#2 Forming Questions

ARDS 315H3 – Honors Methods Design Inquiry

Week 4

This week I took a good look at my questions and the notes written on them and really thought about my interests. From there I went article hunting to gain new insights so that I might pose a more formulated list of potential research questions. What I’ve learned overall is that forming a question is hard and can be a daunting process, but what I have read has given me inspiration.

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Religious monuments, geometry, and design

The topic I looked into first was religious monuments and their tie to geometry and landscape architecture. From there, I decided to read the article titled “A Conceptual Analysis of How Science, Religion, and Culture Interact and Influence Each Other in Polities” (Simuziya, 2022). Now grant it, that doesn’t necessarily tie into what I was looking for but, it did provide food for thought when endeavoring further into this research study.

My Take Aways:

• Introduction: “The research question that the paper sought to answer is: how does science, culture and religion interact and influence each other?” (p. 2).
• “It is certain that not every one agrees that the West is the only place in the world that produced scientific and philosophical knowledge. To be sure, the global south has always had prowess in scientific ventures, but their skills have been subdued for centuries at the hands of imperial and colonial powers” (p. 8).
• “…scholars who see a silver lining in the compatibility argument (i.e.,those who claim that religion and science are in harmony), have cautioned that scientific grand-standing over cultural and religious enquiries need self-moderation: they argue that all knowledge is personal and therefore the scientist must be performing a personal (and hence a subjective) mission when conducting research … Further, for science to be sustained, it needs moral guidance and obligations like those found in culture and religion” (p. 9)
• “Climate change affects ecological patterns that may create conflicts in certain areas. Conflicts related to these challenges could be likened to the case in the Darfur region of Sudan, where the scarcity of grazing land led to conflicts to the scale of genocide over pastoral land” (p. 12).

Because of this article, I gained a better understanding as to why I am passionate about pursuing a cross-cultural examination of religion and landscape: my own belief system, my experience from studying abroad (specifically visiting Roman churches), and my interest in cultures that are not as highlighted in my curriculum.

What can Non-Western cultures offer to Western landscape design, with a focus on religious sites and monuments?

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Marginalized people and place-making

The second topic I delved into was marginalized people and their relationship with the landscape. I ended up reading “Landscapes of Belonging: Systematically Marginalized Students and Sense of Place and Belonging in Outdoor Experiential Education” (Goodman, 2020), which discusses a specific outdoor education program and how marginalized students felt after finishing the course. The purpose of the course was to help students find a “…sense of place [which] is essentially a culture of emotional belonging to place and community” (Goodman, 2020, p. 261). This article was only a brief overview of the study, but in short, the results showed that students in marginalized groups struggled to gain that ‘sense of place’ and ‘community.’

My Take Aways:

• “The purpose of this study was to explore how students systematically marginalized by race, ethnicity, and/or class experienced sense of place and belonging in an OEE [outdoor experiential education] program” (p. 261).
• “…interrogate the roles Whiteness and White privilege play in the outdoor recreation and leisure experiences and underrepresentation of groups historically marginalized by race, ethnicity, and class” (p. 261).
• “The data analysis illustrates that equitable support and culturally responsive pedagogy requires formal social justice training” (p. 262).

What I have gained from this quick read is a different perspective on place-making. In a sense, even classes about helping students form placemaking might not be beneficial for marginalized people if they are not supported in these classes.

How can landscape design better support marginalized people, so they can find community through place-making?

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References

Goodman, C. H. (2020). Landscapes of belonging: Systematically marginalized students and sense of place and belonging in outdoor experiential education. Journal of Outdoor Recreation, Education, and Leadership, 12(2), 261–263. https://doi.org/10.18666/JOREL-2020-V12-I2-9842

Simuziya, N. J. (2022). A conceptual analysis of how science, religion, and culture interact and influence each other in polities. Cogent Social Sciences, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/23311886.2022.2084892