Seminar | Engaging with landscape and heritage through playful methods – Phil Jones | Deakin Cultural Heritage Seminar Series

Engaging with landscape and heritage through playful methods – Phil Jones (University of Birmingham)

Visiting a heritage landscape is very different to learning about the same site second-hand through text and images. An embodied, multisensory, engagement enhances emotional and affectual connections to the histories that such sites bear witness to. This paper discusses a series of methodological tools that can be used to examine the embodied connection between people and place, uncovering both tangible and intangible histories. Three approaches in particular are reflected upon: the use of smartphones to crowdsource materials gathered in-place; arts-based urban transects; and biosensing as a tool for examining the emotional unconscious. The potentials and limitations of each are discussed, with an emphasis on methodological triangulation, combining novel and more conventional techniques to gain rounded insights into how people understand landscape and heritage.

Phil Jones is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Geography at the University of Birmingham. His first degrees were in History, studying at St Andrews and Leicester before moving to Birmingham to undertake a PhD in 2000. His work focusses on developing novel methodological approaches to understanding urban problems including the use of walking interviews, video methods, crowdsourcing, biosensing, participatory interventions and collaborations with artists. This paper emerges from a series of research projects undertaken within his Playful Methods Lab.

Venue: Deakin Downtown, Tower 2, Level 12, 727 Collins Street, Docklands, Melbourne

Time: 5:00pm – 6:00pm, 28th March

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