It’s challenging to produce academic work outside the supportive context of an academic department, but since my last acsdemic post concluded in 2019 I’ve returned to academic writing alongside building a new role for myself in the Civil Service. This is a quick guide to the outputs that Perpetrating Landscapes is producing…
Perpetration in therapeutic landscapes: War and the Moral Outdoors is an article due to be submitted in 2024 and named after my project, funded by AHRC Living Legacies and hosted at Newcastle University’s School of History, Classics and Archaeology from late 2016 until mid-2018. It tells the story of how Ruth Dodds, a First World War munitions worker from a well known Gateshead family, understood and experienced natural landscapes as a moral corrective to the horrors of war and, moreover, a moral corrective to her contribution to the industrialised slaughter of the front. Click the text above and you can read a slightly shortened and (hopefully) easier to read version. Many of the ideas that now power Perpetrating Landscapes have their origin in “WatMO” – they share a concern with landscapes, and how natural landscapes in particular are sometimes expected to support complex hopes and meet challenging personal needs.
Leaky borders in the littoral seascape was a conference abstract submitted (and accepted) to the RGS-IBG during the pandemic of 2020-2022, but which, regrettably, I had to withdraw from. As such, this piece is yet to exist beyond this heavily annotated abstract: it draws on a really compelling archival finding to discuss how borders are made where the land gives way to the sea, and how those borders can be perpetrated against.