Non-representational approaches to body-landscape relations

This short paper offers a critical summary of some of the key themes of non-representational theory (NRT), with a particular focus on recent approaches to body-landscape relations and the potential place of disability in these accounts. NRT in British human geography has encouraged an emphasis on the embodied, practiced and habitual qualities of embodied experience. Recent non-representational work on landscape has developed these agendas to show how landscape may be thought of as a ‘process’ (Rose 2002) or ‘tension’ which potentially ‘animates’ the embodied subject (Rose and Wylie 2006). Here the body and the landscape are understood to be complimentary concepts that are useful to think through together – each in a constant process of 'becoming’ through the other. This paper reflects on the methodological challenges of researching such non-representational body-landscape relations, showing how researchers have drawn on insights of disciplines as diverse as neuroscience and performance studies to address this challenge.