with the prompt on a scale from 1 to 7. A large portion of the surveys used methods of creative and poetic inquiry; for instance, participants were asked to describe an imagined situation involving an urban fox, based on an image they were provided with.¹⁸ In addition to the surveys, a fairy tale writing workshop, held in February 2025, formed the centrepiece and stage two of the project. Here, artist and storyteller Elizabeth Dearnley provided insight into the history and roles of foxes in folk and fairy tales since the Middle Ages.¹⁹ Workshop participants were then invited to compose individual vignettes on urban foxes using prompts provided by rolls of a dice. Groups of participants were then formed and collaboratively wrote their own fairy tales on urban foxes, some of which will be cited in this chapter. By combining quantitative methods with creative ones in this way, I sought to retain ‘complexity, ambiguity and openness’, which Cate Watson names as the prime benefits resulting from creative methods such as poetic enquiry.²⁰

This project’s participant base was located in Southwark, a highly diverse borough in the south-east of London;²¹ apart from being a participatory project, the storytelling workshop brought community members from different backgrounds together in the premises of the Centre for Wildlife Gardening, run by the London Wildlife Trust. In this way, participants were not only able to meet and interact with each other, but also engaged with a free-of-cost nature resource in their area which, itself, draws on community members and volunteers to ensure its continuing existence.

Participants were recruited via a range of social media channels (including the Nextdoor app and local Facebook groups), newsletters (for example, Southwark Cathedral) and physical posters placed in libraries and on public notice boards. In spite of the £100 recompensation offered in the hope of recruiting participants with a wide range of views on urban foxes, most participants (85%) arrived with an overall favourable view on these animals, according to Likert scales included in the project’s first survey. For potential future iterations of this project, it would be interesting to run more targeted rounds of recruitment in order to attain a more balanced range of views and assess the impact this has on the tales created by participants.

Exploring community issues: subverting and abiding by the fairy tale form

We are on Rye Lane. A family of foxes goes up to the bin to have a little rummage, and finds the latest edition of Southwark News. The headline says: ‘Southwark Takes a Stand on Bin Menaces’, with a picture of a fox rummaging through a bin. The council wants to get rid of the bins and replace them with new ones with lids on them. The foxes are very angry, because this is where they get some of their food, and they are being portrayed as evil, and that’s not who they are. So they rally foxes across London, and they have a meet at Peckham Levels and they make a really compelling speech to organise a protest. They get together and make placards, one says ‘Don’t bin us off’, another ‘The bin proposal is a load of rubbish!’. And they march together to Tooley Street where the council is, and they are chanting and gathering a lot of momentum. The councillors are all cats. They are domesticated and they don’t understand wildlife, they don’t understand the nature of the fox. They are quite rattled by this protest, and so they hold a cabinet meeting. The cats realise during their meeting that if they get rid of the bins the foxes will eat the mice, and no mice will be left for the cats. So they agree to negotiate, and in the end, the foxes get to keep the bins, and in return, they help keep the city clean and help with recycling.

The above tale, transcribed from an audio recording taken of the workshop, is a striking example of how the process of creating fairy tales was used by participants to explore fictionalised issues and needs within their community, and how one might engage with these. In this tale, urban foxes take on the role of a marginalised community group within a hyperlocal setting. They are ostracised by the council for their eating habits, which are, it seems, wilfully misunderstood by the council of cats, and presented as coming from malicious intent. The foxes’ final protest leads to a deal with the cats in which both parties play their part in protecting the other’s priorities – food on the one hand, tidy streets on the other.

Though it may not appear this way at first sight, many common elements of the fairy tale can be observed in this story. While there isn’t one exemplary definition of the ‘fairy tale’ genre, the most well-known stories – such as those collected and edited by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm – often feature protagonists from disadvantaged or marginalised backgrounds.²² These protagonists are often faced with a challenge that forces them to venture out into the world and out of their comfort zone; they tackle the challenge, often over the course of several escalating stages, until they finally overcome it at the end of the narrative. Oftentimes, a moral lesson is conveyed through the ending: in the case of our story here, the ending speaks to the value of resistance and community organisation, but also to the value of compromise to facilitate peaceful coexistence.

