Rebecca Burns
Affiliation: The University of Worcester
Rebecca is a practice-based PhD researcher at the University of Worcester, working at the intersection of therapeutic landscapes, creative health, folklore, ritual, and material culture. Her doctoral project, The Oracle of Place, explores how place-based oracle cards might invite renewed attention to familiar local landscapes and help people notice, remember, and speak about ordinary places differently. Rather than treating oracle cards as predictive tools, her research examines them as material-symbolic artefacts that may shape encounters with place through chance, image, interpretation, portability, and repeated use. Rebecca holds an MA in Magic and Occult Science from the University of Exeter, and her broader practice explores everyday enchantment, seasonal ritual, and creative ways of restoring relationship with land, self, and community.
Panel: Writing Ourselves into the Land
Talk Title: A Deck of Local Belonging: Oracle Cards and the Therapeutic Potential of Ordinary Places
This paper explores how a place-based oracle deck may act as a creative research tool for inviting renewed attention to familiar local landscapes. Drawing on my practice-based PhD research in a small market town in Herefordshire, the paper considers how oracle cards might mediate the ways people notice, remember, and speak about ordinary places that are often overlooked in favour of scenic, touristic, or officially recognised heritage sites.
Rather than treating oracle cards as predictive tools, I examine them as material-symbolic artefacts whose specific properties, including chance, image, interpretation, portability, and repeated use, may shape encounters with place. I introduce the provisional concept of oracular attention to describe a form of situated noticing shaped by randomness, reflection, and imaginative association.
The paper asks how creative, folkloric, and ritualised methods might help keep local knowledge alive without fixing it into static heritage. In doing so, it considers the oracle deck as a way of connecting to our local places through repeated acts of drawing, noticing, remembering, and returning. It suggests that the therapeutic potential of ordinary places may lie partly in the processes through which they are revisited, reinterpreted, and brought back into meaningful circulation as sites of memory, story, and belonging.