Authored by Sarah Bell
2020 has been a strange year, and one that I suspect many of us might be quite relieved to be moving on from. I hope this update finds people as safe, well and sane as the year’s events have allowed, and that everyone has some peace and time to rest and recover a little over the Christmas break.
For Sensing Nature, the year started off with exciting news. After our ‘Nature Narratives’ audio description and visual awareness training in 2018-19, we heard that one of our training sites, Sherwood Forest, had introduced a programme of quarterly guided walks with blind and partially sighted visitors. Meanwhile, another training site, Sheffield Park and Gardens, had begun creating a sensory garden tour and inclusive site map, and Durlston Country Park had started writing audio descriptions to be integrated into two new ‘Viewpoint Indicators’ in development.
While I imagine the implementation of some of these initiatives will have been impacted by the major changes and challenges that have come with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, I hope 2021 might bring some relief and opportunities to carry on this fantastic work.
Just before the start of the pandemic, we were awarded some additional funding from the Economic and Social Research Council for a follow-on project, called ‘ReStorying Landscapes for Social Inclusion’. Full project details can be found online in an earlier news piece. While the intended time-scales for the project have necessarily shifted with the pandemic, a key highlight that we are currently working on is an exciting partnership with Forestry England, Westonbirt Arboretum, Andy Shipley, Zoe Partington and Art Shape.
The ReStorying Landscapes project aims to develop new ways of conveying the diverse sensory landscapes and histories of Westonbirt Arboretum, including finding new ways of expressing and relating to the widely celebrated ‘Picturesque’ qualities of the site. As one strand of our activities, we will be inviting people with sight impairment to join Westonbirt’s volunteer team. They will be supported to train as volunteer guides and co-create and deliver site tours to inspire visitors’ sensory imagination about the Arboretum and its history.
In another strand of activities, we are working with contemporary artist, creative consultant and disability advocate, Zoe Partington, and Art Shape (an organisation that is passionate about enabling artists facing disabling barriers to realise their creative potential). In the new year, we will be developing disability arts and creative engagement practices on site, moving beyond the traditional emphasis on the visual to capture more subtle sensory qualities of landscape experience.
The aim of this work is to demonstrate the value of moving away from framing disability as an ‘access need’, recognising it instead as a potential opportunity for creativity and shared learning.
This work will feed into our Unlocking Landscapes Network initiative, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in 2018. More information about this Network is available in a previous news piece online. When lockdown hit back in March, we realised we would need to postpone the original plan of in-situ multisensory landscape workshops for a little while.
So we initially released a call for contributions (in any format of people’s choosing) for people to reflect on the question, ‘what does landscape mean to you?’ We suggested a series of questions to help elicit responses relevant to the network aims: What is landscape to you? How do landscapes hold you? How do they speak to you? What stories do your landscapes tell? What are your hopes for future landscapes? What do these futures mean for human and biodiversity? Contributions are still coming in and we have been sharing them via a new page of the Sensing Nature website.
We will be complementing these in 2021 with the launch of a new landscape decision-making series. Through the series, we will be inviting practitioners, policy makers, artists and researchers working in the field of landscape to write or record a short provocation in response to the guiding question: ‘What do you consider to be the key challenges and opportunities for embedding social inclusion into landscape decision making?’ As the contributions come in, we hope to follow up with a series of themed online panel discussions through spring next year, each focused on a different landscape priority.
Through the year, I’ve heard about some great initiatives and activities. These include: a series of brilliant audio-described gardening-by-touch videos by Bryan’s Quest (available on YouTube), as well as a fab Masters dissertation project by Emily Malen around audio description in natural heritage settings, a series of new ‘Virtual Sense Adventures’ run by Dee Jones, a timely ‘Nature Nearby’ campaign launched by Youth for Nature, a new ‘Sensory Walks’ resource produced by Sense, a US-based ‘Camp Abilities’ initiative introduced to me by Dr Lauren Lieberman, a US-based ‘Young Sound Seekers’ programme, Andy Shipley’s inspiring 14-day online Sensory Odyssey, and ‘Sensing the Wild’ (a partnership between the Tees Valley Wildlife Trust and Going for Independence CIC).
During the early days of the pandemic, some lovely online resources were created around bird song and bird calls, including the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust’s alternative dawn chorus, the National Trust’s guide to recognising different bird song, and the RSPB’s birdsong identifier. I also heard about an exciting new resource in development by Birdlife Partners across Europe, called ‘Seeing the World Through Nature’, which aims to develop environmental educational resources for teachers who work with blind and partially sighted children.
At a more personal level, it has been a somewhat exhausting year, transforming teaching, marking and pastoral support activities for online delivery, with little space or time to develop new lines of research or writing in this area (or sleep!). But that will come back. The priority has been to support colleagues, students, collaborators, family and friends through this challenging time as far as possible.
If you would like to hear more about or access any of the Sensing Nature outputs in alternative formats to those online, or contribute to the Unlocking Landscapes Network activities, please do get in touch, either via the website or via email at Sarah.Bell@exeter.ac.uk.
In the meantime I wish everyone as peaceful and safe a Christmas as possible, and a hopeful New Year for 2021.
