Editorial - green letters special issue:traversing the field

This special issue comes out of Traversing the Field: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Walking in Scottish Landscapes, held at the University of Dundee on 30 April 2016. With a short extract from Thomas A. Clark’s In Praise of Walking as prompt and provocation, the call for papers invited participants to consider links between landscape, walking and thinking, and to deconstruct as well as celebrate its application in their respective disciplines. On the day, walking was revealed to have the potential to unlock new perspectives across disciplines, history borrowing methodologies from archaeology, ethnography from mental health care, philosophy from dance, and so on. Evidently, many speakers had found themselves literally crossing fields in order to cross disciplinary fields.</p

Popular music, psychogeography, place identity and tourism: The case of Sheffield

Tourism and cultural agencies in some English provincial cities are promoting their popular music ‘heritage’ and, in some cases, contemporary musicians through the packaging of trails, sites, ‘iconic’ venues and festivals. This article focuses on Sheffield, a ‘post-industrial’ northern English city which is drawing on its associations with musicians past and present in seeking to attract tourists. This article is based on interviews with, among others, recording artists, promoters, producers and venue managers, along with reflective observational and documentary data. Theoretical remarks are made on the representations of popular musicians through cultural tourism strategies, programmes and products and also on the ways in which musicians convey a ‘psychogeographical’ sense of place in the ‘soundscape’ of the city

On preparing for the great gift of community that climate disasters can give us

There is a widespread (if rarely voiced) assumption, among those who dare to understand the future which climate chaos is likely to yield, that civility will give way and a Hobbesian war of all against all will be unleashed. Thankfully, this assumption is highly questionable. The field of ‘Disaster Studies’, as shown in Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, makes clear that it is at least as likely that, tested in the crucible of back-to-back disasters, humanity will rise to the challenge, and we will find ourselves manifesting a truer humanity than we currently think ourselves to have. Thus the post-sustainability world will offer us a tremendous gift amidst the carnage. But how well we realise this gift depends on our preparing the way for it. In order to prepare, the fantasy of sustainable development needs to be jettisoned, along with the bargain-making mentality underpinning it. Instead, the inter-personal virtues of generosity, fraternity and care-taking need fostering. One role a philosophically informed deep reframing can play in this process of virtuous preparation for disaster is in helping people to understand that, in order to care for their children, they need to care for their children in turn, and so on, ad infinitum

Look Who’s Talking:Using creative, playful arts-based methods in research with young children

Young children are often ignored or marginalised in the drive to address children’s participation and their wider set of rights. This is the case generally in social research, as well as within the field of Arts-Based Education Research. This article contributes to the growing literature on young children’s involvement in arts-based research, by providing a reflective account of our learning and playful engagement with children using creative methods. This small pilot project forms part of a larger international project titled Look Who’s Talking: Eliciting the Voices of Children from Birth to Seven, led by Professor Kate Wall at the University of Strathclyde. Visiting one nursery in Scotland, we worked with approximately 30 children from 3 to 5 years old. Seeking to connect with their play-based nursery experiences, we invited children to participate in a range of arts-based activities including drawing, craft-making, sculpting, a themed ‘play basket’ with various props, puppetry and videography. In this article, we develop reflective, analytical stories of our successes and dilemmas in the project. We were keen to establish ways of working with children that centred their own creativity and play, shaped by the materials we provided but not directed by us. However, we struggled to balance our own agenda with the more open-ended methods we had used. We argue that an intergenerational approach to eliciting voice with young children – in which adults are not afraid to shape the agenda, but do so in responsive, gradual and sensitive ways – creates the potential for a more inclusive experience for children that also meets researcher needs

‘Not a country at all’: landscape and Wuthering Heights

This article explores the issue of women’s representational genealogies through an analysis of Andrea Arnold’s 2011 Wuthering Heights. Beginning with 1970s feminist arguments for a specifically female literary tradition, it argues that running through both these early attempts to construct an alternative female literary tradition and later work in feminist philosophy, cultural geography and film history is a concern with questions of ‘alternative landscapes’: of how to represent, and how to encounter, space differently. Adopting Mary Jacobus’ notion of intertextual ‘correspondence’ between women’s texts, and taking Arnold’s film as its case study, it seeks to trace some of the intertextual movements – the reframings, deframings and spatial reorderings – that link Andrea Arnold’s film to Emily Brontë’s original novel. Focusing on two elements of her treatment of landscape – her use of ‘unframed’ landscape and her focus on visceral textural detail – it points to correspondences in other women’s writing, photography and film-making. It argues that these intensely tactile close-up sequences which puncture an apparently realist narrative constitute an insistent presence beneath, or within, the ordered framing which is our more usual mode of viewing landscape. As the novel Wuthering Heights is unmade in Arnold’s adaptation and its framings ruptured, it is through this disturbance of hierarchies of time, space and landscape that we can trace the correspondences of an alternative genealogy

Sensory geographies and defamiliarisation: migrant women encounter Brighton Beach

This article’s starting point is a sensory, reflexive walk taken on Brighton seafront and beach, by fourteen migrant women and some of their children. It goes on to open up a wider discussion about the cultural politics and affective resonances, for refugees and migrants, of beaches. By discussing their sensory experiences of the beach, we begin to understand their ‘ostranenie’, or defamiliarisation, of making the familiar strange. We also see how evocative such sense-making can be, as the women compare their past lives to this, perceiving their lifeworld through a filter of migrancy. The article goes onto discuss the broader cultural symbolism of beaches, which are a site of contestation over national values, boundaries, and belonging. As well as discussing sensory methodology in this article, and explaining the locale of Brighton Beach itself, it concludes with some wider thinking of the cultural politics of beach spaces and migrant perceptions

Interdependent Transformations: Integrating Insights from Relationship Science to Advance Post-Traumatic Growth and Personality Change Research

People have a tremendous ability to grow and change for the better following adverse life events. This capacity for growth has captured the attention of psychologists interested in understanding the mechanisms underpinning both personality and well-being. This paper advocates for a greater integration of relationship science into this area of study as a means of advancing post-traumatic growth and personality change research. Relationships, both as an impetus for change and as evidence of growth, have featured consistently in the post-traumatic growth and adversity literatures. Drawing from interdependence theory in particular, this paper highlights how the unique structure of close relationships and relationship dynamics can be applied to address outstanding theoretical questions related to the advancement of post-traumatic growth research, as well as offers a critique of the practice of using relationship outcomes (e.g., connection) as evidence of post-traumatic growth. Finally,this paper encourages psychologists across subdisciplines to share their unique skills and insights to help generate more robust psychological theories and methods

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

Collective resilience in times of crisis: lessons from the literature for socially effective responses to the pandemic

Most countries worldwide have taken restrictive measures and called on their population to adopt social distancing behaviours to contain the spread of the COVID‐19 pandemic. At a time when several European countries are releasing their lockdown measures, new uncertainties arise regarding the further evolution of a crisis becoming multifaceted, as well as the durability of public determination to face and contain it. In this context, the sustained social efficacy of public health measures will depend more than ever on the level of acceptance across populations called on to temporarily sacrifice daily freedoms, while economic insecurity grows and social inequalities become more blatant. We seek to develop a framework for analysing how the requirements of ‘social distancing’ can be reconciled with the conditions that allow for the maintaining, or even strengthening, of social cohesion, mutual solidarity, and a sense of collective efficacy, throughout the crisis. To reach this goal, we propose a summary of relevant findings and pragmatic policy principles derived from them