cultural geographies

Though the internet is relatively new, the methods used to study it do not necessarily need to be entirely new. Drawing from the author’s experiences of doing cybergeography research, documented through the use of excerpts from a research journal, this article describes how traditional methods are adapted to understand the relationships between online and offline worlds and how people seek to use the internet to change their everyday landscapes. Research strategies include treating the study of online places as if they were material landscapes, analyzing characteristics of websites, visiting associated places, and in-person interviews with producers. The amount of qualitative data collected from sites and the time it takes to analyze this data are challenges associated with qualitative analysis of websites. Field work is still necessary in internet research. Site visits and interviews reveal details about cases that may not be visible online including infrastructures and identities. Limitations of visits and interviews include the inability to study global scale phenomena as well as ethics of anonymity and confidentiality. Triangulation among virtual landscapes, material places, and interviews helps to reveal a nuanced view of the way that the internet transforms everyday life.

There has been a recent upsurge in mobilities research relating to embodied movement, and a corresponding interest in adapting methods to acquire data while on the move. At the same time, many of the questions being asked relate to non-representational aspects of movement, notably the sensory, emotional and affective. While approaches that attempt to enable the researcher to ‘be, see and feel there’ such as mobile video ethnography are becoming more popular, they have not been without their critics. Situated within literature on affect and (post)phenomenology, this article critically examines the go-along to weigh up what we might gain and lose from using such methods. I demonstrate the ways in which such methods have the potential to enhance recollection, empathy and our ability to research ‘quiescence’ through the elicitation of detailed verbal accounts. Acknowledging their shortcomings however, I discuss the potential contribution that bio-sensing technologies may make in conjunction with go-alongs. Ultimately, I argue that despite the value-laden nature of such technologies and the history of anthropometry they are situated within, if used sensitively such tools may be used to promote positive logics of affect and mobility.

Creative Geographies, methods of experimental ‘art-full’ research that have creative practices at their heart, have become increasingly vibrant of late. These research strategies, which see geographers working as and in collaboration with a range of arts practitioners, re-cast geography’s interdisciplinary relationship with arts and humanities subjects and practices as well as its own intradisciplinary relations. Amidst the vibrancy of this creative ‘re-turn’, a series of important questions are cohering around how exactly, and for whom, these methods are creative and critical. If the potential of creative methods for both researching and living differently is to be achieved then it is important we spend time reflecting on these and other questions. To begin these reflections this article tells three stories of creative doings that concern knowing, representing and intervening in place. These creative doings came about in the course of ethnographic work with the participatory arts project Caravanserai led by artist Annie Lovejoy, and among other outputs resulted in the collaborative artists’ book insites (2010). From a focus on these three sets of creative doings come larger concerns, principally around how the materialities, technologies and aesthetics of different art forms might enable various ways of knowing and conceptual experiments, as well as concerns around skill and expertise. These latter query what it is that geographers do and what it is that visual artists do, seeking to appreciate the expert as well as the amateur and what might be gained through learning to practice – in other words, how our creative methods might not only focus on finished products but also what can be learned in the processes of creative doings. Drawing the article together is a concern to understand better the work creative methods can do in the world in terms of enabling us to research and to live differently.

In this paper, we invite you night fishing for wäkun at Bawaka, an Indigenous homeland in North East Arnhem Land, Australia. As we hunt wäkun, we discuss our work as an Indigenous and non-Indigenous, human and more-than-human research collective trying to attend deeply to the messages we send and receive from, with and as a part of Country. The wäkun, and all the animals, plants, winds, processes, things, dreams and people that emerge together in nourishing, co-constitutive ways to create Bawaka Country, are the author-ity of our research. Our reflection is both methodological and ontological as we aim to attend deeply to Country and deliberate on what a Yolŋu ontology of co-becoming, that sees everything as knowledgeable, vital and interconnected, might mean for the way academics do research. We discuss a methodology of attending underpinned by a relational ethics of care. Here, care stems from an awareness of our essential co-constitution as we care for, and are cared for by, the myriad human and more-than-human becomings that emerge together to create Bawaka. We propose that practising relational research requires researchers to open themselves up to the reality of their connections with the world, and consider what it means to live as part of the world, rather than distinct from it. We end with a call to go beyond ‘human’ geography to embrace a more-than-human geography, a geography of co-becoming.

The recent renaissance within animal geography has tended to focus on the spatial orderings of animals by humans, rather than on the lived geographies and experiences of animals themselves. We suggest that one reason for this imbalance is methodological – a persistent commitment to human-centred methods somewhat at odds with the more-than-human aspirations of the sub-discipline. In this paper we review and critically assess methodological developments in three areas that we consider to be especially significant for developing animals’ geographies: (i) techniques for tracking the spatialities of animal culture; (ii) scientific and artistic engagements in inter-species communication; and (iii) geographic tools afforded by genetic analyses. In conclusion, we reflect on the promise and some of the challenges to developing these methods within (what is still largely known as) human geography.

