Clare Deal PhD

• MA in Social Research, Birmingham University (2024) 
• PGDE and QTS (English Teaching) Northumbria University (2019) 
• M.Litt in English Literature (Distinction) Newcastle University (2016)
• BA (Hons, First Class) Newcastle University (2014) 

Clare grew up in Wiltshire, her childhood largely spent stomping through muddy fields with a lurcher. Leaving farm life behind for cities and books, she studied literature at Newcastle University before working as a research assistant on various projects alongside completing an M.Litt. Clare particularly enjoyed the challenge and brilliance of working alongside children in care for an educational theatre company.

After an autumn working as a writer in Beirut, she returned to the UK where I took up a short-term role with Jamie’s Farm as a horse specialist in Hereford.Not quite ready to commit to full-time rural living at that point, Clare returned to the North East to train with Teach First and subsequently worked as an English and SEND teacher for a number of years in Newcastle. This doctoral training post is a way of combining her love of research and practice. 

PhD title

‘Just Like That’: The Transformative Experience of Therapeutic Farming for Young People at Risk of Exclusion

Supervisors

Professor Peter Kraftl and Professor Matthew Broome

My research focuses on young people deemed to be ‘at risk’ and their experiences at a therapeutic farm. Drawing predominantly on theories and methodologies from children’s geographies, social sciences and psychiatry, this research explores how spatial experiences are central to individual and societal discourses of inclusion, exclusion and trans/formation. I unpack the more troubling associations with transformation as a concept which presumes a (bad) past and offers a (good) future. This wholesale image is undeniably useful for charity outputs and funding, but neglects the more nuanced, incremental, piecemeal changes interventions can bring to young lives. Alongside a critical examination of the concept, I explore how transformation is narrated on a personal level, starting from an understanding of it as the spark from which new possibilities for being, narrating and relating are formed. 

The questions which are shaping my initial encounter are: 

• How do young people create narratives of personal and collective transformation and/or continuity during and after an experience at a therapeutic farm? 

• How do young people’s emotional-spatial experiences of rural landscapes reconfigure societal and personal discourses of the transformative and/or continuous experiences of adolescence? 

• How does a therapeutic farm subvert dominant narratives of power within education, land rights and research through action, ways of relating and underpinning understandings of transformation? 

• How can sensory experiences in therapeutic farms inform inclusive education practices? 

This work will extend current scholarship through critically analysing how the embodied experiences of young people at risk are shaped by landscape and embodied experiences in-the-moment, but are also already shaped by personal, political and societal discourse around adolescence, class, exclusion, risk, race and urban and rural dichotomies. My research will offer a site-specific account of the kernel of experience from which participants’ and staffs’ actions, habits and narratives begin (or don’t begin) to shift. This will, I hope, offer new insights into the value of farming therapies, expanding our collective understanding of (transformative) spatial experiences of adolescence and allowing the sector to support young people more appropriately, thoughtfully and joyfully.