While these common fairy tale elements are used as a skeletal structure in our tale, certain genre paradigms have also been subverted: there are no magical processes involved – though talking and protesting animals could be seen as magical, they are clearly anthropomorphised here and are, as such, a stand-in for humans – and the generic feudal background of Grimms’ fairy tales is replaced with the highly specific one of Peckham’s Rye Lane. In many well-known fairy tales, the protagonist is saved or protected by a miraculous higher power – this applies to the Grimms’ iteration of Cinderella, for example, wherein the protagonist’s dead mother acts as a giver of glorious garments that enable her daughter to dance at the prince’s balls. In the tale of Iron John, the princely protagonist is provided with a horse, armour and weapons by the mysterious Eisenhans, which assist him in overcoming all trials thrown at him, ultimately leading him to riches and a prosperous marriage. In our Peckham fox tale, the protagonists’ ultimate success builds on their ability to organise and argue convincingly, rather than on external assistance. There is also no individual hero or heroine in this tale; in fact, the foxes could not have achieved success if they had not acted as a group. In this way, the story also differs from many nineteenth-century examples of the genre in which the plot follows the fate of an individual character.

In Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, Jack Zipes has shown how fairy tales across history have been used as a fundamentally subversive genre insofar as all fairy and folk tale narratives have been born out of a ‘historically explicable desire to overcome oppression and change society’. However, he also rightly points out that most widely traded fairy tales ultimately affirm or only marginally improve pre-existing conditions by largely following similar story patterns, including the well-known trope of the ‘happy end’ in which the morally good are rewarded and the morally bad are punished.²³ The subversion of central genre paradigms of the fairy tale therefore has a role to play in drawing added attention to certain story elements that disrupt the ‘status quo’.

In the above fairy tale, using urban foxes as protagonists has led participants to break the ‘social contract’ that is the genre of fairy tales in specific ways: the world of magic and supernatural assistance has been replaced with a contemporary, hyperlocal reality, and social struggle is explicitly depicted.²⁴ This is to say: we are not following the story of an individual fox who, through a mixture of wit, good morals and external help, changes their individual fate to good fortune, but we are witnessing the playing out of systemic social issues between groups in a specific urban setting.

The change in setting is relevant in that it disrupts two further key elements of the ‘classic’ fairy tale: the hero’s departure into a different land and the ‘fundamentally acartographical space’ within which fairy tales so often take place.²⁵ Vladimir Propp has defined the hero’s venturing into a ‘different kingdom’ as one of the functions of the fairy tale: the different kingdom is a nameless, usually generic, land in which the challenges facing the hero can take place.²⁶ In our example fox tale, the adventure remains within the confines of Peckham; in fact, the challenges faced by the foxes concern the imagined future of this area. We encounter buildings and landmarks that participants perceive as central to Peckham’s character, such as Rye Lane – the area’s main shopping street – and Peckham Levels, a converted parking garage filled with creative studios and meeting spaces. The foxes and cats grapple with the conditions within these spaces, and the nature of their challenges are far from magical: waste management, littering and recycling.

While all of these changes to the fairy tale fabric can be read as subversive, one may well ask, at the same time, why participants chose this setting and these issues for their fairy tale, as they were not prompted to do so in the workshop. Rather than using subversion to disenchant the fairy tale genre, there may be reason to suggest that Peckham and its bin issues are being enchanted by their insertion into a fairy tale. Fairy tales can reframe places and turn them into spaces where the most unlikely events – a form of magic, we might say – can happen. This has been shown by Aslıhan Şenel and Ece Yetim, for instance, in their ‘Spatialized Myths’ project in which myths and fairy tales were used as a medium to address individual urban experiences and resistance against Gaziantep’s gentrification. This process included a rewriting of historical and contemporary myths through a shadow performance put on by participants, which enabled the apparition of ‘silence’ to emerge as a part of urban life – a seemingly unlikely thing to find in urban spaces.²⁷ In our fox tale, Peckham is shrouded in the fairy tale form in the same way to enable the protagonists to find and execute unlikely, perhaps even magical, solutions – after all, when has a single protest ever changed a council’s mind? At the same time, by being written into a fairy tale narrative, the events in Peckham are endowed with a ‘universal’ relevance accumulated by this genre due to its longstanding existence and cross-cultural transferability.²⁸

