Katherine Burlingame | University of Oslo (original) (raw)
Papers by Katherine Burlingame
Geoforum, 2025
Rewilding efforts have been extensively employed to return nature back to its natural rhythm, inc... more Rewilding efforts have been extensively employed to return nature back to its natural rhythm, increasing biodiversity, allowing ecosystems to restore themselves, and mitigating the effects of climate change as human impact is slowly reversed. Rewilding, however, has also been described as a plastic word loosely applied across ecological science and environmental activism, and has been blamed for further perpetuating dualisms of nature and culture, wild and unwild, and unpeopled and peopled. The designation of an Anthropocene era in which humans have irreversibly transformed landscapes across the globe, however, has consequently challenged traditional conceptions of the wilderness while blurring the boundaries between the human and nonhuman world. Similarly, recent rewilding efforts around the globe reveal a unique story of enduring human care, underscored by the strengthening, rather than severing, of relationships between humans, nonhumans, and their shared landscapes. This paper therefore provides a critical review of recent ‘plastic’ rewilding interpretations and strategies that have led to a disconnection between policy and practice as well as the term’s expansion into popular nature writing and mainstream consumer marketing. Following calls for more inclusive rewilding futures, the concept of co-wilding is suggested as a form of vibrant care and lively collaboration to help mobilize new possibilities for coexistence on a damaged planet.
Landscape Research, 2024
An increased interest in Arctic regions as places of data generation to inform climate models, re... more An increased interest in Arctic regions as places of data generation to inform climate models, reports, and policies on environmental change has created a distinct kind of landscape, transformed by the material legacy of short and long-term monitoring and other scientific activities. Drawing from fieldwork in four key areas for environmental monitoring in the HighNorth of Norway, Sweden, and Greenland, we investigate the intentional and unintentional materialities of environing technologies and other anthropogenic impacts that form a particular kind of Anthropocene land-scape related to knowing global environmental change. We conclude that such distinctive monitoring landscapes contribute to work investigating shifting conceptualisations of heritage and the emergence of unintentional landscapes in the Anthropocene, and suggest that as co-creators of the global environment, they provide an interesting insight into the material legacies of natural scientific knowledge production.
Landscape Research , 2024
The landscape concept’s disciplinary ambiguity and its broad range of definitions have resulted i... more The landscape concept’s disciplinary ambiguity and its broad range of definitions have resulted in the term’s unruly reputation. More recent scholarship, however, suggests that the term’s interdisciplinary application challenges its contentious origins, creates new pathways for co-creation, and encourages more direct interventions in informing policy. I therefore suggest there is a growing realm of landscape geographies, exploring alternative ways of knowing and being in landscapes across broader spatial, temporal, and ontological scales. Given that it can be difficult to navigate the complicated matrix of landscape definitions, theories, and methodologies, I position landscape as a method and introduce a new model of landscape analysis that includes three overlapping approaches to investigate a landscape’s material, symbolic, and affective dimensions. I conclude that embracing a wider spectrum of landscape geographies will help to elevate a more diverse range of voices, inspiring interdisciplinary conversations that contend with landscape futures in a rapidly changing world.
International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2022
In this article, I challenge the increasing emphasis on digital technologies to enhance encounter... more In this article, I challenge the increasing emphasis on digital technologies to enhance encounters with the past in heritage landscapes. Beginning with a memory from my childhood, I conceptualise presence as being there and review recent approaches in heritage studies that highlight the wide range of benefits derived from embodied experiences in heritage places including reinforcing feelings of wellbeing and ontological security. Outlining enduring limitations of high-tech digital heritage tools, particularly the lack of critical perspectives assessing the ethical and methodological challenges of employing them in heritage landscapes, I argue there is a recurring theme of grasping for presence. Drawing on fieldwork in four heritage sites associated with the Viking Age in Sweden and Germany, I suggest a renewed focus on ‘high touch’ will encourage more meaningful, multisensory encounters within the fabric of the heritage landscape. As our lives become increasingly high tech, I return to the foundational values and motivations of being there in heritage places, concluding that heritage landscapes serve as important spaces of interaction where past, present, and future imaginaries can be negotiated beyond the reach of the digital world.
