Dr Samuel Skinner

Nature connection through engagement with greenspaces plays an important role in promoting well-being. In England, certain groups, such as girls and young women from disadvantaged backgrounds, have limited access to high-quality greenspaces and face other barriers to engaging with nature. In Oxfordshire, the County Council has committed to improving access to greenspace and nature for all. In 2022, a group consisting of twenty girls and young women (aged 10–16) from East Oxford not-for- profit organisations, academic institutions and public bodies came together to start an initiative called ‘Greenspace & Us’. The girls and young women participated in six three- hour workshops in February to March 2022. Using the COM-B (Capability, Opportunity, Motivation, Behaviour) approach, we explored the enablers and barriers to girls and young women in Oxford engaging more with nature, which included: increasing equity of access; introducing meaningful co-production; taking safety concerns seriously; making nature normal; promoting the right to play; and increasing the ability to connect with greenspaces.
The outputs of this process were synthesised into the ‘Greenspace & Us Manifesto’, which was crafted collectively. Furthermore, these insights were used to design inclusive park furniture, which was later installed in a local park in East Oxford. In this practice-based article, we outline the methods, outcomes as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the engagement, co-design and co-production approaches we used in Greenspace & Us. We hope the insights from our project will support more inclusive and equitable design of greenspaces for all.

Rather than turning away from speed readers because of their surface involvement in the equation ‘fastness = progress’, we examine how this new, temporal form of text might inaugurate a return to the technical and material fundamentals of reading – and what alternative ways of thinking through our relation to new textualities this might offer. This allows us to pose (although not always resolve) questions about technicities and materialities that converge upon the act of reading, but are not reducible to it. The claims made for speed reading applications by commercial companies such as Spritz and Spreader are weighed against clinical research and set within emerging theoretical frameworks, setting the stage for a critical design and creative practice using and abusing speed reader-type technology. We begin by introducing our initial research to date with this new machinic form of reading, and go on to explore what alternate conceptual and practical applications, beyond simply speeding up for the sake of productivity, it may afford, particularly within poetic, performative, and typographic realms. It should be noted that the text is speculative in character, seeking to articulate and provoke questions, rather than provide answers, which our research has engendered thus far, we hope this approach is fertile for readers.