This is true especially with regards to the social struggles described in the tale. The fairy tale genre is used here by participants to outline the dynamics of a social struggle without pointing towards human parties that could correspond with the animal actors. Certain aspects of this struggle are heightened and emphasised in a comical way, such as the foxes’ carrying of placards with witty puns. Other aspects, however, appear more pronounced, even absurd, when acted out by animals within a fairy tale framework. The fact that everyday citizens, represented by the urban foxes, and council members, represented by the cats, are depicted as different species gives some insight into views on political representation and participation present within this group of writers. It appears strange that a species with entirely different dietary needs and preferences would be elected to represent a community in which urban foxes form a significant part of the population. The cats are ‘domesticated’ and ‘do not understand wildlife’, meaning they are ill-equipped to understand the needs of at least one significant part of their borough’s population. The conflict between foxes and cats also appears grossly imbalanced not only in terms of power structures, but also regarding their respective demands within the ‘hierarchy of needs’²⁹ – the foxes’ food source is being threatened due to what is, presumably, a need for tidiness on Peckham’s streets. Viewing all of these aspects together, we can see how the fairy tale form and its fantastical elements – in this case anthropomorphised animals – were used by participants to explore aspects of social struggles present at the level of local government; at the same time, this tale provides a hopeful outlook on community action which aligns with Jeannine Blackwell’s outlook on fairy tales as a fundamentally utopian medium.

This utopian drive comes not only from the positive action depicted in the tale, but from reading its creation as an empowered act of placemaking. Historically, fairy tales have played an important role in shaping the identities of ‘places’ as defined by Doreen Massey, who writes that as opposed to spaces, places are ‘always constructed out of articulations of social relations which are not only internal but which link to elsewhere’.³⁰ For Massey, ‘elsewhere’ constitutes the global as opposed to the local, both of which contribute contesting interpretations of a landscape’s past towards a ‘place’, a conglomerate of stories relating to a space.³¹ In the particular case of the fairy tale, we may also view these stories as iterations of ‘elsewhere’: while not historic documents, fairy tales have nevertheless been traded as culturally ‘authentic’ tales that have tangibly changed the perceived identity of many places, including cities – one famous example being the German city of Hamelin, where the tale of the notorious Pied Piper is set. By drawing on and subverting the fairy tale tradition, the collaborative authors of our fox tale are thus intervening in the cultural and historical ‘constitution of the present’, adding a storied concept to Peckham’s conglomerate of ever-developing interpretations that make up a place.³²

Navigating difficult conversations through the fairy tale

In the Kingdom of Southwark, in the Hamlet of Peckham, is where our story is set. As the sun came up one morning, the geese of Goose Green decided to take Fox Kennel Hill for themselves. After a successful breeding season, they needed space for their golden eggs. They had already successfully taken Peckham Rye Park without any trouble from the poor pigeons, robins, and blue tits. The foxes had always lived peacefully on Fox Kennel Hill, though these days they were free not to live in kennels. Clever and handsome, they spent their days reading and beautifying, generally being kind to their community and helping the less fortunate. Geese on the other hand were greedy and kept to themselves, wanting land for their golden eggs. The foxes come up with a plan to capture the geese as they try to take Fox Kennel Hill. They wonder whether to eat them, but instead, a council meeting of all the animals is held, presided over by the owl. The decision is made that the foxes keep Fox Kennel Hill, the geese get Goose Green, and any excess eggs get divided out.

