Environmental humanities

Environmental humanities asks what landscapes mean. It reads landscape as narrative, memory and philosophical inquiry, drawing on literature, history, art and cultural theory to understand how people make sense of the places they live in and move through. Work in this theme treats landscape not only as a physical setting but as a way of seeing and telling: the stories we attach to places, the values those stories carry, and how they shape the way land is used, contested and cared for.

It sits alongside the group’s more empirical themes as a reminder that landscape research is as much about interpretation as measurement, and it is frequently where the vocabulary other themes rely on gets examined rather than assumed.