Land Pedagogy in the Metropole: A co-produced research project into community-centred knowledge in Merseyside, UK

This paper examines a research project carried out in the city of Liverpool in Merseyside, UK, which drew on creative arts-based methodologies, popular education, and ‘post-abyssal’ epistemologies to co-create frameworks of knowledge with communities in struggle.

A ‘spatial vocabulary of power’ for Merseyside was developed to render explicit the tacit, embodied knowledge of project participants of their lived experience of their local spacetime. Coupled with a creative provocation, inviting participants to consider Liverpool and its surrounding area as an ‘internal colony’, participants became de-habituated to their everyday environment. This provocation was informed by histories both of enclosure and control of land in the UK, and settler colonialism as a structure.

The complex coloniser/colonised tacit knowledge of the participants was made explicit and shown to be in contradiction to the dominant ideology of capitalism, suggesting reasons why much of Merseyside has maintained an anti-capitalist counter-ideology. The resultant narrative suggests that a drama-based land pedagogy appropriate to the colonial centre can be developed so as to enable communities in struggle to transform into communities of resistance. The paper concludes by considering ways in which this aligns with pedagogies emergent in the Global South, and how they can be developed further.