Paper short abstract:

The concept ‘immersive landscape’ is brought to Germany’s former coal mining region the Ruhr, in the grip of a green transformation. Through ethnography and analysis of documentaries, I explore how working-class people conceive and perform ‘embodied immersion’ in a landscape under reconstruction.

Paper long abstract:

The emerging interdisciplinary concept of ‘immersive landscape’ calls attention to the fact that deindustrialization not only means socioeconomic change in particular geographical places, but also sociomaterial transformations that remake worlds. Moving away from older representational approaches, the immersive landscape is envisaged as a multidimensional process – a dynamic assemblage of people, matter, animals, weather, things, capital, labour and embodied experience (Jarramillo and Tomann 2021). Brought to the evolving landscape of Germany’s former coal mining region, the Ruhr, I am struck by the fact that ‘immersive experience’ is writ large in the utterly representational public discourses of the region’s green transformation and its industrial heritage. Drawing on my ethnographic research with working-class women and men along the restored Emscher river in the northern Ruhr, and on documentary films, I juxtapose such promotional narratives with people’s perceptions and practices of ‘embodied immersion’ in diverse environments – from toxic exposure at industrial sites, to aesthetic appreciation and fitness in landscape parks, Sunday swims in a canal, work in allotment gardens, and ‘forest bathing’. I ask: What do historical tropes of immersive landscapes (e.g., in German Romanticism) tell us about social relationships and conflict? Whence the moral good of immersive experience? Can and should the representation of people-environment relationships be overcome?