In this section, I will focus on fairy tales as a means of facilitating collaborative engagement with difficult and controversial subjects. The above tale carries significant social subtext: the geese of Peckham are rapidly expanding their territory with the help of their golden eggs, displacing smaller local species such as robins, pigeons and blue tits. The foxes, threatened with a similar fate, resort to capturing the geese and are faced with the decision of whether to eradicate them by eating them. The resolution is not dissimilar to that of the previous tale: a council meeting is held, and an agreement is reached which involves the assignment of specific plots of land to different species and what is, in essence, the destruction of ‘excess’ goose eggs to curb the uncontrolled spread of these birds.

In this tale, we may read the events taking place as signifying a variety of themes and issues. Within the south-east London context of the story, the geese may stand for the societal forces of gentrification, foreign investment or, in a more problematic reading, members of a specific ethnic group. The geese’s targeted spreading of eggs may remind us of the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory proliferated by far-right groups across Europe and the US which, in confluence with the ‘Eurabia’ conspiracy theory, predicts an Islamic takeover of Europe through, among other things, the purchase of property and high birth rates.³³ Indeed, all of these aspects, including the aforementioned conspiracy theories, were discussed as part of the group’s writing process, as I was able to glean from my workshop observations and recordings.

Although ‘Retelling the Urban Fox’ did not include plans for a wider publication of the tales beyond an academic context, I found myself feeling alarmed at the emergence and likely inclusion of potentially discriminating narratives in the fairy tales produced during the project. Over the course of history, fairy tales have been used as means of conveying and masking political messaging in equal measure. For example, the Nazi regime in Germany used fairy tales and mythology liberally to indoctrinate both children and adults with national socialist propaganda,³⁴ and the Soviet Union spread communist propaganda in the same way.³⁵ This form of fairy tale usage is not confined to the past; Ashton Kingdon, in her recently published work The World White Web, shows how contemporary propaganda shares structural similarities with historical representations of oppressed groups and describes how the far right have co-opted normative culture, including fairy and folk tales, to conceal racialised messages.³⁶ Fairy tales lend themselves to such appropriation due to a variety of factors, including their alleged familiarity and simplicity, and the adaptability of the symbolism used in these stories. In essence, the usage of fairy tales for ideological means is so historically engrained and widespread that participants may not have been consciously producing a tale along such lines, but merely reproducing or imitating stories they had read before.

However, as I overheard this group during their work and later listened to workshop recordings, a much more nuanced understanding of their process presented itself. The group members actively – and sometimes quite heatedly – discussed, for example, the notion of allegedly high Muslim birth rates indirectly through their storytelling process by disagreeing on whether or not the element of the golden eggs should be included. The representation of the foxes in the story was another source of difference across the group, as participants disagreed on which activities should mark them as the positively depicted protagonists of the story. Some felt that ‘reading’ and ‘beautifying’ shouldn’t be seen as markers of positive behaviour and were, in fact, quite ‘middle-class’ behaviours. In this way, the discussions had between group members gestured towards differing views not only on diversity within the local community, but also on gentrification and to what extent the middle class should be depicted as positive.

Both the ‘product’ and the process surrounding this fairy tale raise several important points for reflection. On the one hand, this anecdote may lead us to think about the potential of collaborative storytelling for addressing and discussing sensitive topics such as race and class, specifically in groups wherein participants may have differing opinions. When the group presented its fairy tale at the end of the workshop, participants, despite having previously been involved in a somewhat heated discussion, remained relaxed around and supportive of each other; this could be seen in their body language as well as in the way they recounted their experience of the workshop afterwards. On the other hand, some participant reflections suggested that writing in the fairy tale genre may have drawn out and encouraged a binary ‘good versus evil’ narrative such as the one produced by the group:

[…] had we been asked to write about humans, I think you would have got much more specific and therefore less revealing stories. For example, I cannot imagine a participant so boldly telling a story about humans having too many babies and forcing out the local indigenous population, even though this was absolutely the moral of the aforementioned golden eggs story. This psychological displacement onto the fox, along with the childhood connection with fairytales perhaps encouraging a feeling of play and whimsy that would otherwise have been absent/inappropriate, and the simple (simplistic?) good-vs-evil requirements of the fairytale genre encouraging broad sweeping narratives, led to a subconscious spillage on our parts that was very interesting to witness.