Archaeological Review from Cambridge, 2022
Recent research has revealed that interdisciplinary work combining archaeological and heritage pr... more Recent research has revealed that interdisciplinary work combining archaeological and heritage practice continues to be limited by enduring what is possible in what archaeologists and heritage practitioners 'do'. Though archaeologists play an integral role in the discovery and interpretation of the past-providing the foundation for the heritage-making process, there is often position storytelling as a key to bridging the divide between archaeological practices in Sweden, we argue that a renewed focus on storytelling creates more dynamic and collaborative pathways to interpret, communicate and experience archaeological heritagescapes.
Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 2021
Learning by doing has become a common phrase in the scholarship of teaching and learning as resea... more Learning by doing has become a common phrase in the scholarship of teaching and learning as research continues to emphasize the benefits of active student engagement in higher education. Instead of passive vessels to be filled with information, students become the architects of their own education. While traditional ways of teaching focus on what students should learn, there is now more interest in how they should learn. With the emotional turn in geography, research has increasingly focused on the lived experience and the emotional and affective dimensions of space and place. However, the question often remains as to how to bring such research into an active learning environment that extends beyond the classroom. Instead of learning by doing, learning by feeling is presented as a new way of teaching emotional geographies. Student projects from two courses in landscape geography reveal how excursions into the affective landscape help students explore emotional geographies through more creative, reflective, affective, and active learning assessment strategies.
Tourism Geographies, 2019
A recent shift in tourism studies has focused on the emotional, affective, embodied, and performa... more A recent shift in tourism studies has focused on the emotional, affective, embodied, and performative dimensions of heritage landscape experience. However, such research often struggles to transform theoretical and conceptual discussions into practical and applicable terms that can be effectively implemented by site managers. The concept of presence is therefore proposed to identify emotional and affective dimensions of heritage landscapes through an embodied, observational, and collaborative approach. Inspired by landscape phenomenology, I share how my own embodied encounter in the Viking Age site of Birka in Sweden prompted further observations and reflections on the existing site experience to confirm that certain areas of the landscape have been largely unexplored for their affective and emotional potential. Practical strategies to utilize these new dimensions emerge from focus groups and interviews with site managers, re-enactors, and tour guides. I conclude that a more collaborative study of presence grounded in embodied and observational encounters provides a useful stepping stone to transform theoretical and conceptual discussions of emotion and affect into more practical heritage management strategies.
Journal of Geography in Higher Education , 2018
The standardization of writing styles and formats and the use of jargon in the social sciences ha... more The standardization of writing styles and formats and the use of jargon in the social sciences have had considerable consequences on the quality of academic work. Due to the emphasis on method, theory, and empirical rigor, creativity, personal narrative, and storytelling no longer play a large role in academic writing. Addressing the growing concern for researchers losing their sense of self, the suppression of emotional reflection, the inaccessibility of jargon-filled work to the public, and the overall deterioration of writing quality, this paper argues for a renewed focus on teaching writing as a foundational qualitative method in the social sciences. Using creative writing examples by students from a graduate course in landscape geography, I suggest strategies for teaching, practicing, and reflecting on writing as method. Addressing the significance of creative and reflective writing earlier on in higher education will help young academics foster their own narrative voices, and will ultimately contribute to more interesting, accessible, and affective research that (re)enchants geography and other fields in the social sciences.
Books by Katherine Burlingame
Certain deadening forces including disneyfication, museumization, and the standardization of heri... more Certain deadening forces including disneyfication, museumization, and the standardization of heritagescapes have led to the loss of embodied, lived experiences. In an effort to (re)enchant how these landscapes are developed, managed, and encountered, a new landscape model is introduced that combines the more practical components of heritage management (locale and story) with strategies that explore the emotional and affective dimensions of phenomenological landscape experience (presence). Within landscape geography, the model provides a more concise methodology for landscape analysis. Bringing together often opposing perspectives, the model helps to peel back the different material, symbolic, and affective layers of landscapes. Within heritage and tourism studies, the model provides a vital stepping stone between theory and practice, and it serves as an accessible and replicable tool to study the complexity of the visitor experience and the different dimensions of historical landscapes. Applying the model in four sites associated with the Viking Age reveals the desire for more multisensory, hands-on, and individualized encounters with heritagescapes. This illuminates the need to thwart the deadening forces and reawaken the lived experience in landscapes of the past and present.
