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Macpherson H, 2009, "The intercorporeal emergence of landscape: negotiating sight, blindness, and ideas of landscape in the British countryside" Environment and Planning A 41(5) 1042 – 1054
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The intercorporeal emergence of landscape: negotiating sight, blindness, and ideas of landscape in the British countryside

Hannah Macpherson

Received 24 December 2007; in revised form 6 June 2008; published online 13 February 2009

Abstract. In this paper I explore some of the ways in which people with visual impairments see landscape and participate in visual cultures of landscape apprehension. I draw on ethnographic and interview material, developed while acting as a sighted guide for specialist blind and visually impaired walking groups who visit the landscapes of the Lake District and Peak District in Britain. Through this research material I show how landscape is likely to become present for people with blindness or visual impairment through both their individual capacities for sight and a complex mix of discursive, material, social, and historical relations. Specifically, I argue that there is an intercorporeal, collective dimension to this emergence of landscape and this intercorporeality is evident at both a perceptual and a discursive level. I suggest that future research needs to attend further to how landscape emerges and becomes present through intercorporeal processes.

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