SCOPES AND THEMES

Landscape and environment are currently of compelling cultural significance, as fields of scholarly research, sites of artistic creativity and arenas of public concern. As both imaginative representations and material realities, landscape and environment matter as a medium for the expression of complex ideas and feelings, about beauty, belonging, access to resources, relations with nature, the past and the future, making sense of the world and people's place in it. Such concerns are topical, but they are not new. In the mind and on the ground, landscape and environment are conditioned historically by sometimes far reaching cultural forms and processes, and in complex patterns and structures which demand a range of disciplinary perspectives to understand them.

This £5.5 million transdisciplinary programme runs for five years from September 2005 to August 2010. The aim of the programme to advance knowledge, critically and creatively, of the cultural forms and processes shaping, and shaped by, landscape and environment. It will break new ground in bringing together researchers from a wide range of disciplines and approaches (including those where practice is integral to the research) to address the changing ways landscapes and environments have been imagined, experienced, designed, made and managed, and in communicating research findings to a wide audience. The programme will extend the scope and deepen the focus of enquiry by examining landscapes and environments articulated in words, pictures, performance, patterns of building and cultivation and in forms of conduct and livelihood. It will do so for a range of historical periods and places, and in a dialogue with current debates on landscape and environment in the public domain. Research of the highest quality, inventively conceived, rigorously pursued, imaginatively produced and well disseminated, will enrich understandings of landscape and environment at all levels, through a focus on the following themes

• images, values and knowledge
• representing, making and meaning
• time, space and narrative
• settlement and movement
• elements and ecologies
• authority and access

 

The programme specification can be found in publications