Unlocking pathways: singing and sensing the sociality of tracks and trails

Clare Hickman, Abbi Flint and Sarah Bell

This interactive workshop will use participatory activities and share multi-media provocations to explore entangled sensory and social engagements with landscape, through two UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded projects:

‘In All Our Footsteps: Tracking, Mapping and Experiencing Rights of Way in Post-War Britain’ explores the use and experience of rights of way (footpaths, bridleways and byways), through historical, health and policy perspectives.

‘Unlocking landscapes: History, Culture and Sensory Diversity in Landscape Use and Decision Making’ is a network exploring the potential for sensory history scholarship to disrupt and expand the types of stories shared about landscape; moving beyond dominant forms of landscape encounter and enabling a greater diversity of people to ‘be’ and belong in historic landscapes.

Sharing insights from both projects, we will use cross-disciplinary approaches from history, geography and creative methodologies to interrogate and de-centre the dominance of individual and visual perspectives of pathways and landscapes. This in turn will open-up possibilities for more inclusive understandings of people-place relationships. We will invite participants to respond to multi-media provocations, to explore how socialities (with the human and more-than-human) and multi-sensory engagements (haptic, sonic, olfactory, gustatory and visual) shape histories and experiences. In particular, we will explore the role of songs and singing in these experiences. Creative approaches, such as poetry, can be effective means of researching and writing these multi-sensory, social engagements and histories with landscapes. We will share original research poems and invite participants to co-create words for a new, inclusive and sensory-engaged, ‘tramping’ song.

More information about the conference programme here: Programme of the ESEH Conference 2023 (unibe.ch)