Landscape as method in interdisciplinary research
Source: Burlingame (2025), Landscape Research.
What does it mean to use landscape as a method? Katherine Burlingame’s prize-winning paper tackles this question directly, proposing a new framework for interdisciplinary landscape research.
The 2025 Landscape Research Best Paper Prize was jointly awarded to two papers that advance interdisciplinary landscape research in distinct but complementary ways. This article highlights Katherine Burlingame’s contribution, which proposes a new framework for applying landscape as a research method.
Why this paper stood out
Rather than attempting to resolve these differences, Burlingame reframes them as productive. The paper argues that landscape can function as a connective methodology, enabling collaboration across geography, planning, ecology, design and the humanities. In doing so, it moves beyond debates about definition and instead focuses on how landscape can be used as an organising framework for interdisciplinary inquiry.
This shift from landscape as object to landscape as method provides a clear and accessible structure for research that is both conceptually grounded and open to multiple perspectives.
The contribution
The framework proposed in the paper brings together three overlapping dimensions of landscape:
material: physical and ecological characteristics
symbolic: cultural meanings and representations
affective: lived experience and relational understanding
By integrating these dimensions, the paper offers a flexible approach that supports collaboration across disciplines while maintaining conceptual clarity. Landscape becomes a way of structuring research questions, rather than simply a subject to be analysed.
This contribution reflects the journal’s long-standing commitment to interdisciplinary dialogue and to expanding how landscape research is understood and practiced.
Implications for landscape research
Burlingame’s approach is particularly valuable for contemporary landscape research, where complex environmental and social challenges require collaboration across fields. By positioning landscape as a methodological bridge, the paper provides a practical route for interdisciplinary work without reducing disciplinary diversity.
The result is a framework that is both theoretically robust and usable in practice, supporting new forms of research that engage with landscape as relational, situated and multi-dimensional.
Hannes Palang, Editor-in-Chief of Landscape Research, commented:
“Burlingame’s paper stood out for its clarity and ambition. It offers a thoughtful and practical way to navigate the conceptual diversity of landscape research while strengthening dialogue across disciplines. By positioning landscape as method, the article opens new possibilities for collaborative and forward-looking research.”
About the joint award
The 2025 Landscape Research Best Paper Prize was jointly awarded to two papers that advance interdisciplinary approaches to landscape research. Together, they demonstrate the breadth of contemporary landscape scholarship, from conceptual frameworks to applied design methodologies.
Read the companion joint winner: Weisser and Hauck – Animal-Aided Design
Explore the full Best Paper Prize collection:
https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/clar20/collections/best-paper-prize-landscape-research
Read the 2025 Best Paper by an Early Career Researcher: Overstreet and Sørensen
https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/clar20/collections/best-paper-prize-early-career-landscape-research