Did the ‘feeling of play and whimsy’ and ‘psychological displacement’ mentioned here facilitate a productive, cross-ideological discussion, or did the fairy tale form merely function as a well-known vehicle that encourages, perhaps even strengthens, pre-existing binary worldviews? The participant’s statement that the fairy tale itself encourages ‘broad sweeping narratives’ should be questioned, given the genre’s subversive potential, as explored by participants in the previous tale. Nevertheless, perhaps it should be seen as worrying that some participants so easily and readily latched on to such a simplistic iteration of the fairy tale.

These questions feed into wider discourses of process and product, the relationship between the two, and whether we deem one or the other more important within the context of creative participatory research. The heated discussions within the group in question and their collaborative creative process produced ‘emergent knowing’ in participants: lasting personal knowledge regarding how their respective voices relate to each other as well as embodied and affective knowledge. In this way, arts-based research such as this project contributes to ‘the negotiation of knowledge across voices, and thus carries the promise of radically destabilising traditional knowledge hierarchies’, as Louise Phillips, Maria Bee Christensen-Strynø and Lisbeth Frølunde have stated.³⁷ Inger Lise Oelrich writes on these qualities of storytelling in particular within the context of cross-ideological conversations:

Storytelling is an eminent way of bringing hidden stories, often difficult stories, into the light of day. […] Storywork exercises strengthen the experience of human connection, creating a common ground between people who normally do not sit together and listen to each other. Storywork addresses the growing erosion of social cohesion and sense of belonging that are at the roots of much personal suffering, conflict and violence today.³⁸

While Phillips, Christensen-Strynø and Frølunde discuss ‘traditional knowledge hierarchies’ with a view towards academic knowledge and impact, we might use their thinking as a lens that helps us read Oelrich’s writing as a call to destabilise social knowledge hierarchies: to replace the hierarchies of who ‘sits together’ with the emergent knowings that result from connection. There are no guaranteed or necessarily tangible ‘outputs’ from this knowing. Applying outcome-oriented research methods to measure the ‘impact’ of the conversations between participants on their respective ideologies would mean funnelling emergent knowing into a system interested only in pre-determined criteria of success. Particularly when faced with sensitive or controversial issues, this uncontrollable quality of emergent knowing can be very unsettling for researchers and participants alike. Nevertheless, the importance of creating spaces in which emergent knowing can arise is becoming increasingly evident in times of ever-deepening digital silos, societal divides and radicalisation. Emergent knowing can foster empathy and bridge divides specifically because it creates awareness and experiential knowledge without demanding pre-determined actions as a result. The specifics of the fairy tale – or lack thereof, narratologically speaking – make this genre an especially valuable one for creating this kind of knowledge. I have already addressed how fairy tale symbolism can liberate stories from the constraints of realism and, at the same time, enchant realist locations and events, imbuing them with a universal relevance. These attributes of the genre can be useful when bringing people together who ‘do not normally sit together’, as they temporarily remove those specifics from stories which so often – as we see in news and social media landscapes – are used as part of narratives of otherness and separation. Therefore, exploring more deeply the potential of the fairy tale in engaging humans with different viewpoints that may be uncomfortable to them could prove a valuable future angle for research, both from a fairy tale studies and a social sciences perspective.

Having said this, I must also admit that I did not foresee the emergence of sensitive topics such as conspiracy theories in the workshop, given its intended focus on participants’ views on urban foxes. I was, therefore, not ideally prepared to account for the potential harmful consequences of the collaborative process or product of this group. There is no doubt that the tale presented by these participants carries symbolisms that may have caused upset to certain groups, including some of the participants involved in this research project. For potential future iterations of this project, I would set up the workshop explicitly for cross-ideological dialogue through fairy tales; this would involve implementing more rigorous safeguards against discriminatory use of language and symbolism, and explicit invitations to participants to reflect on the binary of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ that some fairy tales can establish.

