Landscape
Projects within the Landscape theme will interpret rural landscapes as spaces in which people, animals and plants do things and construct meanings not limited to an aesthetic encounter, to produce places of recognised biological, economic, social and cultural value. Our scholars will work alongside communities to identify rural priorities and chart the inherently dynamic and multi-valent values of landscape. Our ambition is to show how new forms of land production and/or activities might add to and enhance people’s engagement with place in ways that avoid the reproduction of idealised rural landscapes shorn of their complex problems.
Projects in this theme might investigate:
- Non-human or more-than-human versions of landscape value: biology, resource, society, culture.
- Past imaginations of landscape, or imaginations of past landscape, and how these heritages might be mobilised to inform sustainable landscapes today.
- How ideas and circumstances coalesce to legitimise some landscape interventions (such as habitat restoration, energy production or infrastructure development) as positive or as negative, and why communities ascribe such values.
- Landscape practices, both ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ and the parameters of landscape – agricultural change (pastoral to arable, rewilding, energy generation, leisure, diversification), but also rural industry, crafts, arts and communities.
- ‘bad’ rural Landscapes: crime and illegality, extraction, waste, pollution.
- Non-land rural landscapes – skyscapes, waterscapes, underground, soils, air.
- Specific landscape forms and their role in a sustainable rural future: peat moors, heaths, military exclusion zones, national parks and other designated protected areas, private estates etc.
- How communities might take charge of recasting, enhancing or redefining the cultural value of the rural as representative of dynamic and sustainable communities even as it continues to evoke our shared past.
SURF
William Smith Building
Keele University
Keele
Staffordshire
ST5 5BG
Email: surf@keele.ac.uk
Admissions enquiries: enquiries@keele.ac.uk