Hannah Macpherson

The Intercorporeal Emergence of Landscape: Negotiating Sight, Blindness, and Ideas of Landscape in the British Countryside

In 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

Humour 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.

Articulating blind touch: thinking through the feet

ABSTRACT Through 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.

Walking methods in landscape research: moving bodies, spaces of disclosure and rapport

Abstract Walking 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 methodology.

Cultural geographies in practice

I the painting ‘Morning sight’ (Figure 1) Ann Roughton paints a garden landscape which includes the sight of her own macular degeneration. The affects of this degenerative sight condition are represented as a grey cloud area in the centre of the painting, while the rest of the garden is painted in an impressionistic style using flecks of coloured paint. The painting is one in a series which Ann produced over the course of a month in order to represent what she sees with age related macular degeneration (AMD).1 The painting and her accompanying commentary are of interest because they render sight itself visible and help to draw our attention to the fact that sight cannot necessarily be assumed to be a constant or predictable source of information about the world. For example, there are around 155,000 on the register of partially sighted people and 157,000 on the register of blind people in England.2 With age our colour values are also likely to change and we are increasingly likely to need spectacles. In the United Kingdom AMD is the most common cause of visual impairment in people over 60. In AMD the cells of the macular area (see Figure 2) become damaged and stop working, central vision may become blurred or distorted and gradually a ‘hole’ in the central vision is likely to develop, while peripheral vision tends to be retained. Ann,3 now aged 85, began to develop AMD ten years ago, first in her right eye and later in her left. In a comment on the painting on the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB) website which promotes the work of visually impaired artists, Ann explains how she ‘sees’ and ‘sees with’ her ‘macular cloud’, how it affects her vision and how her vision changes during the day:

Building resilience through group visual arts activities: Findings from a scoping study with young people who experience mental health complexities and/or learning difficulties

Summary This article reports research that aimed to identify and evaluate potential resilience benefits of visual arts interventions for young people with complex needs. The study involved a review of the ‘arts for resilience’ literature and a case study of 10 weekly resilience-building arts workshops for 10 young people experiencing mental health complexities and/or learning difficulties. Findings We found a significant existing evidence-base linking visual arts practice to individual and community resilience, across disciplinary fields including art therapy, social work, community health, visual arts practice and geographies of health. Visual art activities were utilised to both educate young people about resilience and enhance young people’s overall resilience. Qualitative research material developed from the case study shows that even short-term visual arts interventions can impact on young people’s resilience – crucially, participation was extremely beneficial to young people’s sense of belonging and ability to cope with difficult feelings (topics which arose repeatedly during interview, focus group discussion and observation). Applications Our review and findings from this small case study provide some initial insights into the resilience benefits of participation in visual arts activities. This, combined with the resilience-based practice framework presented here, could aid the effective targeting of interventions for social workers and others working with young people with complex needs. Alongside this research paper, an arts for resilience practice guide has been produced by the project team (including young people). It contains instructions on how to conduct a range of practical visual arts activities that we identified as being resilience-promoting.

Journeys in ink: re-presenting the spaces of inclusive arts practice

This 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.

Navigating a non-representational research landscape and representing ‘under-represented groups’: from complexity to strategic essentialism (and back)

Within the call for papers for the conference Reinvigorating Social Geographies: The Politics and Praxis of Social and Cultural Geography in the UK, a concern was expressed about the inclusiveness of certain elements of Cultural Geography. It was even suggested that ‘there are “mutterings” of a possible divorce between different strands of the research group’ (Smith, Browne and Bissell 2008). This mention of a possible divorce is indicative of a more general concern in the discipline over the exclusivity of recent nonrepresentational research agendas (Barnett 2008; Thien 2005). However, the term divorce presumes a neat disciplinary sub-division which does not exist in practice. For example, a number of researchers (including myself) have attempted to bring together non-representational agendas with research on underrepresented groups spanning perceived ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ divides within the discipline (Askins 2006; Macpherson 2009a, 2009b; Saldanha 2005; Swanton 2008; Tolia-Kelly 2006, 2007, 2010). Therefore I do not think there are grounds for a sub-disciplinary divorce. Rather, I think it is imperative that each of the aspects of the disciplinary nexus remains in a productive, if agonistic, relationship. In this short discussion piece (originally presented to the Reinvigorating Social Geographies Conference, 2009) I develop this argument and I demonstrate some of the ways in which geographers can shuttle between complexity and strategic essentialism in research, writing and teaching.

Listening space: Lessons from artists with and without learning disabilities

In this paper, we develop an expanded conception of listening as ‘being-with’ and explore this in the context of creative visual arts activities with people with learning disabilities. Through a series of textual and visual interlocutions between Inclusive Artist ‘Alice’, Social and Cultural Geographer ‘Hannah’ and members of the contemporary arts group ‘The Rockets’, we identify how an expanded conception of listening is practiced and the results it produce. Where listening for the Inclusive Artist includes an attentiveness to visual, verbal and gestural vocabularies of arts-based methods; the construction of conducive spaces for listening and voice with attuned collaborators and appropriate art materials; the use of art materials as ‘meeting points’, which enable a non-verbal conversation to take place and knowledge of how particular materials and practices can influence a person’s work and sense of themselves. The temporalities of these forms of expanded, attentive, curious listening are explored and concern is expressed about how they sit in opposition to the hasty demands for research with ‘impact’. We hope this paper provokes researchers to consider what it means to listen through arts-based methods, the crucial role of the facilitator and the temporalities of listening they are bringing into being.

Inclusive arts practice and research: a critical manifesto

Inclusive arts describes an exciting and newly emergent field: the creative collaborations between learning-disabled and non-learning-disabled artists which are increasingly taking place in performance and the visual arts. In Inclusive Arts Practice Alice Fox and Hannah McPherson interview artists, curators and key practitioners in the UK and US. The editors introduce and articulate this new practice, and situate it in relation to associated approaches. Fox and McPherson candidly describe the tensions and difficulties involved too, and explore how the work sits within contemporary art and critical theory. The book includes essays and illustrated statements, and has over 60 full-colour images. Inclusive Arts Practice represents a landmark publication in an emerging field of creative practice across all the arts. It presents a radical call for collaboration on equal terms and will be an invaluable resource for anyone studying or already working within this dynamic new territory.