Noticing nature on the waterways

Abstract

ABSTRACT Noticing nature has often been described as a process through which young people come to know, understand, and care for it. This paper challenges these assumptions through examining practices of noticing nature, as together, young people and adults notice environmental features on urban waterways. Drawing on a project that provided opportunities for young people of Somali heritage to access waterways in Leicester, through canoeing, nature- and heritage-based activities, we examine instances of noticing young people recorded on film. Using the techniques of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, three fragments of film are analysed: Noticing a heron, ducks, and a dead rat. Through these, we explore the intersubjective social production of noticing, how adults seek to structure that developing sense of noticing, and the role of technologies through which young people notice. Considering how young people disrupt adult spatial orderings, we find that adults and young people do not straightforwardly fall into expert and novice categories in terms of reinforcing norms of noticing nature. Instead, adults sometimes reinforce, sometimes dismiss, young people’s sense of what and how to notice. We reflect on how the urban waterway as disordered spaces are socially produced through in-the-moment noticings, and how young people and adults might categorise desirable and undesirable nature-to-notice.