Harding, Burch and Wemelsfelder explore people's responses to landscapes in an unusual way, and in doing so interrogate not just the relationship of people to landscape, but how scientific approaches might be used to approach quality and meaning.
"we wish to explore a relational understanding in which landscape is considered part of the communication taking place between living beings, not merely a substrate for it .. to better reflect the dynamics of how sentient organisms actually live, through continuously responsive, expressive communication with all that surrounds them"
It would be great to see how well traditional scientific measures of ecosystem health might correlate with subjective perceptions, and to see how people from different backgrounds locate the meaning of the same environments.
Thank you Tom for sharing! Some very worthwhile ideas to explore. We'd certainly had in mind to understand how different people make meaning from one place in such a beautiful variety of ways but to reflexively link this with different research methods makes it even more interesting.
The article was a interesting read and it's great to see how "traditional scientific" understandings are exploring overcoming subjective-objective divide (my background is in anthropology so apologies - and please enlighten me - if this isn't such a new thing!).
Have you come across the sociological work of Nick Fox and Pam Alldred at the Uni of Sheffield on ? And their other work on ""? Both are relevant for this. :)
Ellie
Thanks to both of you for some useful links. I found the Fox and Alldred paper particularly interesting. I've been looking at the ways in which the concepts of might illuminate the relationships between people and place, and the ways in which these relationships affect wellbeing (my own particular area of interest is in gardening or conservation activities which take place in communal spaces in towns and cities).