Ewan Allinson

‘Local knowledge and expertise’ are increasingly recognised in legislation across the UK as key resources for addressing an array of policy priorities. There is no unified understanding in the academic or policy literature about what this ‘local knowledge’ actually means in practice, nor how to empower it. This PhD project will use embedded creative practice, arts-research, and co-creative methodologies to discover, document, and illuminate the granular knowledge, expertise, and experience of land that hill farmers, wildlife officers, gamekeepers, ghillies, stalkers, foresters, crofters, and other landworkers, possess in upland rural localities. 

This practice-led research, and its related methodologies of sited fieldwork, ethnographic interviews, collaborative deep-mapping, and sculptural practice, will be based on the Bolton Estate in Wensleydale Yorkshire. Sporting estates in the UK have become flashpoints for heated public debate as regards land use and land management.  This research will provide a spread of empirical evidence, the philosophical reading of which should reveal this overlooked and critical national resource of land-knowledge, expertise, and experience in the authoritative terms it deserves. One of these philosophical filters will be phenomenological, drawing upon Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, the other pragmatist, drawing upon Dewey. 

The contribution to society will be the articulated promotion of traditional and practical local knowledge, which can be deployed by rural communities in their efforts to be heard, and be trusted by policy-makers in designing legislation that delivers value-for-money management of change by empowering local expertise. 

Names of Supervisors: 

• Professor Mary Modeen, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee
• Dr Tina Röck, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Dundee
• Professor Annie Tindley, School of History, Classics & Archaeology, University of Newcastle.