‘Picture perfect’ landscape stories: normative narratives and authorised discourse

ABSTRACT

Despite the positive impacts of an increasing number of organisational initiatives and campaign groups, unequal access to the countryside remains an intransigent issue. Contesting the countryside’s normative associations is thus not just a conceptual challenge but a practical one for organisations managing rural sites. Taking the National Trust-run site of Wembury in Devon, UK, as a case study, I use critical discourse analysis to uncover institutions’ (including the National Trust and other charities, news media, and factual programmes) and individuals’ (using TripAdvisor data) discursive constructions of the landscape. Emerging themes include discourses of place, activities, and people, that—despite some dissonance and seeming contestation—cohere and (re)produce ideologies based on normative narratives of rural landscapes. I suggest the potential value of discourse analysis in surfacing rural storyscapes, and leveraging them to disrupt discourses which further exclusionary ideologies, as a tool to enable locally contextualised, practical means of advancing inclusion.

KEYWORDS:

• Discourse
• normative
• inclusion
• rural
• ‘authorised heritage discourse’

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Landscape Research Group for the funding that enabled this research, undertaken by Falmouth University with the assistance of the National Trust S&E Devon Team.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The National Trust is a charity founded in 1895 to preserve the UK’s historical and natural places and make them available for public enjoyment.

2. Wembury Beach is part of the Wembury landscape; while reviews do encompass other aspects than the beach, they are thus not directly comparable with the wider focus of the other sources.

3. These will be referred to for simplicity as ‘individual’ discourses (i.e. those of TripAdvisor) and ‘institutional’ (those produced by organisations).

4. Social media data analysis is an emerging context, and amidst debates as to the extent to which material shared to the public domain may be analysed without explicit consent there is not yet a clear ethical framework for its use, thus a ‘situational’ approach to ethics was adopted.TripAdvisor does not require login and does not entail sharing of sensitive information (as an online chatroom might); and little metadata is available on TripAdvisor. Nevertheless, no personal information was stored in the dataset, and reviews marked only with their location.

5. Where she appears as ‘Black Till’.

6. Although there were other terms, ‘Black’ does appear in contemporary accounts denoting ethnicity.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Landscape Research Group.

Notes on contributors

Laura Hodsdon

Dr Laura Hodsdon is a Senior Research Fellow at Falmouth University. Her research focuses on identity and culture from a perspective of social justice, with particular interests in normative discourse, power, and privilege in heritage and in organisations, drawing on a background of equality and diversity policy at the University of Oxford and a PhD in literary criticism from the University of Leeds, UK. She leads Falmouth University’s ‘Inequality and Storytelling’ research centre, and is currently (2021-2023) Project Leader and UK Principal Investigator of a European Commission Joint Programming Initiative on Cultural Heritage/AHRC-funded research consortium project Re-voicing Cultural Landscapes: Narratives, Perspectives, and Performances of Marginalised Intangible Cultural Heritage.