Field || guides

The Field || guides follow-on funding programme of activities will see new learning and ideas about field landscapes, landscapes and agricultural ethics impacting upon a range of users, stakeholders and custodians in SW England. Through a series of landscape interventions with professional artists and educators, it directs our research on temporality and ethics into impactful and participatory activities which invite the public to imagine themselves as current and future landscape custodians. In so doing, our work will also contribute to the wider UKRI Landscape Decisions programme, specifically by bringing the voices and views of a range of people and interest groups to attention.

Our impact and engagement activities in Field || Guides build upon the work and findings of our AHRC-funded Field\work Research Network, which both precedes and works in tandem with our impact and engagement plans. In focusing on the iconic landscape of the Devon field, the Field\work network draws into dialogue arts and humanities academics, artists, farmers and key local land managers. The network will generate new learning and perspectives regarding how narratives, experiences and ethics help constitute landscape values.

The Field || guides follow-on work takes materials, methods and insights from the network forward, to engage diverse groups of people in questions of landscape value. Firstly we will work with teachers and primary schoolchildren (future landscape custodians) from urban/rural schools in Devon, to engage them in innovative interactive learning about field landscapes, past present and future. We will do this by collaborating with Beaford Arts, an Arts Council England national portfolio organisation, and a professional map artist, to organise and deliver a series of professionally-curated field-based learning opportunities such as field-walks, sound-drawing, and poetic provocation, so the children and teachers can consider past, present and future landscape value. This work will produce a range of outcomes, and leads to an innovative set of National Curriculum primary resources.

Secondly, we will collaborate with poet technologist Chris Jelley on an innovative 'field poetry' programme, employing physical 'poetry boxes' and geo-locational digital tagging to key locations in Devon, either in, or with a perspective on fields (including National Trust properties, right-to-roam areas, Exeter city centre). In summer 2021 the physical poetry boxes will be sited in carefully chosen locations across Devon to engage visitors and tourists in questions of landscape value, and will produce a large ensemble of curated public voices and perceptions.

Thirdly, we will create a Field || guides website on fields and the cultural value of agricultural landscapes with significant new online resources and engagement opportunities regarding landscape values for public audiences. The website will host findings and resources from the impact and engagement activities discussed, as well as materials from the prior research network. The site will become a long-term resource, supporting the 'Countryside Classroom' resources and visitor experience; the front page will provide entry points for teachers and tourists, as well as other constituencies, including academics and artists. We will launch the website with a physical/digital interactive public exhibition and legacy plenary at the University of Exeter's state-of-the-art Digital Humanities laboratory.

As our impact and engagement activities progress through lifespan of the work, we aim to bring the lived complexities of cultural landscape value into discussions and land-use and policy. We will do this through feeding back into the wider work of the landscape decisions programme, and by engaging with key stakeholders and policy-makers in Devon specifically with whom we have established connections and relationships, including the National Trust, Exeter City Council and Devon Country Council.

We have four main impact objectives: to improve understanding of the aesthetic and ethical value of fields by landscape decision-makers (beneficiaries: policy-makers, local and general public); to empower the voices of children and tourists with respect to land-use (beneficiaries: schoolchildren, tourists, policy-makers); to embed the research outcomes within national curriculum resources (beneficiaries: schoolchildren, teachers); and to inform and co-produce creative landscape interventions (beneficiaries: artists, children, teachers, general public).

Who might benefit?

1. Primary children (in local partner and UK national schools) will benefit with respect to skills, knowledge and creative experience, either through participation in educational activities generated from the in situ activities, and/or National Curriculum resources co-developed with teachers.
2. Educational professionals benefit through skills-training, support with curriculum resources, experience of learning through arts. In particular, the enrichment of cross-curricular knowledge and approaches to landscape and citizenship.
3. Landscape user groups, including residents and visitors to Devon will benefit from innovative and creative opportunities for engagement with new and familiar landscapes.
4. Arts, heritage, and environmental organisations, including project partners and emerging users will benefit from enhanced local/organisational relationships and capacity.
5. Artists will benefit from the creation of a community of professional artists whose work focuses on the fields and landscapes of Devon.
6. Businesses will benefit through hosting poetry stamping stations.
7. Policy-makers will benefit through exposure to new valuation frameworks.

Indirect users and beneficiaries include:
i. Educational policy makers and exam boards
ii. Third sector practitioners in the creative arts

How might they benefit?

1. Extending notions of ethical and temporal value with respect to landscape. In particular, we mean to build 'communities of the field', who benefit from a greater appreciation of their complex role as current and future landscape custodians.
2. Situated engagement with arts, including poetry, maps, exhibitions. We advocate for artists to co-design and co-lead on landscape interventions to facilitate and co-create experiences which enable or transform understanding.
3. Field || guides website. The site will inspire and stimulate ongoing engagement by providing user-specific routes into the content. Different sectors will benefit from the targeted material and resources to inform and enrich their field experiences. We mean for the site to become a social object around which positive interaction occurs, and where involvement can occur across a range of locations.
4. Empowering constituencies whose voices are not often heard (children and tourists) and augmenting the profile of land users, thus enhancing policy-making capabilities.
5. Publicity and profile. The commitment from our range of partners to promote the activities locally, nationally, and internationally, will raise the profile of the project and provide mutually beneficial publicity.

Overall, we seek to maximise the qualitative benefits for different constituencies and users by creating community-engaged, participatory opportunities which illuminate ideas around the shared stewardship of fields and landscapes.