Book Chapters by Katherine Burlingame
Landscape as Heritage: International Critical Perspectives, 2022
In Authenticity in North America: Place, Tourism, Heritage, Culture and the Popular Imagination, 2019
Book Reviews by Katherine Burlingame
International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2022
A timely contribution among recent research that has challenged the nature/culture divide in heri... more A timely contribution among recent research that has challenged the nature/culture divide in heritage studies and particularly the future of heritage in the Anthropocene (DeSilvey
Geoforum, 2025
Rewilding efforts have been extensively employed to return nature back to its natural rhythm, inc... more Rewilding efforts have been extensively employed to return nature back to its natural rhythm, increasing biodiversity, allowing ecosystems to restore themselves, and mitigating the effects of climate change as human impact is slowly reversed. Rewilding, however, has also been described as a plastic word loosely applied across ecological science and environmental activism, and has been blamed for further perpetuating dualisms of nature and culture, wild and unwild, and unpeopled and peopled. The designation of an Anthropocene era in which humans have irreversibly transformed landscapes across the globe, however, has consequently challenged traditional conceptions of the wilderness while blurring the boundaries between the human and nonhuman world. Similarly, recent rewilding efforts around the globe reveal a unique story of enduring human care, underscored by the strengthening, rather than severing, of relationships between humans, nonhumans, and their shared landscapes. This paper therefore provides a critical review of recent ‘plastic’ rewilding interpretations and strategies that have led to a disconnection between policy and practice as well as the term’s expansion into popular nature writing and mainstream consumer marketing. Following calls for more inclusive rewilding futures, the concept of co-wilding is suggested as a form of vibrant care and lively collaboration to help mobilize new possibilities for coexistence on a damaged planet.
Landscape Research, 2024
An increased interest in Arctic regions as places of data generation to inform climate models, re... more An increased interest in Arctic regions as places of data generation to inform climate models, reports, and policies on environmental change has created a distinct kind of landscape, transformed by the material legacy of short and long-term monitoring and other scientific activities. Drawing from fieldwork in four key areas for environmental monitoring in the HighNorth of Norway, Sweden, and Greenland, we investigate the intentional and unintentional materialities of environing technologies and other anthropogenic impacts that form a particular kind of Anthropocene land-scape related to knowing global environmental change. We conclude that such distinctive monitoring landscapes contribute to work investigating shifting conceptualisations of heritage and the emergence of unintentional landscapes in the Anthropocene, and suggest that as co-creators of the global environment, they provide an interesting insight into the material legacies of natural scientific knowledge production.
Landscape Research , 2024
The landscape concept’s disciplinary ambiguity and its broad range of definitions have resulted i... more The landscape concept’s disciplinary ambiguity and its broad range of definitions have resulted in the term’s unruly reputation. More recent scholarship, however, suggests that the term’s interdisciplinary application challenges its contentious origins, creates new pathways for co-creation, and encourages more direct interventions in informing policy. I therefore suggest there is a growing realm of landscape geographies, exploring alternative ways of knowing and being in landscapes across broader spatial, temporal, and ontological scales. Given that it can be difficult to navigate the complicated matrix of landscape definitions, theories, and methodologies, I position landscape as a method and introduce a new model of landscape analysis that includes three overlapping approaches to investigate a landscape’s material, symbolic, and affective dimensions. I conclude that embracing a wider spectrum of landscape geographies will help to elevate a more diverse range of voices, inspiring interdisciplinary conversations that contend with landscape futures in a rapidly changing world.
International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2022
In this article, I challenge the increasing emphasis on digital technologies to enhance encounter... more In this article, I challenge the increasing emphasis on digital technologies to enhance encounters with the past in heritage landscapes. Beginning with a memory from my childhood, I conceptualise presence as being there and review recent approaches in heritage studies that highlight the wide range of benefits derived from embodied experiences in heritage places including reinforcing feelings of wellbeing and ontological security. Outlining enduring limitations of high-tech digital heritage tools, particularly the lack of critical perspectives assessing the ethical and methodological challenges of employing them in heritage landscapes, I argue there is a recurring theme of grasping for presence. Drawing on fieldwork in four heritage sites associated with the Viking Age in Sweden and Germany, I suggest a renewed focus on ‘high touch’ will encourage more meaningful, multisensory encounters within the fabric of the heritage landscape. As our lives become increasingly high tech, I return to the foundational values and motivations of being there in heritage places, concluding that heritage landscapes serve as important spaces of interaction where past, present, and future imaginaries can be negotiated beyond the reach of the digital world.
