Open Collections

Pojuner, Isabella

University of British Columbia

Since the 19th century, national debates surrounding the English land question have both declined and narrowed in scope. In this thesis, I survey academic and independent research into the contemporary political economy of land in Britain. Finding these contributions are institutionally constrained, I turn to examine the broader political economy of knowledge production since the English enclosure movement. The development of land registration infrastructure, associated surveying practices, and uses and disciplining of ‘trespass’ each have consequences for customary, collective, and institutional memory. Who owns land? Who can access it? Who defines the land question? These are related concerns. I coordinate these consequences and concerns into the concept of epistemic enclosure. In light of the initial breadth and subsequent decline of the English land question, I analyse Right to Roam, a national campaign for greater land access rights. Rooted in a breadth of discursive contributions to the land question, it mobilises public support by organising mass and local acts of civil, intentional trespass. As it aims to transform English property culture, I characterise Right to Roam as a relational rather than recreational access campaign, in part because it exercises a memory of dispossession in England and beyond. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, I give an account of four trespasses I participated in from 2022-2023. These trespasses act as spaces to engage with the English land question and develop responsible relationships to land. Deploying the critical cartographic method of mental sketch mapping with participants in trespass, I demonstrate the method itself performs property relations. Alongside acts of trespass, it enables participants to address their ‘mindwall’, or relationship to performances of private property, and reinscribe collective memory of land relations in enclosed space. In doing so, they trace terra incognita through trespass, mapping epistemic enclosure at the scale of the individual body. Closing with preliminary recommendations for policymakers and campaigners, this thesis contributes to the critical silence that is the English land question.

Text

2025-01-13

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/90116

Geography

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/