Paper short abstract:

This paper presents fieldwork on the use of historic and contemporary maps with young children as part of an exploration of their local landscape. We describe how children made connections between past and present and how this translated into encounters with the outdoor environment itself.

Paper long abstract:

Our research in the interdisciplinary project ‘Voices of the Future: Collaborating with children and young people to re-imagine treescapes’ explores children’s perspectives on the past, present and future in trees and woods. We carried out ethnographic fieldwork on the kinds of learning that children engage in when presented with the opportunity to move between the classroom and outdoors. While outdoor education has often focused on the benefits of simply being outdoors for learning, we developed processes of research and creative practice with children that spanned both settings. It allowed insight into the children’s sense of place and their senses of history and future possibility.

This paper focuses the use of historic and contemporary maps (accessed through technological means) to explore differences and continuities in local treescapes. Beginning in the classroom, the maps opened the possibility that the children’s landscape had changed significantly through recent decades. Moving outside, children tried to connect the maps to what they saw in their surroundings. This raised a series of questions for us in terms of learning from the children’s perspectives. Where the the kind of knowledge codified in maps is in many ways different to that experienced in the landscape, maps can create a sensitivity to time that changes how the landscape is felt. What possibilities are there for integrating children’s voices into decision-making about landscapes that they will, broadly speaking, be responsible for as they grow older? Can combinations of technological, historic and landscape-based learning be useful in this task?

Paper short abstract:

Inspired by Raymond Lucas’ (2010) work on sensory notation, this paper explores modes of observing and representing sensory perceptions of urban space. We reflect on ways that mapping sensory, affective experience could inform social anthropology and urban practice through a participatory toolkit.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores notational mapping as a mode of representing sensory perceptions of urban space. Inspired by Raymond Lucas’s (2010) work on sensory notation and underpinned by our shared commitment to integrating participatory ‘citizen social science’ methodologies into both social anthropology and urban practice, we have developed a toolkit designed to record the sensory impact of urban spaces.

Anthropologists and cognate scholars have long examined the phenomenological and affective experience of place and landscape (e.g. Tilley 1994; Edensor 2005). Meanwhile, popular psycho-geographers like Ian Sinclair and Will Self have brought public attention to the way atmospheres and accreted histories of cities can be revealed through walking and immersive reflection.

At a policy level, the relationship between the built environment and social and psychological wellbeing is increasingly recognized, and yet for urban planners and practitioners, it can be difficult to build a practical rationale for this relationship. The emotional and psychological impact of urban planning interventions rarely figures in evaluation frameworks, which usually rely on functional indicators like traffic flow or pedestrian footfall.

Recognising both citizens’ expertise in their own neighbourhoods, and the lack of tools that give them a voice in planning decisions, our toolkit adapts Lucas’s notational system as a way to integrate sensory perceptions into urban practice, including haptic, aural, kinetic and emotional mapping. We reflect also on the constitutive relationship between technologies and the built environment, and our ongoing work to develop a sensory notation app that can generate useful data for architects, planners and communities.

Paper short abstract:

Movement within the urban space initiates a process of spatial (un)learning that challenges researchers’ personal geographies and representations of social and racial inequalities. It creates intersubjective junctions, as places from which to observe how privileges are (re)constructed and contested.

Paper long abstract:

Fieldwork, as an embodied practice, requires moving through space as constituted by social and racial boundaries and systems of privilege. While anthropologists walk into the field with a specific understanding of spatial inequalities, their perceptions can change depending on the reality of the landscape that they discover. This paper focuses on the two authors’ experiences of spatial (un)learning in the context of ethnographies with migrant populations in European cities. It reflects on the researchers’ everyday movements that can make the familiar unfamiliar and create new personal geographies of spatial boundaries and junctions that can be later integrated into data analysis. Drawing on ethnographic fieldworks in Belgium and France, we show that moving across the city rests on a personal ‘imagining’ of urban infrastructure that is called into question as the research progresses. Walking with her participants in neighborhoods of Antwerp and Ghent, Weyers demonstrates that their experiences informed her own representations of urban neighborhoods developed over time, either aligning with or challenging her own position as a white, middleclass, female researcher. Reflecting on the use of public transportation in the suburbs of Paris, Ménard analyses how daily im/mobility challenged her embodied practice and mental mapping of the urban space, leading to a different understanding of urban segregation. Both cases illuminate how movement can create intersubjective junctions, as places from which to observe and discuss how privileges are (re)constructed and contested within the urban space. Movement changes perceptions, but also encourages us to analyze spatial inequalities as a deeply relational process.

Paper short abstract:

Walking the Scottish landscape as embodied methodology amongst people doing memory work for accused witches of the early modern period inform how land in Scotland became sites of connection with the past. Through walking, memory work and identity intersect to create geographies of remembrance.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the interplay between walking, landscape, and memory work in Scotland, concerned with how people make kinship and connection with the people accused of witchcraft in the 16th-18th centuries. Through walking methodologies, landscapes become sites of personal and collective memory, where past violence and contemporary activism intersect. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with activists, artists, and historians engaged in memorialising the accused witches, this paper explores how physical movement through the landscape fosters connections with the long-dead, evokes powerful emotional responses, and inspires motivation to action.