Conclusion and outlook: fairy tales, literature and the potential for change

‘Retelling the Urban Fox’ initially set out to explore the impact of collaborative storytelling on participants’ perceptions of urban foxes. While some insights on this were gained that have not been addressed here, it was even more interesting to observe how the creative methods used toppled my more positivist, linear research framing and encouraged me to showcase instead the creative processes participants developed during the workshop. While proponents of creative research methods, such as Patricia Leavy, have been arguing for years that these approaches can foster more diverse, unexpected and ethical research insights,³⁹ it is still worth reflecting on the specifics that led to this transformation in focus. For one thing, participatory research requires an ever-open and flexible mindset if one is to honour the emergent knowledge produced by participants during a creative process. In this case, participant engagement with the writing process was lively, engaged, sometimes divisive – in short, it exposed fairy tales as a source of emergent knowing which would have been foolish to ignore.

In addition, I believe that being a literary researcher by training allowed me to assess the fairy tales produced by participants as texts in their own right, rather than merely as vehicles for potential attitudinal change. The process of close reading is itself, in many ways, an open-ended and creative process which, in conjunction with my observational data, led me beyond the boundaries of pre-determined outcomes. Having little previous training in social science methods was, in this context, quite liberating, as it felt possible to shift my focus in this way without feeling like I was ‘doing it wrong’. It was interesting to see how, in line with the focus of the project, my internal stance also changed: from seeing myself as a literary researcher struggling to be a social scientist, to seeing the value literary research had to add to social sciences methods. Having a shifting research framework and question comes with its challenges, particularly with regards to preparedness in situations like those that arose in the context of the second tale presented here. Despite these difficulties, for the reasons outlined in this chapter I can only recommend approaching a creative research project from a place of curiosity, rather than absolute preparedness.

Having thus shifted in its focus of inquiry, this chapter has explored how collaborative storytelling – creating fairy tales, in this case on urban foxes – can evoke reflective and exploratory creative processes in participant groups which find expression in their literary creations. I have demonstrated how participants played with central elements of the fairy tale genre by abiding by and subverting them to explore issues of social struggle within Peckham, while at the same time upholding the genre’s utopian function. The fairy tale was used by participants to engage with sensitive topics such as gentrification and conspiracy theories; here, I highlighted how collaborative storytelling can act as a process-oriented space for inter-ideological exchange, though care needs to be taken as to how to safeguard such spaces appropriately.

This project can serve as a rich point of departure into further research regarding the potential role of collaborative fairy tale creation for change. Much research involving fairy tale creation is focused on children and their development; while this avenue is, of course, important, ‘Retelling the Urban Fox’ has shown the many possible uses of fairy tales in creative research with adults.⁴⁰ The analysis and reflections here encourage us to perform further studies in which participants reflect more deeply on their relationships with the fairy tale genre and its connection to place: what does it mean to write a fairy tale based in a specific neighbourhood, a specific city? How does this change how we think about the genre, and how does the genre change how we think about the space? There may also be rich potential for larger-scale studies with adults in which participants with differing political viewpoints are brought together with the aim of co-creating fairy tales. In our current divisive and divided times, exploring the fairy tale as a resource for social healing would seem particularly pertinent. While collaborative processes are never as simple as creating empathy or changing viewpoints overnight, it would be interesting to see the changes in participants’ attitudes over time, perhaps over a series of workshops. As outlined previously, such a project would also need to encourage participants to think more critically about how fairy tales can entrench dichotomic thinking and perhaps explore specifically subversive modes of fairy tale production.

Notes

1.   Richard Inger, and others, ‘Ecological Role of Vertebrate Scavengers in Urban Ecosystems in the UK’, Ecology and Evolution, 6.19 (2016), pp. 7015–23; Ian Douglas and David Goode, ‘Urban Natural Histories to Urban Ecologies: The Growth of the Study of Urban Nature’, in The Routledge Handbook of Urban Ecology, ed. by Ian Douglas and others (Routledge, 2010), pp. 74–83.

