Landscape and non-representational theories

Landscape research has recently seen a burgeoning of interest around notions of 'affect', 'emotion', 'embodiment', 'performance' and 'practice'. Although these notions can be parceled together in a variety of ways, in this chapter I want to situate them within the still developing range of work dealing with what has come to be termed non-representational theory. As a style of thinking, non-representational theory emerged in the mid-1990s. Though originally coined by Nigel Thrift, it is today associated with Ben Anderson, John-David Dewsbury, Paul Harrison, Hayden Lorimer, Derek McComack, Mitch Rose and John Wylie, all of whom, like Thrift, are geographers based in the UK. The term 'theory' is perhaps a little disingenuous here as it implies something in the singular; non-representational theories may be more useful a term (see Anderson 2009), as it denotes something of a catchall rather than a strict or prescriptive theoretical framework. With this in mind, Hayden Lorimer (2005: 83) has proposed the phrase 'more-than-representational', which seems to adequately sum up attempts ' ... to cope with our self-evidently more-than-human, more-than-textual, multisensual worlds'.