By walking the hills of Abernethy, sites of execution in Edinburgh, and the old kirkyards of Stirling, participants engaged with the land as both a repository of memory and a medium for reconstructing histories. To help me better understand their experiences, ‘Big Days Out’ were planned by interlocutors. This example of facilitated walking methodologies enable a deeply embodied form of research that reveals how landscapes are imbued with narratives of injustice and resilience. While on these walks, cell phones were relied upon heavily for taking fieldnotes, recording conversations, and taking photos; thus facilitating an experience that blended technology and landscape.

The paper also reflects on the role of personal geographies in shaping memory work, questioning how individual and collective experiences of the land inform perceptions of justice and belonging. In doing so, it contributes to the understanding of how sensory and embodied engagement with the land can transform both memory studies and activism, challenging the boundaries between past and present.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the use of camera-mounted kites to engage with landscapes shaped by land management. It examines how aerial imagery and the experience of interacting with the terrain enable an investigation into the ‘texture’ of land governance.

Paper long abstract:

The questions underpinning this paper arise from the use of camera-mounted kites as a methodology for fieldwork research in landscapes shaped by land management.

Flying a kite engenders a correspondence between flier and air (Ingold), enabling engagement with terrain in unexpected ways. While tethered and maneuvering the kite, one must remain mindful of each step, enhancing the perception of atmospheric and geographical elements. The camera extends this engagement into an experiential continuum with technologies ranging from pigeon photography to satellites and drones. It enables an investigation into the essentialism underlying the technological gaze and cartographic representation, and processes of concealment and ‘naturalization’ inherent in the construction of landscape.

The author's (emergent) notation system captures personal experience, atmospheric elements, and the varied textures of the surface shaped by land management activities. In an anti-reductivist spirit (Elden), an analogy is drawn between such ‘texture’ and the broader mechanisms of contemporary territorial governance. Ultimately, the paper explores how these can be investigated and, perhaps, unveiled through the disruptions introduced by research practices that challenge boundaries and the underlying visual logic of aerial imagery.

Paper short abstract:

The Korean DMZ's restrictive landscape poses a challenge in terms of visibility and movement. Oscillating between mediated and immediate sensory perceptibility and marked by selective access, it provokes methodological questions for ethnography.

Paper long abstract:

The complex landscape of the Korean DMZ challenges notions of visibility, movement, and technology. Governed by a strict yet inconsistent regime of access and denial, the DMZ distorts, expands, and limits sensory perception. It forces us to confront the limitations of both mediated and unmediated sensory experiences. Aerial impressions rely heavily on orbital imagery, periscopically making visible what is denied the naked eye. In contrast, navigation systems cease to function in the DMZ, rendering technology obsolete and emphasizing the primacy of the visual sense and practical knowledge of the landscape in guiding movement. While topographic maps and aerial vistas focus on visual knowledge, navigation shifts the emphasis to movement and corporeal knowledge. Within the DMZ, physical movement is strictly controlled. Most mobility across this landscape occurs in vehicles, which mediate not only how the DMZ is seen but also tactile, olfactory, and acoustic sensations. The DMZ hovers between hypermediation and immediacy, contributing to a sense of dis-orientation and shaping the experiences of both interlocutors and researchers. In this presentation, I will share ethnographic insights and methodological reflections drawn from my long-term research in and about the DMZ as a field site of limited, selective, and inconsistent perceptibility.

Paper short abstract:

This paper uses walking as a method and metaphor for exploring the interconnected landscapes and lives in Philippine rice terraces. Through walk-based multisensory mapping, it traces how physical pathways become vital lifelines of resilience, ecological care, and adaptation amid forces of change.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents a reflexive cartography of the pathways and places in Maligcong Rice Terraces, Bontoc, Philippines, focusing on the intricate intersections and divergences shaped by the continuous movements of its indigenous people. Employing the Bicol-Rinconada concept of pag-agi (walking), the author’s positionality as a Bicol-Rinconada researcher is at a junction with the Bontoc notion of inpasyar (walking). This dual lens hinges on the dialogic nature of ethnography where the outsider’s perspective is brought into conversation with the indigenous worldview towards a nuanced understanding of the support networks that sustain and embody Maligcong’s negotiations with change.

By mapping the physical pathways linking rice terraces, settlements, mountains, and culturally significant spaces, pathways are revealed not merely as routes of travel but as vital lifelines that articulate how the people of Maligcong move, interact, and manifest their values, challenges, and aspirations. The pathways, while bearing markers of external influences such as globalization and tourism, also reveal an itinerary of ecological symbiosis and restriction, illustrating the delicate balance between human activity and the environment.

Grounded in local narratives and enriched by walk-based multisensory mapping, this study prioritizes reflexivity by engaging the researcher physically and experientially with the landscape and interrogating how walking, in its social and symbolic dimensions, shapes perceptions of place, memory, and belonging. This research contributes to the discourse on movement and sensory engagement by reflecting the methodological potential of walking in generating new insights into the dynamic relationship between people, pathways, and the forces that shape them.