Staff Profile
Dr Charlotte Veal
Senior Lecturer in Landscape, Degree Programme Director MSc Advanced Landscape Planning and Management
- Telephone: 0191 20 80236
- Personal Website: https://newcastle.academia.edu/CharlotteVeal/Analytics/activity/overview
- Address: School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape
Newcastle University
Room 8.06 Henry Daysh Building
Claremont Road
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 7RU
Biography
I am interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of landscape studies, cultural-political geographies, security studies, and performance studies. My research focuses on the intersections between: (dancing) bodies, performance, and security. And, it develops the theories and practices of creative research methods.
Principally, my research traces the cultural and political geographies of performance and/or creativity, and the role of political performances in spearheading novel responses to security debates - this includes in the context of international security (international borders), militarism and mobility, public health (microbial security) and, more recently coastal landscapes (multispecies ecosystems). I am interested in the language and practices of performance and choreography for intervening in security, governance and geo/bio-politics.
Research Interests (overview)
- Landscape, embodiment and practice
- Geographies of creativity, performance and the Geohumanities
- Borderscape, everyday geopolitics and creative securities
- Arts, militarism, and gravity
- Creative arts in post/conflict peace, health, and wellbeing
- Multispecies relations/thinking, beastly landscape, and microbial landscapes
- Coastal communities and multispecies seascapes entanglements
- Experimental and creative methods
PhDs
I welcome enquiries from potential PhD students in any of the above areas.
Ongoing PhD Supervision:
- 2022- Anne-Sofie Beling: The More-than-Human Relations of Trans-planetary Imaginaries and Habitats (with Martyn Dade-Robertson)
Roles and Responsibilities
- Degree Programme Director for MSc Advanced Landscape Planning and Management
- Co-Director The Landscape Collaboratory
- NUCoRE Landscape Theme Co-Lead. NUCoRE Landscape ECR Co-Lead
- APL Research Committee
- APL Library Committee
- APL Northern Bridge Selection Committee
- Performance Research Network Steering Committee (interim co-director)
- Former Degree Programme Director for MA Landscape Architecture Studies
External Roles and Responsibilities
- External Examiner for MSc Architecture, Landscape and Environment, University of Edinburgh
- Editorial Board Cultural Geographies
- International Advisory Board for Landscape Research
- FOLAR Steering Committee
Education
2016-2017: Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice, University of Southampton
2011-2015: PhD: Geography, University of Nottingham (no corrections)
2010-2011: MA: Landscape and Culture, University of Nottingham (Distinction)
2007-2010: BA: Geography, University of Nottingham (1st)
Previous Appointments
2019-2021: Postdoctorate Fellowship in Landscape, Newcastle University
2017-2018: Ass. Lecturer in Human Geography, Coventry University
2016-2017: Research Fellow in Human Geography, University of Southampton
2015-2017: Teaching Fellow in Human Geography, University of Southampton
Affiliations
Academic Member of the Landscape Institute
Fellow of Higher Education Academy
Member of the Landscape Research Group
Current Research Project
Chorepolitics in the Borderland: Dance, Geopolitics and Spaces of Urban Securitisation - Fellowship in Landscape, Newcastle University (PI)
National borders are witnessing the unprecedented return of walls, fences, and separation barriers, as nation states across, and often between, the Global North and South seek new strategies of security in an era of geopolitical turbulence. Based upon a major piece of interdisciplinary empirical research on the US-Mexico border, this project delivers an innovative geopolitical account of the role of performance in animating and contesting securitised borderscapes. The project traces the embodied mobilities cultivated within the borderland, explores the role of dance practices to stand witness to the material and representational violences of securitisation, and explores how dance might intervene in the border to rewrite the place-producing politics of securitised borderscapes.
