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The time of COVID-19 lockdown has given us an opportunity to practice experimental methodologies of cultural geography. I use early-20th-century Polish guides to Rome, Italy, to provide exercises in auto-geography. The aim of these exercises is to enrich the practice of cultural geography by opening up to self-exploration and combining lectures and imagination with distanced spaces. These exercises relate to finding the hidden narrator, understanding locational formulations, and assessing the role of our own assumptions and memories in studying urban narratives. Although travel guides are typically read as sources of historical and cultural knowledge, I propose also reading them to better understand the relationship between reading practice and the researcher’s prior knowledge.

The article explores problem of exposing walking research methods (WRMs) to misuse, criticism and framing as “non-scientific”. According to authors, WRMs are framed as “non-scientific”: (1) by researchers and their rigorous top-down approach, (2) by research participants and their lack of interest in providing quantitative indicators, (3) by public authorities as they are can be interested in simple answers to non-scientific questions. The problem of misuses and framing of the WRMs as “non-scientific” is discussed by referring to two examples: using WRMs to support art projects and local fieldwork activities and adapting WRMs as a diagnostic tool for the local policy projects such as the development of strategies for urban development, pedestrian policy-making, and urban renewal projects.

Although complaining is well-recognized by psychologists and economists, its political potential is still far from obvious. Dissatisfaction with social services, non-democratic relationships between authorities and citizens, and the ignoring of significant social identities are communicated in everyday conversations. Even when complaining is perceived as ‘grumbling’, the informal nature of the communicated inconveniences may be more important than the formal participatory instruments through which collective claims are placed. Criticism and communication of grievances can lead to political activism only in particular circumstances. This article provides a conceptual frame of complaining enhancing into political claims. The proposed frame distinguishes between inactive complaining and complaining aimed at making a change, which may be reinforced or reduced. The essential role in this process of complaining is given to the objects of complaints/addresses, and agents such as media, politicians, institutions such as NGOs, social movements, whistleblowers, activists and leaders.

Protests offline, under the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic and regulations such as a stay-at-home, require the adaptation of existing tactics and/or the use of innovative tools in the contenti...

On 3 October 2016, Black Protest demonstrations against a total abortion ban were held in more than 140 Polish cities. This article discusses how the Black Protest in Szczecin's Solidarity Square h...