The geographical field course as active archive

This paper narrates a collaborative effort to re-place a local culture of ‘the field’. By oscillating between two geography field courses in Glenmore, Scotland - one in 1951, the other in 2002 - it traces a route through different residues of fieldwork: material objects (photographs, log-books, diaries, equipment), mnemonic devices (biography, oral narrative, re-enactment, technology) and physical phenomena (footpaths, landscape features, field sites). Framed as an ongoing and mobile event, overlapping versions of the field course(s) are then recounted through embodied methodological strategies, or ‘taskscapes’. These close observations of the processes of field practice focus on walking, sensing, talking and archiving. They resist easy interpretation, and do not always register a resolved narrative. What is more pertinent, I argue, is to understand them as an unfinished and active archive that speaks of the localized, everyday conditions in which geography’s history is made.