CONDUCCIONES Y SERVICIOS

In this chapter I have sought to elucidate participants’ embodied and multisensory place experiences as this relates to the care farm environment. According to DeMiglo & Williams (2008) an individual’s sense of place may be understood in terms of the perceived atmosphere or quality that is attributed to a specific space, where the concept of atmosphere is used here to denote a ‘spatial experience of being attuned in and by the material world’ (Bille 2014, 5, cited in, Pink, Leder Mackley, and Morosanu 2015).

Humans’ experience of place is often compared to other forms of sense perception that, as with the other human senses, are often difficult to communicate or explain. For example, in terms of sense of taste one may consider a food to be particularly delicious whilst another may consider this same food to be unpleasant. The same holds for sense of place perception in that people’s experiences of specific localities can be interpreted very differently and hold very different meanings for different people (Eyles and Williams 2008). This is supported by findings of this thesis. As demonstrated throughout this chapter, participants’ material and embodied engagement with the care farm environment created experiences that were alluring or repellent, therapeutic or harmful, depending on the meanings that people attached to those experiences. This reminds us that so-called therapeutic landscapes do not

146 possess intrinsically therapeutic properties with the capacity to enhance or restore wellbeing. Indeed, participants in this study clearly experienced the care farm environment in different ways. Of course, this is not to deny that participants experienced the care farm as therapeutic on a variety of occasions, but it does suggest that positive place experiences are not in any sense pre-determined outcomes (Conradson, 2005).

Participants’ visual, auditory, olfactory and tactile experiences served to create strong visceral connections to the care farm environment and to the other (human and non-human) bodies that shared it. What is more, even when these experiences were interpreted as unpleasant, they could still be very powerful and evocative. This highlights how care farms have the potential to stimulate strong place attachments (or aversions) and ways in which participants’ multi-sensory experiences shaped processes of place making and therefore people’s sense of place (Duffy and Waitt, 2013). This construes sense of place as a type of situated affect or feeling state, whereby a place ‘owes its character to the experiences it affords to those who spend time there, that is, to the sights, sounds, feels, smells movements and rhythms that constitute its specific ambience’ (Vannini and Taggart, 2013, p. 12).

I argue that all the different ways in which participants interact with various features of the farm landscape and the sense experiences that arise as a result, help participants to develop an embodied connection to the farm and the people that share it. In this way, participants’ landscape experiences serve to create a strong or ‘authentic’ sense of place, a sense that evolved over time as participants continue to engage with features of their environment. This sense of place is not simply psychological or part of our human consciousness in isolation, but is achieved and produced through participants’ sensory, emotional and affective engagements with the material world (Pink, Leder Mackley and Morosanu, 2015).

In the next chapter I explore the sense of place concept in more detail, as this relates to the care farm environment, and the implications this has for people with intellectual disabilities. Specifically, I examine the transformative potential of the various affective atmospheres described in this chapter, through an examination of the wider impact that care farming had on the everyday lives of the participants in this study.

147 Chapter 6. The care farm landscape: therapeutic or ameliorating?

6.1. Introduction

In the previous chapter, I sought to explore the material, embodied and performed elements that foreground participants’ therapeutic landscape encounters when engaged in care farming activities. I argue that participants’ sense of place emerges as an affective environment or atmosphere, characterised by the sights, sounds, feels, smells, rhythms and textures that constitute the care farm landscape and its ‘specific ambience’ (Vannini and Taggart, 2013, p. 12). Whilst much of this chapter focused on the more immediate and momentary aspects of wellbeing, I argued that attention must also be given to the disruptive power of such affective atmospheres, if wellbeing is to become a stable and measurable outcome over the longer term (Atkinson, 2013b). This forces us to think critically about the way in which affect works antagonistically to disrupt our habituated practices, modes of perception and everyday routines and to ‘try to capture the transfer of affectual energies that may play a part in jolting individuals to see and feel differently’ (Patterson, 2005, p. 165). This approach required me to take in to account not only the specific forms of engagement that took place within the care farm setting, but also the wider network of socio-environmental relations within which participants were embedded (Conradson, 2005).

Drawing on the video data and interview material, as well as other visual material collated by participants’ themselves, this chapter examines the wider impact that participation in care farming activities has on the everyday lives of people with intellectual disabilities. I begin by outlining the different journeys undergone by two participants, during their first year of attending a care farm (see below for selection rationale). The word ‘journey’ is used here to communicate the importance of movement between places and to capture the transfer of affectual energies that may play a part in jolting individuals to think and feel differently. Drawing on these individual journeys as examples, but interpreted through the analysis of all seven case studies overall, this chapter examines the transformative potential of the various affective atmospheres, described in chapter five.

My analysis reveals two types of therapeutic journey that broadly fit the experiences of my case study participants. The first type of journey denotes landscape experiences that are

148 transformative. Here the therapeutic power of the care farm landscape resides in the ability of activities conducted on care farms to influence other aspects of participants’ lives to create wider ‘spaces of wellbeing’ (Fleuret and Atkinson, 2007). This is characterised by enhanced social networks, increased independence and healthier, happier bodies. By contrast, I suggest that there is another type of journey where the therapeutic experience resides in the ‘otherness’ of the farm landscape. For this type of journey, the care farm is perceived as a space of sanctuary where participants feel safe and accepted, thereby providing a much- needed source of respite from other ‘health taking’ environments that participants inhabit during their everyday lives. Whilst providing people with opportunities to remove themselves from places that are detrimental to health can have certain therapeutic benefits, I argue that the wider impact of care farming on the lives of these individuals is less clear.