The Secret Life of Seaweed (Co-PI with Maggie Roe) and Dance of the Seaweed (PI with Esther Huss) - Catherine Cookson Fund, Newcastle University Bid Preparation Fund
The coastline plays a vital role in the history, culture and economy of the UK. Yet a historic fall in demand for domestic seaside holidays, and a decline in the fishing and shipbuilding industries, have contributed to various socio-economic challenges within these areas. The project(s) examine past and future imaginaries of human relationships with the coast through the lens of seaweed. Seaweed has long supported the economic health of coastal communities. It is receiving escalating policy and industry attention for its role in diversifying livelihoods, and as a possible solution to socio-economic and environmental challenges. To date, the dominant view of seaweed is as a product of an increasingly commercialised, human-centric sea space. We address the disconnect between the extractive approach and an expressive, sensory seascape, post-humanistic approach. The embodied, visceral, mobile, textual, imaginaries and expressive cultures, past and present, of seaweed are examined. And, we explore a novel framing of people’s relationships with seaweed based around creative arts practice, utilising creative arts practices (including movement workshops, choreography, and dance performance) to generate knowledge and translate novel insights about lived experiences and memories to seascapes and blue nature.
Beastly Landscapes (Co-PI with Usue Ruiz-Arana) - Newcastle University NICAP
Humanists and social scientists are increasingly attending to human entanglements with ‘non-human’ worlds. Through a series of events (symposiums, writing/scoring retreats, and exhibitions) we advance the ‘beast’ as the central dynamic in this encounter. Beasts have inhabited our art (Neolithic painting), landscapes (gothic literature) and science (inter-species transplants), troubling the limits of what it means to be human. Adopting a multidisciplinary framework, we trace how the beast – as creative being – might advance our sense-making of the world; de-centre human agency in the Anthropocene; and put a reign to human exceptionalism.
Past Research Projects
Routes of infection, routes to safety: Creative mapping of human-viral behaviours on the bus to understand infection prevention practices, AHRC COVID-19 Rapid Response Grant, with University of Southampton (Co-I)
There is an absence of qualitative, interdisciplinary research on the personal application of infection prevention (IP) measures, like hand-washing and mask-wearing, and its effectiveness beyond the healthcare setting. In this crisis, IP measures are critical to building confidence to resume leisure and economic activity out of the home. The project advances previous work by this team that identified a need for novel IP research which integrates behavioural, microbiological and aesthetic approaches to creatively demonstrate the interactions of human movement with microbial/viral transmission. The case study is the public transport bus and its diverse community of users The research will: i) investigate the structural challenges in consistent application of IP in public (and private) spaces; ii) provide microbiological and sociological evidence to inform and improve effective cleaning practices for bus operators and safe travel practices for bus users; iii) generate wider public knowledge and understanding of infection risk/prevention and their geographies in shared indoor spaces.
Choreographing military bodies: Aeromobilities, embodied geopolitics, and dance-based combat training with the British Parachute Regiment - Royal Geographical Society Small Grant and the Jasmin Leila Award, University of Southampton (PI)
The archival project examines the micro-bodily regimes of British Parachute Regiment personnel during training at Ringway Aerodrome in the mid-1940s. It combines research into military- and aero-mobilities, with work on embodied geopolitics, and the emerging geographies of dance literature, to explore the making of the airborne militarised body. More specifically, the project analyses, innovatively, how military strategists solicited dance-based embodied knowledges in the furtherance of geopolitical agendas. Notably, it marshals interdisciplinary, multi-sensual archival sources to critically probe the historical role of dance theorist Rudolf Laban in the drilling and analysis of British paratrooper’s bodies during recruitment, as operationalised, and commencing assault operations. Here, I lay the foundations for examining dance-based pedagogy, including Laban’s ‘Industrial Rhythms’ and ‘Effort Analysis’, in cultivating ‘elite’ military bodies and ‘advance force’ practices.
I am the Degree Programme Director for MSc Advanced Landscape Planning and Management (2023-) and former Programme Director for MA Landscape Architecture Studies (MALAS) programme (2022-23).
