1,721,014 research outputs found
Articulating blind touch: thinking through the feet
No full textThrough reference to autobiographies of blindness and interview material with members of specialist blind and visually impaired walking groups this article aims to explore some of the problems of talking about the experience of touch. It reflects on how people with blindness are receptive to and articulate tactile impressions, and consideration is given to how the articulation of touch relates to certain discourses and stereotypes of touch and blindness. In so doing, the article highlights some of the ways in which the embodied experience of touch is mediated through language and makes the simple point that language does not simply convey tactile experience, it mediates its expression. With this research ?problem? in mind I turn to how some interview participants drew attention to their feet ? transcending the stereotype of blind touch as primarily associated with the hand. Some of the ways in which the impressions of the feet are talked about by people with blindness are revealed, including the way in which feet are part of embodied processes of immersion and forgetting as well as a source of contemplation, humor, visualization, and dreams
Non-representational approaches to body-landscape relations
No full textThis short paper offers a critical summary of some of the key themes of non-representational theory (NRT), with a particular focus on recent approaches to body-landscape relations and the potential place of disability in these accounts. NRT in British human geography has encouraged an emphasis on the embodied, practiced and habitual qualities of embodied experience. Recent non-representational work on landscape has developed these agendas to show how landscape may be thought of as a ?process? (Rose 2002) or ?tension? which potentially ?animates? the embodied subject (Rose and Wylie 2006). Here the body and the landscape are understood to be complimentary concepts that are useful to think through together ? each in a constant process of 'becoming? through the other. This paper reflects on the methodological challenges of researching such non-representational body-landscape relations, showing how researchers have drawn on insights of disciplines as diverse as neuroscience and performance studies to address this challenge
Navigating a non-representational research landscape and representing 'under-represented groups': from complexity to strategic essentialism (and back)
No full textWalking methods in landscape research: moving bodies, spaces of disclosure and rapport
Full text linkWalking methods or accompanied visits are increasingly being used to investigate people?s encounters with landscape. Walking methods are often celebrated for opening up new spaces of disclosure, building rapport and generating new knowledge of landscape. However, stating these benefits of walking as a research method has now become somewhat of a methodological orthodoxy that risks ignoring the diverse contexts and cultural circumstances within which people walk and the relational qualities of landscape. Walking methods do not simply ?uncover? people?s responses to landscape, they open particular relational spaces of ?people-landscape?. Furthermore, walking does not just open up research avenues, it closes them down too. This paper explores in more depth these propositions and the complex interplay between people (as social and embodied beings), walking and landscape. The focus is on examples drawn from walks utilised as method, walks for pleasure and walks for pilgrimage, where I propose some features of the walk and the cultural context of the walker?s body that should be given critical consideration when adopting a walking methodology. These include: the rhythm and style of the walk, the walk route terrain and distance, and the fitness and embodied dispositions of the walker. I then question further the presumed utility of ?rapport? that leisure walks and research walks are often thought to create. In so doing, this paper offers some critical insights for researchers of landscape who are considering adopting a walking methodolog
Participation, practitioners and power: community participation in North-East community forests
Full text linkThis research focuses on the nature and extent of community participation occurring in the North East Community Forests (NECF). The aims of the research were to firstly; review the current academic debate on community participation in landscape planning and management, secondly; reveal the current state of community participation within the NECF at both a strategic and local level and thirdly; consider the range of possible factors which determine the nature and extent of this community participation. This was achieved through a literature review, policy document analysis and in-depth interviews with individual NECF practitioners. Particular consideration was given to how individual practitioners might affect participatory processes. Research findings reveal participation practices within the NECF tend to focus on ?creating and enjoying? not ?planning and managing?. This local, rather than strategic approach to participation was found to be more compatible with the 90 % private land ownership that the NECF has to work with. The study concludes, that research which focuses on practitioners as forming the major barrier to enhancing community participation is unjustified in the case of the NECF. To enhance participation practice the multiple social, economic and material factors which converge to determine participatory processes within the NECF must be addressed
Walkers with visual-impairments in the British countryside: Picturesque legacies, collective enjoyments and well-being benefits
Full text linkThis paper draws on ethnographic research to explore the experiences of members of specialist blind and visually impaired walking groups who visit areas of the Peak District and Lake District, notable rural locations in Britain. For many people, a visit to these areas is associated with the apprehension of picturesque beauty through the physical faculty of sight. However, data from participant observation and interviews reveal that people also derive many other key social, well-being and health benefits by visiting and walking in these areas. This paper identifies some of these other benefits and places them within the context of recent theory that addresses therapeutic landscapes and people with visual-impairments? cultural and sensory apprehensions. The well-being experiences of visually-impaired walking participants are identified and include; exploration outside of known (usually urban) routes; reaching summits and areas that have collective symbolic value; the facilitation of social networks; and improvements in physical fitness and self-reported weight loss or maintenance. The paper combats a pervasive ocularcentrism in appraisals of British landscape and contributes to emerging debates on ?therapeutic mobilities? - a place where disability and rurality intersect
The inter-corporeal emergence of landscape: negotiating sight, blindness and ideas of landscape in the British countryside
No full textIn this paper I explore some of the ways in which people with visual impairments see landscape and participate in visual cultures of landscape apprehension. I draw on ethnographic and interview material, developed while acting as a sighted guide for specialist blind and visually impaired walking groups who visit the landscapes of the Lake District and Peak District in Britain. Through this research material I show how landscape is likely to become present for people with blindness or visual impairment through both their individual capacities for sight and a complex mix of discursive,material, social, and historical relations. Specifically, I argue that there is an intercorporeal, collective dimension to this emergence of landscape and this intercorporeality is evident at both a perceptual and a discursive level. I suggest that future research needs to attend further to how landscape emerges and becomes present through intercorporeal processes
"I don't know why they call it the Lake District they might as well call it the rock district!" The workings of humour and laughter in research with members of visually impaired walking groups
No full textHumour and laughter are socioembodied phenomena which may be evident in interview, ethnographic, or other social research settings. In this paper I argue that we should engage with humour and laughter in our research accounts, rather than simply relegate these themes to the brackets in our transcripts. Drawing upon doctoral research carried out with members of specialist visually impaired walking groups, I show how laughter and humour form a temporary sonic element to the landscapes they pass through and how laughter and humour are used to negotiate the relations between sighted guide and walker, relieve nervousness, and subvert stereotypes. I argue that recognition should be given to laughter and humour as both a conscious reflective strategy and a `nonrepresentational' embodied and contagious phenomenon, for laughter and humour are intimately connected both to the subject positions of walkers with visual impairments and to the embodied, muscular practice of walking itself. I note that, while humour is a useful individual coping strategy that gives people with blindness a sense of liberation from a notion of `the blind' as subjects of pity, laughter and humour can also betray a certain pessimism, sometimes used as a way of coping with, rather than actually challenging, some of the subtle prejudices that they face as users of rural space
Journeys in ink: re-presenting the spaces of inclusive arts practice
Full text linkThis article documents some of the imaginative and physical journeys taken by a group of performance makers during a two-week course at Northbrook College, West Sussex in July 2011. Text, photographs and artworks are used to re-present some of the journeys we have taken together as a group and the modes of marking, map making and documentation used. MB: is an inclusive arts practitioner who works with artists with learning disabilities. Mary was coordinating the course and HM: was participating as an interested Cultural Geographer. The article is written as a dialogue and is likely to be of interest to readers interested in the geographies of performance, disability, non-representational research, innovative non-verbal methods or inclusive arts practice
Guiding visually impaired walking groups: intercorporeal experience and ethical sensibilities
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