We are extremely pleased to announce this year’s recipients of our Research Fund, focusing on the interplay of language and governance in Landscape Justice.
Update 2020: View more detail on each project and progress at the Funded Projects page.
It was an exceptionally difficult choice, with many interesting and deserving projects. We would like to thank each and every applicant for submitting their project, and for their interest in the Fund.
The five projects we will support are (in alphabetical order of recipient surname):
Landscape Education, Heritage and Justice
Recipient: Margherita Cisani, Italy
Project location: Italy
Enhance the awareness on landscape justice and democracy within educational contexts, with particular attention to the ways and the languages with which the concept of landscape as heritage is conveyed or co-constructed.
The main project goals are to deepen the research, focussing specifically on the languages, images and discourses used to convey the idea of landscape as a shared or, alternatively, imposed heritage; and to design and provide an educational toolkit (both online and offline) for landscape educators, in order to offer an easy-to-use example of a didactic activity aimed at enhancing the awareness on landscape and heritage as justice issues.
Ways and Meanings
Recipient: Siobhán Forshaw, UK
Project location: UK
This project will trace and respond to official and unofficial access routes around the South Lake District, with the aim of identifying contrasting understandings of the landscape. The production and dissemination of a pamphlet will draw links between these contrasts and aim to provide a resource by which Grizedale Arts can create programming that focuses on increasing access, inclusion and equality for local people and visitors. In particular, this research will form part of a bigger project called Black Shed, which is a building project responding to unequal access across lines of gender, ethnicity, disability and class.
Deconstructing the Archive: A philological analysis of the verbal and visual constructs of historical landscape narratives
Recipient: Aisling O’Carroll, UK
Project location: UK/France
The work will focus on the influence that geological and historiographic studies had at the turn of the nineteenth century in establishing a reading of landscape as a physical archive and informing a new mode of historical engagement with landscape. This research question will be investigated through a detailed study of two primary figures in preservation and restoration theory, the English art-critic John Ruskin and French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, and their Alpine investigations.
Connecting and Severing: a Deconstruction of the Language of HS2 Ltd
Recipient: Joanne Phillips, UK
Project location: UK
Review the language used by the Department for Transport, in the guise of HS2 Ltd, to promote and discuss the high-speed rail project. The project focuses on how landscape justice/injustice might be performed through the language of a powerful public body, and how access/connection to, and disconnection from landscape along the long, thin site of the proposed line is addressed or concealed through words. The review will critically analyse both how this language attempts to depict the rail proposals in order to encourage public acceptance, and of how it has failed/is failing to do so.
Boron Landscapes in Turkey
Recipient: Gözde Şarlak & Steffen Krämer, Germany
Project location: Turkey
The official narrative by governmental agencies in Turkey are euphoric when it comes to the mining of Boron. Against the background of this development, we consider it necessary to raise sensitivity for the environmental and social impacts of Boron mining in Turkey before euphoria outruns risk assessment. The mining sites have little public visibility and few existing materials are limited to specialized fields of knowledge. We also entirely lack an account of local residents who face landscape transformation over generations and negotiate economic promises, environmental changes, and lived experience in their own descriptions.
Congratulations to you all! In the near future, we will share more information about each project individually, so keep an eye on our website and social media.