Current Teaching
I currently teach on the Landscape Architecture (MLA) and Landscape Architecture Studies (MALAS) programmes. This includes:
- APL8015: Introduction to Landscape Research: Skills and Practice (module leader)
- APL8000/APL8004: Conceptualising Landscape (module leader)
- APL8008: Landscape Histories and Theories (module leader)
- APL8018: Landscape Planning and Management Dissertation (module leader)
- APL8017: Landscape Planning and Management Field trip (module leader)
- TCP8911: Research Design
- APL8006: Landscape Architecture Studio 2
- APL8020/APL8010: Design with Plants and Greenspace Management
- TCP1026: Understanding Place: Methods and Perspectives
Past Teaching
I have taught widely in cultural and political landscape / geographies, qualitative methods and fieldwork research, and supervised undergraduate and masters dissertations, in previous roles at the University of Southampton and Coventry University.
Other
I hold a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice and am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
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Articles
- Raynor R, Veal C. Spectacle of Endings: In an “Endless Present”. GeoHumanities 2023, 9(1), 158-169.
- Veal C. Opening Up Endings: Action Performance Practice. GeoHumanities 2023, 9(1), 191-210.
- Carrer F, Veal C. For Creative Research Methods in the Anthropocene?. Landscape 2021, (4), 17-18.
- Veal C. Embodying vertical geopolitics: Towards a political geography of falling. Political Geography 2021, 86, 102354.
- Veal C. Thinking intimate geopolitics creatively: Choreographing spaces of performance, testimony and law. GeoHumanities 2020, 6(1), 65-88.
- Veal C. The art of parachuting: Embodied geopolitics, aerial aesthetics and dance‐based combat training at Ringway Aerodrome, 1940–1946. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 2020, 45(1), 139-154.
- Roe E, Veal C, Hurley P. Mapping microbial stories: Creative microbial aesthetic andcross‐disciplinary intervention in understanding nurses’ infection prevention practices. Geo: Geography and Environment 2019, 6(1), e00076.
- Veal C. Micro-bodily mobilities: Choreographing geographies andmobilities of dance and disability. Area 2018, 50(3), 306-313.
- Veal C. Dance and wellbeing in Vancouver’s 'A Healthy City for All'. Geoforum 2017, 81, 11-21.
- Veal C. A choreographic notebook: methodological developments in qualitative geographical research. Cultural Geographies 2016, 23(2), 221-245.
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Book Chapters
- Veal C, Hurley P, Roe E, Wilks S. Pandemic imaginaries of interspecies relatedness: More-than-human microbial methods on the bus . In: Cooper, F; and Fitzgerald, D, ed. Knowing COVID-19: The pandemic and beyond. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024.
- Rogers A, Veal C. Performance and the Performing Arts. In: Paul Cloke, Mark Goodwin, Kelly Dombroski, Junxi Qian, and Andrew Williams, ed. Introducing Human Geographies (4th Edition). London: Routledge, 2024.
- Veal C. Notating War, Choreographing Soldiers: Dance Methods as Military Stratagem. In: Cree, A, ed. Creative Methods in Military Studies. Bicester: Coles Books, 2023.
- Veal C, Hawkins H. Doing creative geographies: exploring challenges and fulfilling promises. In: de Dois A; Kong L, ed. Handbook of the Geographies of Creativity. Elgar, 2020, pp.352-369.
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Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)
- Veal C. Consenting To Everyday Propinquities Onboard the Bus during the Covid-19 pandemic. In: Putspace: Public Transport as Public Space in European Cities: Narrating, Experiencing, Contesting. 2022, Brussels, Belgium: HERA.
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Report
- Roe E, Veal C, Hurley P, Wilks S. Understanding microbial landscapes of the bus during the Covid-19 Pandemic: December-2021 Report. University of Southampton, 2021.
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Reviews
- Zhao J, Davies C, Veal C, Xu C, Zhang X, Yu F. Review on the Application of Nature-Based Solutions in Urban Forest Planning and Sustainable Management. Forests 2024, 15(4), 727.
- Veal C. Non-Representational Theory and the Creative Arts by C. Boyd and C. Edwardes (eds.) [Book review]. Cultural Geographies 2020, 27(4), 684-686.
- Veal C. Review: Creativity: Live Work Create by Harriet Hawkins. Social and Cultural Geography 2017, 18(8), 1199-1200.
- Veal C. Review: Refrains for Moving Bodies: Experience and Experiment in Affective Space by Derek McCormack. Cultural Geographies 2013, 22, 376-377.