A therapeutic taskscape: Theorizing place-making, discipline and care at a camp for troubled youth

Ethnographic research at a therapeutic camping program for troubled youth in Vermont suggests that therapeutic landscapes can be productively theorized as 'taskscapes' [Ingold, T., 1993. The temporality of the landscape. World Archaeology 25(2), 152-174]. Rather than searching for the elements of material landscape that make a particular place health-giving, the taskscape perspective focuses on the on-going activities that produce distinctive material landscapes, discipline, individual meaning, and therapeutic experience. This paper engages the debate over analyzing health care institutions as spaces of control or care, finding that both perspectives can be accommodated within the taskscape approach.