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Developing ‘real-world’ methods in urban geography fieldwork
... At the initial stage of the research process, I conducted extensive visual mapping of the space using photography while taking ethnographic walking trips to collect the overall details of how space and people interacted (see Figures 1 and 2). The walking trips helped me navigate the networks of subjects, objects, and spaces through which life in Sapa unites into a coherent existence (Latham and McCormack 2007). The fragmented stories and narratives collected through the waking ethnography approach helped me see Sapa with its complexities, not just as an area of micro and macro merchant business but also as a social hub for Vietnamese community connections (Cheng 2013). ...
This study provides a snapshot of the social lives of primarily first-generation Vietnamese-Czech immigrants, who engage in small-scale merchant business at the Sapa market and cultural centre in Prague. To add to the existing research on the Vietnamese immigrant community in the Czech Republic, the research shifts from studying the immigrant community’s identity as business owners to their identities as cultural participants by observing the community’s interactions during break times. The researcher utilizes the framework of spatializing culture to focus on how such interactions help socially construct and transform the resting spaces, existing in both the physical and online worlds of the Sapa market and cultural space. This ethnographic study combines participant observation, insider ethnography, visual mapping, and visual and digital ethnography. The fieldwork reveals that the physical and digital rest areas of Sapa help facilitate ethnic identity construction and preservation among the community members.
... This foregrounds an attentiveness to everyday place formations. Such attentiveness draws attention to "the "dailyness" of urban life: those routines, habits, behaviours and objects that seem to allow much of city life to cohere" (Latham and McCormack 2007). Ethnographic research is thus facilitated by the body-inplace as a research methodology (Kusenbach 2003;Pink 2008). ...
This paper offers a systematic, experimental, walking methodology to facilitate an ethnography of a major urban public park undertaken in the north-east of England in 2009–10. Ethnography puts the body in-place, placing the senses within the streams of life to be observed through experience; walking is one means of so doing. Walking traditions have frequently been used to observe, record and analyse the minutiae of urban life, with recent qualitative methodologies seeking to use walking to underpin ethnographies. Walking must negotiate the specificity of place and time, with all walks taking place in a real-world of materially, spatially, complex, vital and rhythmic landscapes. My aim was to systematically capture some of these patterns. Ethnographies typically use sustained field-based immersion; yet, some research utilises sampling strategies to guide observational procedures. Combining these methodologies allowed me to develop a methodology with three objectives: to create a series of routes to be followed; routes which allowed me to both scan and closely observe distant, and proximate, surroundings; and to construct a diurnal, weekly “sampling” frame, which allowed me to “immerse” myself within the park’s life through repeatedly walking these routes, building up a picture of everyday life, whilst (hopefully) capturing unscheduled events.
... First, in unsettling a habitual way of seeing manifest as a touristic vision, Perec has influenced a series of fieldwork projects, which attempt what The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel calls 'counter tourism' and involves doing 'the opposite of what you think a traveller should do' (Antony & Henry, 2005, p. 101). And, in their fieldwork teaching, Alan Latham and Derek McCormack follow Perec -doing so explicitly and critically -through exercises in de-familiarisation, with the aim of heightening awareness of the everyday (Latham & McCormack, 2007). ...
This paper traces key themes in contemporary experimental fieldwork – explorations of ordinary places by artists, writers, activists, enthusiasts, students and researchers – to the works of Georges Perec. Preoccupations of this work – including playfulness, attention to the ordinary, and writing as a fieldwork practice – are all anticipated and elaborated in Perec’s oeuvre, where they converge around an ‘essayistic’ approach. Exhibiting these traits, some contemporary fieldwork is more convincingly Perecquian than psychogeographical or Situationist, despite the tendency to identify it with the latter. Through Perec, it is therefore possible to bring contemporary experimental fieldwork into focus, identifying a coherence and sense of project within it, while speaking to the question of what it means and could mean to conduct fieldwork experimentally. Particular attention is paid in this paper to Perec’s most accomplished and sustained field texts, both of which have been translated into English: An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (2010, from 1975 original in French) and Species of Spaces (1999/1974).
... Walking not only guides us through encounters with other human beings, but also embeds us in a dense network of materials, ranging from skyscraping buildings to the most mundane of everyday objects such as lampposts or sidewalks (see Figure 1). Indeed, it is only through navigating these networks of subjects and objects that our urban life achieves some sort of coherent existence (Latham & McCormack, 2007). On entering the field, I am drawn to the objects-in-place as I pace through the urban streets, orientating through my impulses rather than being consciously purposeful of each step I take. ...
While ethnographic work has been a core part of teaching in many geography courses, the process of entering the field, “being-in” the midst of data collection, and leaving it has rarely been made explicit for discussion at the National University of Singapore. This article draws on fieldworking experiences at two urban sites in Singapore and discusses the insecurities, distractions, and reorientations that shape the spatialities of fieldwork. Apart from photography, I suggest that fieldnotes and video-recording techniques are important tools to be deployed alongside walking in order to apprehend affective, ineffable, and mundane moments in the field. By highlighting urban materialities as affective materials for organizing everyday experience, and urban mobilities as heterogeneous and rhythmic, I demonstrate how walking ethnographers’ bodies are attuned to a host of affects and mundane vignettes of the city, in the process sensitizing us to the networks of rhythms weaving urban life into form. In this sense, there is both a poetics and politics to walking as a mode of embodied ethnography.
Geography is not only the study of the surface of the planet and the exploration of spatial and human - environment relationships, but also a way of thinking about the world. Guided by the Australian Curriculum and the Professional Standards for Teaching School Geography (GEOGstandards), Teaching Secondary Geography provides a comprehensive introduction to both the theory and practice of teaching Geography. This text covers fundamental geographical knowledge and skills, such as working with data, graphicacy, fieldwork and spatial technology, and provides practical guidance on teaching them in the classroom. Each chapter features short-answer and 'Pause and Think' questions to enhance understanding of key concepts, and 'Bringing It Together' review questions to consolidate learning. Classroom scenarios and a range of information boxes are provided throughout to connect students to additional material. Written by an author team with extensive teaching experience, Teaching Secondary Geography is an exemplary resource for pre-service teachers.
Cultural geography and the social sciences have seen a rise in the use of creative methods with which to understand and represent everyday life and place. Conversely, many artists are producing work that centres on ideas of place and space and utilising empirical research methods that have a resonance with geographers. This book contributes to the body of literature emerging from such creative approaches to place. Drawing together theory and practice from cultural geography, anthropology and graphic design, this book proposes an interdisciplinary geo/graphic process for interrogating and re/presenting everyday life and place. A diverse set of research projects highlights participatory and autoethnographic approaches to the research. The sites of the projects are varied, encompassing the commercial space of grocery shops, cafés and restaurants, the private, domestic space of the home, and a Scottish World Heritage site. The theoretical context of each project highlights the transferability of the geo/graphic process, with place being variously framed within discussions of food, multi-culturalism and belonging; home, collecting and meaningful possessions; and, materiality, memory and affect. Themes in the book will appeal to researchers working in the creative methods field. This book will also be essential supplementary reading for postgraduate students studying Cultural Geography, Experimental Geographies, Visual Anthropology, Art and Design.
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