2. Sandra E. Baker, and others, ‘Not in My Backyard: Public Perceptions of Wildlife and “Pest Control” in and Around UK Homes, and Local Authority “Pest Control”’, Animals, 10.2 (2020), p. 222.

3. ‘Deadly Urban Fox Disease Spreading to Dogs’, Daily Mail, 6 April 2011; ‘Urban Foxes Are a Health Hazard, and We Should Not Be Told to Feed Them’, Daily Telegraph, 8 October 2013.

4. Peter Crowden, ‘If These Disease-Ridden Vermin KILL a Child Next Time, Blame the Fools Who Think They’re Cuddly’, Daily Mail, 11 February 2013; Kate Stewart and Matthew Cole, ‘The Creation of a Killer Species: Cultural Rupture in Representations of “Urban Foxes” in UK Newspapers’, in Critical Animal and Media Studies: Communication for Nonhuman Animal Advocacy, ed. by Núria Almiron, Matthew Cole, and Carrie P. Freeman (Routledge, 2015), pp. 124–7; Angela Cassidy and Brett Mills, ‘ “Fox Tots Attack Shock”: Urban Foxes, Mass Media and Spatial Boundaries’, Environmental Communication, 6.4 (2012), pp. 494–511.

5. ‘Fox Attack Leaves 1 in 5 Afraid of Wildlife’, Daily Telegraph, 2 September 2010.

6. Jeannine Blackwell, ‘Fractured Fairy Tales: German Women Authors and the Grimm Tradition’, The Germanic Review, 62.4 (1987), pp. 162–74 (p. 163).

7. Marek Oziewicz, ‘Introduction: The Choice We Have in the Stories We Tell …’, in Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media, ed. by Marek Oziewicz, Brian Attebery, and Tereza Dědinová (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022), pp. 1–12 (p. 4).

8. Blackwell, ‘Fractured Fairy Tales’, p. 163; Dorothy Noyes, ‘Fairy-Tale Economics: Scarcity, Risk, Choice’, Narrative Culture, 2.1 (2015), pp. 1–26 (pp. 2–3).

9. Jack Zipes, ‘The Meaning of Fairy Tale within the Evolution of Culture’, Marvels & Tales, 25.2 (2011), pp. 221–43 (p. 238).

10. See, for instance, Disney’s recent remake of Snow White (2025), the fairy tales videogames Cinders (2014) and The Wolf Among Us (2013), or Ry Herman’s This Princess Kills Monsters (2025).

11. Maria Tatar, ‘Why Fairy Tales Matter: The Performative and the Transformative’, Western Folklore, 69.1 (2010), pp. 55–64 (p. 56).

12. Jack Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre (Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 25–8.

13. Vivian Labrie, ‘Activism’, in The Routledge Companion of Media and Fairy-Tale Studies, ed. by Pauline Greenhill and others (Routledge, 2018), pp. 93–102 (p. 93).

14. Rachel Harcourt, and others, ‘Envisioning Climate Change Adaptation Futures Using Storytelling Workshops’, Sustainability, 13.12 (2021), p. 6630; Elise Talgorn and Helle Ullerup, ‘Invoking “Empathy for the Planet” through Participatory Ecological Storytelling: From Human-Centered to Planet-Centered Design’, Sustainability, 15.10 (2023), p. 7794.

15. Sea Rotmann, ‘ “Once Upon a Time …” Eliciting Energy and Behaviour Change Stories Using a Fairy Tale Story Spine’, Energy Research & Social Science, 31 (2017), pp. 303–10.

16. Carolynne Lord, Katherine Ellsworth-Krebs, and Torik Holmes, ‘ “Telling Tales”: Communicating UK Energy Research Through Fairy Tale Characters’, Energy Research & Social Science, 101 (2023), p. 103100.

17. Anja Rekeszus, German Women Writers’ Fairy Tales of the 19th Century: Transcultural Tales, Political Agendas (De Gruyter, forthcoming 2026).