Archaeological Review from Cambridge, 2022
Recent research has revealed that interdisciplinary work combining archaeological and heritage pr... more Recent research has revealed that interdisciplinary work combining archaeological and heritage practice continues to be limited by enduring what is possible in what archaeologists and heritage practitioners 'do'. Though archaeologists play an integral role in the discovery and interpretation of the past-providing the foundation for the heritage-making process, there is often position storytelling as a key to bridging the divide between archaeological practices in Sweden, we argue that a renewed focus on storytelling creates more dynamic and collaborative pathways to interpret, communicate and experience archaeological heritagescapes.
Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 2021
Learning by doing has become a common phrase in the scholarship of teaching and learning as resea... more Learning by doing has become a common phrase in the scholarship of teaching and learning as research continues to emphasize the benefits of active student engagement in higher education. Instead of passive vessels to be filled with information, students become the architects of their own education. While traditional ways of teaching focus on what students should learn, there is now more interest in how they should learn. With the emotional turn in geography, research has increasingly focused on the lived experience and the emotional and affective dimensions of space and place. However, the question often remains as to how to bring such research into an active learning environment that extends beyond the classroom. Instead of learning by doing, learning by feeling is presented as a new way of teaching emotional geographies. Student projects from two courses in landscape geography reveal how excursions into the affective landscape help students explore emotional geographies through more creative, reflective, affective, and active learning assessment strategies.
Tourism Geographies, 2019
A recent shift in tourism studies has focused on the emotional, affective, embodied, and performa... more A recent shift in tourism studies has focused on the emotional, affective, embodied, and performative dimensions of heritage landscape experience. However, such research often struggles to transform theoretical and conceptual discussions into practical and applicable terms that can be effectively implemented by site managers. The concept of presence is therefore proposed to identify emotional and affective dimensions of heritage landscapes through an embodied, observational, and collaborative approach. Inspired by landscape phenomenology, I share how my own embodied encounter in the Viking Age site of Birka in Sweden prompted further observations and reflections on the existing site experience to confirm that certain areas of the landscape have been largely unexplored for their affective and emotional potential. Practical strategies to utilize these new dimensions emerge from focus groups and interviews with site managers, re-enactors, and tour guides. I conclude that a more collaborative study of presence grounded in embodied and observational encounters provides a useful stepping stone to transform theoretical and conceptual discussions of emotion and affect into more practical heritage management strategies.
Journal of Geography in Higher Education , 2018
The standardization of writing styles and formats and the use of jargon in the social sciences ha... more The standardization of writing styles and formats and the use of jargon in the social sciences have had considerable consequences on the quality of academic work. Due to the emphasis on method, theory, and empirical rigor, creativity, personal narrative, and storytelling no longer play a large role in academic writing. Addressing the growing concern for researchers losing their sense of self, the suppression of emotional reflection, the inaccessibility of jargon-filled work to the public, and the overall deterioration of writing quality, this paper argues for a renewed focus on teaching writing as a foundational qualitative method in the social sciences. Using creative writing examples by students from a graduate course in landscape geography, I suggest strategies for teaching, practicing, and reflecting on writing as method. Addressing the significance of creative and reflective writing earlier on in higher education will help young academics foster their own narrative voices, and will ultimately contribute to more interesting, accessible, and affective research that (re)enchants geography and other fields in the social sciences.
Certain deadening forces including disneyfication, museumization, and the standardization of heri... more Certain deadening forces including disneyfication, museumization, and the standardization of heritagescapes have led to the loss of embodied, lived experiences. In an effort to (re)enchant how these landscapes are developed, managed, and encountered, a new landscape model is introduced that combines the more practical components of heritage management (locale and story) with strategies that explore the emotional and affective dimensions of phenomenological landscape experience (presence). Within landscape geography, the model provides a more concise methodology for landscape analysis. Bringing together often opposing perspectives, the model helps to peel back the different material, symbolic, and affective layers of landscapes. Within heritage and tourism studies, the model provides a vital stepping stone between theory and practice, and it serves as an accessible and replicable tool to study the complexity of the visitor experience and the different dimensions of historical landscapes. Applying the model in four sites associated with the Viking Age reveals the desire for more multisensory, hands-on, and individualized encounters with heritagescapes. This illuminates the need to thwart the deadening forces and reawaken the lived experience in landscapes of the past and present.
Landscape as Heritage: International Critical Perspectives, 2022
In Authenticity in North America: Place, Tourism, Heritage, Culture and the Popular Imagination, 2019
International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2022
A timely contribution among recent research that has challenged the nature/culture divide in heri... more A timely contribution among recent research that has challenged the nature/culture divide in heritage studies and particularly the future of heritage in the Anthropocene (DeSilvey