Sustainable stories: Integrated transmedia as an ecology of storymaking Tyler Quiring: November 8, 2016 – DRAFT (please do not distribute) Transmedia storytelling is the art of world-making. - Henry Jenkins (2008, p. 21). Abstract Practitioners and scholars of environmental communication need practical, applied methods to enhance creative collaboration around sustainability science. I make a case for transmedia as an integrated approach to these complex challenges. First, I overview the emergence of integrated transmedia storytelling in media production and research, sharing examples that illustrate how it promotes engagement. I then provide a case study of my own applied transmedia project, a website called Safe Beaches, Shellfish, & You that demonstrates the potential for this method to engage publics with communication about and for environments. Finally, I call for a turn from storytelling to storymaking. I find that transmedia, as an ecology of storymaking, enhances efforts to connect researchers and stakeholders through sustainability science. Introduction As Jenkins’ line above attests, we need creative ways to build the world we want. Communication research shows that sustainability science provides interdisciplinary spaces for this type of activity (Lindenfeld et al., 2012; Sprain & Timpson, 2012). Yet there persists a need to develop accessible and engaging tools that more fully involve the public in this process. Public participation can be thought of as a family of methods for increasing democratic involvement in complex decision-making processes (Rowe & Fewer, 2000). These methods “range from those that elicit input in the form of opinions . . . to those that elicit judgments and decisions from which actual policy might be derived” (p. 7). I draw on this definition to argue that we must recognize the ways in which public actions continually shape the world in order to productively engage with these actions through science and policy. As Jenkins (2008) and others posit, this can be thought of as a process called “world-making” (p. 21), which I take to be the means by which communication shapes possibilities for action and reaction. Transmedia is emerging as a key method to promote engagement through communication. As a form of public participation, transmedia is not merely a tool to increase public understanding and acceptance of science and policy, it is also a means to actively shape science and policy with the public in mind and in hand. As I will demonstrate, integrated transmedia provides unique and to date unrealized potential for linking journalism with critical performance to address complex sustainability issues through collaboration between diverse public participants. For the purposes of this chapter, I define collaboration as a process of co- laboring undertaken by groups as diverse as sustainability scientists, policymakers, citizen scientists and decision makers, and media producers as they strive together to create new futures. As new forms of media production such as transmedia storytelling continue to emerge, they provide increased capacity for engagement among environments, people, and stories. In this chapter, I respond to the urgent need for developing new ways of approaching practical and innovative forms of environmental communication that foreground an ethical commitment to the needs of the world (Cox, 2007). In presenting this response, I explore how— by supporting communication about, for, and with environments—integrated transmedia might enhance public participation in sustainability science. I first outline the development of transmedia as a storytelling phenomenon. I then describe innovative perspectives on transmedia storytelling that highlight its growing capacity. I find that the literature focuses on three distinct