Urban Foraging and Digital Storytelling as Practices of World-Making for Social Change: A Case Study

This thesis explores the work of Alexis Nikole Nelson, aka @blackforager- as a case study on digital storytelling, ecological pedagogy and speculative World-Making within Communication for Development. Nelson's urban foraging and digital storytelling work is deeply relational and embodied, grounded in the land, her communities, and ancestral memory. Her joyful and accessible approach to urban foraging becomes a vehicle for participatory, decolonial learning, offering alternative narratives that challenge dominant environmental discourses shaped by whiteness, settler colonialism, and extractive capitalism. Drawing on intersecting frameworks including speculative ecofeminism, critical place-thinking, multispecies ethnography, and decolonial ecological thought, this study situates Nelson’s practice within a broader ComDev context. Rather than framing development through conventional models of intervention and expertise, Nelson enacts a pedagogy rooted in reciprocity, storytelling, and sensory experience. Her digital content, which blends humour, human/botanical history, recipes, and ecological knowledge, illustrates how culturally resonant storytelling can foster inclusive ecological imaginaries and future-oriented thinking. Nelson’s work exemplifies what Arturo Escobar (2018) describes as ontological design within the Pluriverse—“a world where many worlds fit” (Zapatista quote in Escobar, 2018, p. xvi). Her storytelling reclaims space for Black and Indigenous knowledge systems and performs a kind of joyful resistance that is deeply political, yet accessible to everyone. In a postdigital media landscape where attention is scarce, Nelson’s success demonstrates the power of hybrid, non-extractive narratives that engage audiences through delight, intimacy, and love. This thesis argues that Nelson’s praxis is a form of communication for development that centres relationality, love, multispecies kin entanglements and radical possibilities. Her “digital carrier bag” of stories and plants offers more than simply content—it provides alternative ways of being. She is foraging, assembling and negotiating possible futures. Keywords: Digital Storytelling, Ecofeminist Pedagogy, Speculative World-Making, Decolonial Communication, Multispecies Relationality