Dr Abbi Flint from the In All Our Footsteps team will be presenting on Poetic inquiry and landscape heritage research.

Poets make the best topographers

-W.G. Hoskins

This session will explore the potential of poetic inquiry (Faulkner 2000) as a research method to foster creative ways of researching and thinking about human-landscape relationships and engagements. Poetry’s ability to hold and communicate the complex embodied, sensuous and affective aspects of being in the world (Giles 2000; Sansom 1994) is well suited to phenomenological explorations of dynamic human relationships with landscapes. It also holds potential, like fictive writing, as a way to capture wonder, empathy and ambiguity within archaeological interpretation (van Helden & Witcher 2020).

I will share and reflect on examples of poetic inquiry integrated at different points in the research process within two landscape archaeology and history projects, within a broader approach that draws on archival material, archaeology and folklore, and qualitative research interviews to explore plural experiences and perceptions of landscapes and their heritage.