Creative Approaches to Landscape Research: Multisensory Multispecies Storytelling: Using multisensory and multispecies research perspectives with marginalised groups

The authors are the project team for the UKRI-funded ‘Multisensory Multispecies Storytelling to Engage Disadvantaged Groups in Changing Landscapes’ (2020-22) project, which used creative artist-led workshops to enable people from disadvantaged groups (young people with autism, deaf children, disabled adults, GP referrals, long-term unemployed and students) to explore and communicate their relationships with nature and landscapes. Participants engaged in activities in situated and specific landscapes in the north-west of England, producing creative works that represent their sensorial responses to those environments. The use of artistic and creative approaches as both a research tool and as a method of communicating outcomes enables forms of engagement with the topic that respond to the experiences of those who have taken part and the particularities of the selected locations. Drawing on participants’ experiences of these workshops, and the resulting creative works, this paper outlines the aims and outcomes of this project and examines the interrogative possibilities enabled by its creative approaches. In doing so it foregrounds the inclusive potential of such methods, and thereby the opportunities that creative methodologies offer in enabling marginalised and disadvantaged groups to engage in debates about nature and landscape use.