The paper contributes new ways of thinking about and responding to interview talk in the context of recent scholarship on interviewing, orality and witnessing. We proceed by paying attention to specific examples of interview talk on the experience of absence via the collecting of narratives from families of missing people. We highlight how ambiguous emotions are bound up with broader ways of recognizing such talk, largely exercised here as reflections on what is involved in witnessing those who are missing in communications with police. Tensions that may be produced by official ways of regarding and responding to family character witness of the missing are discussed in the context of two case studies. In response to these tensions, we offer suggestions for finding different spaces through which to value such ‘witness talk’ by families, particularly via ideas from grief scholarship. The paper concludes by briefly reflecting on how interviewing encounters might produce versions of praxis in which the content of talk is not just, and simply, ‘apprehended’ as academic evidence.

Over the last decade and a half, socio-cultural geographies have witnessed a genuine explosion of interest in the ethnographic tradition. Such interest is due in part to the increasing acceptance of non-representational ideas across the field and the way these ideas have constructively informed the long-standing debate on the analytics, esthetics, and politics of ethnographic representation. Non-representational theoretical ideas have influenced the way ethnographers tackle important methodological and conceptual undercurrents in their work, such as vitality, performativity, corporeality, sensuality, and mobility. This article aims to capture a few of the characteristics of this constantly evolving non-representational ethnographic style. Non-representational ethnography seeks to cultivate an affinity for the analysis of events, practices, assemblages, structures of feeling, and the backgrounds of everyday life against which relations unfold in their myriad potentials. Non-representational ethnography emphasizes the fleeting, viscous, lively, embodied, material, more-than-human, precognitive, non-discursive dimensions of spatially and temporally complex lifeworlds.

For many of us, doing psychoanalytic geography demands something akin to a leap of faith. Questioning this assumption, the main purpose of this paper is to shift the terms of discussion about doing psychoanalytic geography from the realm of faith to critique. Drawing on Joan Copjec’s, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (1994), I argue that much of the uncertainty surrounding the research practices of psychoanalytic geography results from inadequate understandings of two fundamental and interrelated psychoanalytic principles. First, causes and effects cannot occupy the same phenomenal terrain. Second, the taking place of society involves a split between appearance, that is, its observable positive facts and relations, and being, that is, its generative principle and the mode of its institution. According to Copjec, a syncopated relation between being and appearance is not only central to Jacques Lacan’s concept of desire; it is also a neglected axiom that distinguishes psychoanalytic from historicist accounts of the spatial and temporal configurations of society. But what is desire and how can we become, to use Copjec’s phrase, ‘literate in desire’? To answer this question, I explore the empirical example of the fictional comic character Alan Partridge (played by Steve Coogan) who exemplifies the taking place of desire as a self-hindering process in terms of the illusoriness, opacity, and duplicity of language.

In the context of the feverish pace in which the social sciences are grappling with the implications for a turn toward ‘big data’, I suggest a different starting point: that big data are not necessarily social science data. In this somewhat speculative provocation, I argue that we should lean more on the notion that social media are phenomena and less on the notion that social media are evidence of phenomena. In doing so, I sketch four areas of potential criticality for an emerging big data studies.

This intervention asks to what extent developments of digital media offer new objects that demand new methods and to what extent they create new methods that might be applied to older cultural fields creating a digital geohumanities. It argues that digital media sometimes reanimate older debates and issues not only in what we study but how we do so, and their significance may be less in new techniques than altering the general tools of our trade in cultural geography. This article looks at both new digital cultures, such as gaming and new converging media, and new methods, be they analysing the data exhaust of digitally mediated social lives or using new software in literary analysis. Profound tensions exist between quantitative imaginaries of a massive stock of texts yielding determinate meanings and deconstructive visions of texts yielding indeterminate and proliferating meanings. Big data sit uneasily with big interpretation. This article suggests a materialist semiosis is needed to attend to the permutations where new digital techniques may form affective technologies conveying meanings as much as effective analytical tools.

In this article I articulate the cultural geographies of performing potential spaces of a gallery exhibition. I offer my participative, affective relations with the artwork, exploring the fluidity and openness of the spaces in which I found objects that were mutual, commingling and dissonant. In doing so, it is necessary to let the work speak, but not to leave it there. Nor is it to appraise, close-up the arrangement or individual elements of the show in an objective aesthetic. Rather it is to acknowledge circling atmospheres emerging in my cultural geography of practice. New spaces emerge in the practice, through my play with the spaces of the objects as set out, and through my own responses in an affective and productive relational engagement with them, singly and severally.

The relation between geography and art has attracted considerable interest over the past decade. This interview with the contemporary artist Olafur Eliasson responds to the calls for cross-disciplinary dialogue, which is nevertheless attentive to space and spatial imaginaries. The interview explores the relations between art and geography, with excursions into questions of theory, pedagogy and experiments.