18. Cate Watson, ‘Staking a Small Claim for Fictional Narratives in Social and Educational Research’, Qualitative Research, 11.4 (2011), pp. 395–408 (p. 399).

19. For information on Elizabeth’s art installations, projects and publications, please consult her website, https://elizabethdearnley.co.uk [accessed 17 June 2026].

20. Watson, ‘Staking a Small Claim’, p. 399.

21. ‘Retelling the Urban Fox’ was executed during my time as an Inclusion, Participation and Engagement (IPE) Fellow at the School of Advanced Study. Concentrating the project within a single borough fulfilled the scheme’s aim and ethos to increase community participation in and engagement with research.

22. Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale (Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 76.

23. Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (Routledge, 2012), p. 8.

24. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 106.

25. W. F. H. Nicolaisen, ‘The Past as Place: Names, Stories, and the Remembered Self’, Folklore, 102.1 (1991), pp. 3–15 (p. 5).

26. Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale, trans. by Laurence Scott and ed. by Louis A. Wagner (University of Texas Press, 2003), p. 50.

27. Aslıhan Şenel and Ece Yetim, ‘Shadowing Silence: A Spatial Rewriting of Myths and Fairytales’, The February Journal, 1.2 (2023), pp. 139–60.

28. Jack Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre (Routledge, 2006), pp. 41–2.

29. A. H. Maslow, ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’, Psychological Review, 50.4 (1943), pp. 370–96.

30. Doreen Massey, ‘Places and Their Pasts’, History Workshop Journal, 39 (1995), pp. 182–92 (p. 186).

31. Doreen Massey, For Space (Sage Publications, 2005), p. 265.

32. Massey, ‘Places’, p. 190.

33. Eirikur Bergmann, Conspiracy & Populism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 123–49.

34. See, for instance, Christa Kamenetsky, Children’s Literature in Hitler’s Germany: The Cultural Policy of National Socialism (Ohio University Press, 1984), pp. 91–104; Judith K. Proud ‘Occupying the Imagination: Fairy Stories and Propaganda in Vichy France’, The Lion and the Unicorn, 22.1 (1998), pp. 18–43.

35. Maria Nikolajeva, ‘Fairy Tales in Society’s Service’, Marvels & Tales, 16.2 (2002), pp. 171–87.

36. Ashton Kingdon, The World White Web: Uncovering the Hidden Meanings of Online Far-Right Propaganda (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), pp. 143–75.

37. Louise Phillips, Maria Bee Christensen-Strynø, and Lisbeth Frølunde, ‘Arts-Based Co-Production in Participatory Research: Harnessing Creativity in the Tension Between Process and Product’, Evidence & Policy, 18.2 (2022), pp. 391–411 (pp. 407–8).

38. Inger Lise Oelrich, ‘Seeking a Common Ground: Storytelling and Social Healing’, in Routledge International Handbook of Therapeutic Stories and Storytelling, ed. by Clive Holmwood, Sue Jennings, and Sharon Jacksties (Routledge, 2022), pp. 204–12 (p. 204).

39. Patricia Leavy, Method Meets Arts: Arts-Based Research Practice (Guilford Press, 2020), pp. 10–13; see also Sophie Woodward, Harriet Shortt, and Su-Ming Khoo, ‘Cultivating Connections, Disrupting Boundaries: Introducing the Journal of Creative Research Methods’, Journal of Creative Research Methods, 1.1 (2025), pp. 2–17 (pp. 2–5).

40. See, for instance, Eliot Schrefer, ‘Where is the Place for Seagrass and Weevils in Children’s Literature?’, in Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media, ed. by Marek Oziewicz, Brian Attebery, and Tereza Dědinová (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022), p. 88; Kristin Wardetzky, ‘The Structure and Interpretation of Fairy Tales Composed by Children’, The Journal of American Folklore, 103.408 (1990), pp. 157–76; María Palmira Massi and Adriana Marcela Benvenuto, ‘Using Fairy Tales to Develop Reading and Writing Skills’, The CATESOL Journal, 13.1 (2001), pp. 161–72.

References