Taking a hike: Exploring leisure walkers embodied experiences

This paper uses walk along interviewing to investigate embodied experiences of walking on the South Downs Way, a long distance trail in southern England. Using a qualitative methodology - encompassing 93 walk-along interviews and auto-ethnographic reflections of two walker/researchers - it explores how walkers conceptualise their own walking experiences and captures this information while they are walking. It contributes to and extends the emerging body of literature which explores people’s experience, specifically aiming to develop a deeper understanding of leisure walking experiences in the dynamic space of the walk. It examines a range of bodily sensations and emotional states associated with the leisure walking experience in the context of temporal and environmental aspects, identifying those feelings that are innate and those which are mediated by external conditions. Current experiences intertwine with memories of other places and times in a process where connections are made between mind, body, the immediate physical environment, self and others, and disconnections from everyday life and the wider environment. These connections and disconnections create a sense of perspective, achievement and well-being

Human factors in the design of sustainable built environments

Scientific research provides convincing evidence that climate change is having significant impacts on many aspects of life. In the built-environment domain, regulatory requirements are pushing the challenges of environmental, economic, and social sustainability at the core of the professional agenda, although the aims of carbon reduction and energy conservation are frequently given a priority over occupants' comfort, well-being, and satisfaction. While most practitioners declare to embrace sustainability as a driver of their professional approach, a general lack of integrated creative and technical skills hinders the design of buildings centred on articulate and comprehensive sustainability goals, encompassing, other than energy criteria, also human-centred and ethical values founded on competent and informed consideration of the requirements of the site, the programme, and the occupants. Built environments are designed by humans to host a range of human activities. In response, this article aims to endorse a sustainable approach to design founded on the knowledge arising from scholarly and evidence-based research, exploring principles and criteria for the creation and operation of human habitats that can respond to energy and legislative demands, mitigate their environmental impacts, and adapt to new climate scenarios, while elevating the quality of experience and delight to those occupying them

Into the divide: community identities and the visualisation of place

This article discusses the experience of place in a profoundly divided urban area of Sheffield. At a time when the gap between affluence and poverty has reached its widest point since the 1960s, this paper explores the relationship between individuals and their sense of place and of the trenchant divisions separating communities. The study employs various methods but centres upon the use of hand drawn maps; creating a dialogue between the interviewers and a number of local residents. These maps and the accompanying commentaries demonstrate the diverse individual sense of a particular place and a dialectical sense of space. The resulting picture is one of both the persistence of historical divisions, suggesting regulation and control through planning and policing, but also of complex entanglements of social identities, habitus and place which defy easy categorisiation

“Far Back in American Time”: Culture, Region, Nation, Appalachia, and the Geography of Voice

This paper develops a geography of voice in order to address the ways in which cultures, regions and nations are imagined, figured and defined. It adopts Connor’s (2000) notion of ‘vocalic space’ as a starting point from which to explore folk song collecting practices in Appalachia. It develops this in relation to Bauman and Briggs (2003) post-colonial critique of the status of language and speech in ethnographic theory. Historically the Appalachian region has received substantial ethnographic cultural study. Working with insights supplied by the collecting activities and subsequent writings of two key collectors – Cecil Sharp (1859-1924) and Alan Lomax (1915-2002)– this paper offers a socio-material conception of voice key to its affective politics, whilst examining historical theorisations. These are firstly, derived from folklore and ethnography, later anthropology and sociology and secondly, articulated with regard to geographies of region and nation. These are then considered in relation to geographer James Duncan’s (1980, 1998) critique of the ‘superorganic’ as an explanation of regional cultural distinctiveness. It concludes by arguing that a geography of voice can contribute to critical approaches to regionalism. An understanding of how vocalic spaces are figured and assembled is key to explaining how culture can be translated through levels of abstraction in ways which can marginalise and disenfranchise the very peoples given voice in regional studies of culture

Ear Trumpet

Gobbledegook Theatre’s Ear Trumpet is a site-responsive outdoor theatre performance in which a team of “sonic investigators” have discovered pockets of sound, trapped in the Earth beneath our feet. The show allows audiences to listen, using “ear trumpets”, a collection of recycled trumpets, trombones and gramophone horns that have been re-purposed as listening devices. In this paper, Dr Jon Croose describes the aurality of Ear Trumpet through a qualitative, practice-led methodology of first-person performance-as-research, interviews with the artists, and analysis of audience response. The essay considers Augoyard & Torgue’s notion of ‘sharawadji’ in Ear Trumpet in terms of ‘sonic effect’ (2006, xv; 8) arising, the author argues, from its encouragement of ‘the consciousness of early listening,’ (2006, 13) and through a combination of the sonic effects of anamnesis, de-contextualisation, de-localisation, attraction, phototonie and quotation. The paper considers how Ear Trumpet positions the relationship between ‘physical environment, the socio-cultural milieu, and the individual listener’ (2006, xiii) and reveals how participants’ suspension of disbelief in the pseudo-science of ‘sonic geology’ allows them to posit the possibility of multiple ‘historic dimensions of sound’, in a way that reframes their everyday soundscape and ‘magically and suddenly transports [them] elsewhere’ (2006, xv). Finally, it raises questions about the effect of sharawadji in terms of the tension between theatrical illusion, “belief” and critical distance among audiences, and considers a possible politics of aurality in performance contexts