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This paper introduces the collection of nine short articles that make up the inaugural special section of the journal on ‘thinking with methods’. It begins by outlining why a fuller conversation about different ways of handling talk in human geography might be worthwhile. Then it describes a series of conference sessions in which a small group of researchers in this field came together to consider...
Within feminist geography, there is a growing consensus on the need for research to contribute to social change and transformation beyond the academy, and increased emphasis on the co‐production of impact. In this paper I critically reflect and report on how I co‐produced impact with a participatory audio‐visual research project, conducted in collaboration with women in Bogotá and Medellín and researchers...
Beyond the boundaries of neatly presented ‘datasets’ are the words said before and after audio‐recorders are switched on, small talk that is rarely transcribed or archived. In this intervention, I return to a brief moment preceding a semi‐structured interview in North Norway. While I was there to study political relations in the Barents region, the research encounters generated interpersonal connections...
In this paper I explore the possibility that interruptions in in situ interviews can support understandings of power and social relations in research. I base my discussion on an extract from a study of young people's experiences of rapid urbanisation in Central Beqaa, Lebanon. The extract is from an interview with a young man who was continually interrupted by his mother. I problematise a tendency...
This paper is concerned with the situated production of opinions in human geography research. Drawing on an online focus group project in which university students were asked to discuss smartphone use in urban greenspace, I'm interested in how our methods can make opinions as much as collect those that are already assumed to exist. Why were these students inclined to speak of having and sharing opinions?...
This paper discussions the implications of returning to ‘old’ interview data many years later and asks what can be learned from the different emotions that such revisiting can invoke in the researcher? It considers the significance of emotions in the process of analysing interview transcripts and how a researcher changes over time. It calls on researchers to ‘revisit’ past data for another look.
Analysing the spoken word, in some traditions, means analysing how social life is created, ordered and transformed through interaction, rather than how it is reported about in interviews. This paper examines an excerpt recorded in that spirit—towards understanding how participants continuously and demonstrably categorise each other in face‐to‐face conversation. Within the larger project, this excerpt...
It is expected that we present participant quotes when writing up qualitative interview research. Yet doing so carries the risk of making our participants' lives seem too neat and can give the misplaced illusion that we have easily made sense of their situation. This paper explores other ways that we might work with interviews that are more sensitive to the complexities of interview encounters themselves...
Drawing on my accompanied returning‐home fieldwork in China with a dear friend, Yun, this paper critically reflects on the ideas of friendship in fieldwork and its enabling and enhancing role in managing safety concerns and negotiating data collection. The contribution is two‐fold. First, it advances current fieldwork scholarship in Humanities and Social Sciences that predominantly focuses on the...
Disagreement is a fundamental dimension of social life. In many situations, however, people are reticent to explicitly criticise the actions of others. It follows that if social researchers wish to study differences in people's common sense judgements of other's actions in an interview setting they need to carefully design how discussion of these differences are structured. This paper examines a research...
This paper brings an urban communication lens to bear on the geographies of platformisation in cities. It does so by drawing on three select instances of platformised materialities in Toronto and Vancouver that represent familiar contours of urban platformisation: mobility (bike and car sharing), last‐mile logistics (on‐demand delivery), and labour (gig work). These examples are worked through Aiello...
In a time of deepening social and ecological crises, the question of research ethics is more pertinent than ever. Our intervention grapples with the specific personal, ethical, and methodological challenges that arise at the interface of conservation and social science. We expose these challenges through the figure of Chris, a fictional anonymised composite of our fraught diverse fieldwork experiences...
‘Expert’ or ‘elite’ interviews are often taken to be occasions when an interviewee shares specialist knowledge with a researcher. Drawing on an interview with a supermarket food safety manager, this paper explores what geographers might make of moments when ‘expert’ interviewees turn out to know little about the matters under discussion. Arguing that such moments unsettle depictions of interviewees...
This paper considers what silences might suggest during research conversations. Reflecting on an interaction in a café, I show how silences might be thought of as ‘interruptions’: important moments in which streams of experience are disrupted and when processes of sense making occur. Though there is no ‘one‐size‐fits‐all’ approach to how researchers should deal with silences, the skilled researcher...
Minimalist fashion has become a key element of the wider minimalist movement that promotes reducing one's wardrobe space to a bare minimum of essential items (or a ‘capsule wardrobe’) with few, quality items that coordinate. Minimalist‐inspired ‘fashion challenges’, in which participants are challenged to only wear a certain number of garments over a certain time period, have also gained increasing...
Graphic elicitation, an arts‐based method that focuses on participant‐led drawing activities, is often conducted with the researcher in situ and discussed in an interview setting, either during or after drawing. However, the COVID‐19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns have meant that using graphic elicitation in its current form required a re‐evaluation. Reflecting on a research project that undertook...
Located on the redeveloping waterfront of Canada's largest city, the Toronto Music Garden is a unique public garden inspired by the first of J. S. Bach's Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. Designed through a collaboration with cellist Yo‐Yo Ma and landscape designer Julie Moir Messervy, the garden attempts not to represent Bach or his music but to inscribe its essence on the landscape. Several lines...
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