1st Edition
Walking, Landscape and Environment
Walking, Landscape and Environment explores walking as a method of research and practice in the humanities and creative arts, emerging from a recent surge of growth in urban and rural walking. This edited collection of essays from leading figures in the field presents an enquiry into, and a critique of, the methods and results of cutting-edge ‘walking research’. Walking negotiates the intersections between the human self, place and space, offering a cross-disciplinary collaborative method of research which can be utilised in areas such as ecocriticism, landscape architecture, literature, cultural geography and the visual arts. Bringing together a multitude of perspectives from different disciplines, on topics including health and wellbeing, disability studies, social justice, ecology and gender, this book provides a unique appraisal of the humanist perspective on landscape. In doing so, it challenges Romantic approaches to walking, applying new ideas in contemporary critical thought and alternative perspectives on embodiment and trans-corporeality.
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Introduction
Anna Stenning and Pippa Marland
PART I Walking in: lines, contours, pilgrimages
1. Walking in (900 questions concerning walking)
Gerry Loose
2. Lines, walks, and getting lost: contemporary poetry and walking
Garry Mackenzie
3. Photographic essay: contouring alone and with a companion in the Dark Peak, Derbyshire between September 2014 and November 2017
Alison Lloyd
4. Walking and theatricality: an experiment in weathered thinking (kairos)
Cari Lavery
5. Ghosts of the Restless Shore: a personal pilgrimage
Mike Collier
Part II Walking with: people, places, politics
6. "This world that walks": cultural destruction, cultural renewal, and social justice on the trails of North American Indigenous removal
Amy Hamilton
7. The trouble with Munro bagging: summiting as erasure in the Highlands of Scotland
Christos Galanis
8. Black Men Walking: an interview with Dawn Walton and Testament
Pippa Marland and Anna Stenning
9. The Walking Library for Women Walking
Deirdre Heddon and Misha Myers
10. Walking backwards: art between places in twenty-first-century Britain
Judith Tucker
Part III Walking on: routes, directions, steps
11. Autism and cognitive embodiment: steps towards a non-ableist walking literature
Anna Stenning
12. Walking with the digital: Heartlands - 'Ere Be Dragons and A Conversation Between Trees
Rachel Jacobs, Pippa Marland and Steve Benford
13. The crisis in psychogeographical walking: from paranoia to diversity, ecology and salvage
Phil Smith
14. Mountaineering literature as dark pastoral
Terry Gifford
15. Walking on
Gerry Loose
Index
Biography
David Borthwick teaches Environmental Humanities at the University of Glasgow’s School of Interdisciplinary Studies. Previous publications have centred on ecopoetry, walking and cultural understandings of avian migration. He has also published poetry and non-fiction. His current research uses poetry and non-fiction to examine the depictions of the multivalent nature of place – and the future of place-based thinking.
Anna Stenning is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Bath Spa University. She has written about nature writing, poetry and disability studies, and she has published both her own poetry and creative non-fiction. Her current research focuses on representations of autistic flourishing, narrativity and eco-anxiety, and she is the author of Nature, Place and Affect: The Poetic Affinities of Edward Thomas and Robert Frost 1912–1917 for Rowman & Littlefield International. She is also a co-editor, with Nick Chown and Hanna Bertilsdotter-Rosqvist, of Routledge’s interdisciplinary collection Neurodiversity: A New Critical Paradigm.
Pippa Marland is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow based at the University of Leeds, where she is a member of the Environmental Humanities Research Group. Her research project is a study of the representation of farming in modern British nature writing. She has published widely on ecocriticism, ecopoetry and nature writing, and is currently preparing a monograph for publication entitled Ecocriticism and the Island: Readings from the British-Irish Archipelago for the Rowman & Littlefield Rethinking the Island series.
