Practising wellbeing: Non-representational approaches to asylum seekers’ and refugees’ therapeutic landscape experiences

• Dominant frameworks of health and wellbeing are limited and exclusionary. • The article applies non-representational theory to asylum seekers’ and refugees’ therapeutic landscape experiences. • Wellbeing arises through practice that bring together various forces that create atmospheres in flux and opened the body to be positively affected. • Sensory nostalgia is an embodied practice before cognitive representation of a memory. • Future research should explore the unexpected politics that arise out of wellbeing practices. In the context of enforced marginality within the UK asylum system, exploring informal and place-based forms of wellbeing is significant. Drawing on two sensory ethnographies in urban allotments and a creative participatory project conducted in the city, this article uses non-representational theory (NRT) as a lens to explore asylum “seekers” and “refugees” therapeutic landscape experiences in Manchester, England. The contribution of NRT to the study of therapeutic landscape experiences in recent years has recognised the active, embodied, affective and performative nature of the place-wellbeing nexus. This has allowed for an exploration of the relationship beyond neoliberal, individualistic and biomedical frameworks of health and wellbeing. Through vignettes the article illuminates where participants, against a backdrop of marginalisation and oppression, carved out space and time to engage in different embodied practices that alongside materiality, time and space, power and positionality, sensory experience and incorporeality created atmospheres in flux and opened the body to be positively affected. The findings not only have implications for how we define wellbeing in therapeutic landscape research conducted with socially excluded groups, but using NRT as a lens allows us to consider what else is happening in a therapeutic landscape experience, including the potential for disrupting forms of Othering.