Article exploring the imagined border in school environments

Dr Jessica Hampton is working on an article exploring the imagined border between the human and more-than-human world in school environments (schoolscapes), using a mixed-methods approach that combines survey data with a co-creation activity.

Through a series of in-school workshops, students were invited to identify objects representing the more-than-human world within their school, analyse their data, and create artefacts reflecting their eco-cultural identity.

Focusing on questionnaire data, in this article I examine how sociodemographic factors—such as gender, socioeconomic background, and multicultural heritage—intersect with students’ place identity (e.g., Liverpudlian, Scouse, English) and sense of belonging. Crucially, vignettes from students’ artefacts contextualise these survey results by incorporating aspects of eco-cultural identity and problematising rigid conceptualisations of identity and belonging, which are often essentialised by questionnaire data.

By incorporating personal and material dimensions of place-making, this study contributes to linguistic landscape research by foregrounding participants’ self-representations of identity, which interweave their cultural-linguistic heritage with the more-than-human world.