Sensing Nature: Unravelling Metanarratives of Nature and Blindness

Abstract

Understandings of nature, landscape and the senses have seen important shifts over time, from early medieval ideas of land 'shaping' to more detached contemplative notions of land 'scoping' since the seventeenth century. Despite a growing body of research demonstrating the richness of people's diverse multisensory nature encounters, certain interpretations and embodiments of nature are persistently prioritised over others in both policy and practice. This essay explores how long-standing preoccupations with the visual in people's understandings of nature and landscape have intersected with overly simplistic metanarratives of 'blindness' and disability in ways that are constraining contemporary opportunities for genuinely inclusive nature experiences, experiences that could instead be promoting health and wellbeing through inspiring curiosity, embodied connection, movement and challenge. To do so, I draw on the findings of a 2-year in-depth qualitative study, 'Sensing Nature', exploring how people with varying forms and severities of sight impairment experience a sense of wellbeing (or otherwise) in diverse types of nature during the life course. The essay examines how study participants had come to embody and experience different nature encounters, pursuing a 'zest to curiosity' in 'mundane everyday' as well as 'riskier' natures. In doing so, it seeks to counter overly simplistic sensory stereotypes of people with sight impairment as 'sub-' or 'super-humans', understanding people first and foremost as idiosyncratic individuals with diverse nature interests, embodied knowledge and skills.