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This short paper introduces a special section exploring how human geographers use research notebooks. It outlines why a fuller exchange about how exactly we do ethnographic note‐taking in human geography is worthwhile, and describes a series of conference sessions in which a group of human geographers took the relatively bold step of showing each other examples of what could be found inside their notebooks. It also provides an overview of how the papers in the special section might help us all to consider the variety of options available to us when we choose to work in this way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 some of the most intriguing excerpts of talk generated by their studies. It ends with an overview of how the following articles that came out of these sessions might productively shake up some of our current working conventions. This paper introduces the collection of nine short articles that make up the first 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 some of the most intriguing excerpts of talk generated by their studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 project that used context‐specific video clips to structure interviews with users of a communal infrastructural resource. In digging into the practical detail of an interview encounter, the paper contributes to human geography's ongoing conversation about the practicalities of doing interview‐based research. This paper examines a research project that used context specific video clips to structure interviews with users of a communal infrastructural resource. In digging into the practical detail of an interview encounter the paper contributes to human geography's on‐going conversation about the practicalities of doing interview based research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human geography has become deeply interested in a range of research methods that focus on researchers' corporeal engagement with their research sites. This interest has opened up an exciting set of research horizons, energising the discipline in a whole range of ways. Welcoming this engagement, this paper presents a series of meditations on the process of using the researcher's corporeal learning as a research tool. Exploring two research projects, as well as the work of the photographer Nikki S Lee, it examines how the process of becoming corporeally capable might productively be framed as sets of ongoing experiments. Framing such engagements as experiments is a useful heuristic through which to think rigorously about what such research can claim as knowledge. More controversially, the paper argues that the heuristic of the experiment helps us to attend to the varying durations of becoming in ways that much existing work has discounted. Developing corporeal capacities – gaining a skill, becoming capable of doing a particular activity – involves becoming attuned to a range of thresholds, the crossing of which open up novel and frequently unexpected perspectives. Attunement to these thresholds does not arise simply through the process of mixing in and participating in a research site. It requires careful attention to the parameters of transformation involved in being able to participate. The paper explores how such parameters might be decided upon and calibrated as part of an ongoing engagement with a research site or event. Our aim is not to artificially restrict or constrain how human geographers approach their research design. Rather it is to encourage human geographers to show more courage in their use of corporeal based research methodologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Torsten Hägerstrand's work was influential to the emergence of human geography as a theoretically sophisticated social science. Focusing on the materiality of everyday life, and the complex ecological webs through which human society is made, his writings offered an original set of tools to think about the how and where of communal life. Nonetheless, in much of the North American and British academy, Hägerstrand's work has been relegated to a disciplinary footnote; a writer whose work has been overtaken by more recent developments in social theory. This article re-evaluates the contemporary relevance of Hägerstrand's thought. Drawing on examples, it explores how the social time-space diagramming developed by Hägerstrand might be productively reinterpreted and reconfigured. Rather than thinking of Hägerstrand's work as being made redundant by subsequent theoretical advances, this paper demonstrates how his work still offers social scientists useful tools to describe the worlds they study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first in a series of three reviews that scrutinise the conventions of doing and describing qualitative research that currently predominate in human geography. Since we find that interviews are the most widely used method in this field, we begin with an examination of how they feature in the work of today's human geographers. How many people do geographers speak with and what do they say about their interviewing procedures? What do they imagine their interviews to be in terms of the social occasion? And how do they present the empirical material that is thereby generated? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings together comics studies and geography to consider how space operates both on and off the comics page. We integrate discussion of comics' formal properties with a sitespecific comics installation (Dave McKean's The Rut) to show the intertwining of these spaces. Our argument is articulated through juxtaposition of the literature on space-time in comics with our case study. This montage speaks to graphic narratives' formal properties, especially its alchemic, emergent nature. Our argument begins by introducing The Rut as an example of how space and narrative can be intertwined. Our argument tacks back to the literature, discussing the pluralization of time-space(s) throughout recent writing within human geography and how this can help us think with The Rut. We then briefly describe the way The Rut is physically laid out. Returning once again to the literature, we argue that the topological figuration of comics is mediated by readers' practices of relation-building and narrative construction, which are in turn impacted by the irreversible nature of time. This is demonstrated for The Rut through experience of the art as well as participant observation. Finally, we highlight how actual spaces are overlaid with virtual spaces that help shape the actualized version; we illustrate this by showing how the embodied experience of The Rut's materiality was productive of a multiplicity of experiential spaces, both actual and virtual. We close by drawing three conclusions: the first about the implications of graphic narrative's relational ontology for how social scientists narrate socio-spatial processes; the second, a call for more empirical work examining the emergence, evolution, and dissipation of topological spaces; and the third about the political possibility of initiating new practices of 'reading' spaces and times to produce and access new ways of being in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qualitative research in human geography is dominated by interviews and ethnography - although an argument might also be made for adding discourse analysis to that short list. Papers that question how human geographers analyse qualitative research material. [Extracted from the article]

This paper reflects on the use of digital photography in urban-based human geography fieldwork. It draws on the authors' experience of introducing digital photography into the teaching and assessment of a level 3 undergraduate field course in Berlin. To begin they outline how they sought to use simple digital technologies in order to facilitate student engagement within Berlin and to widen the range of assessment avenues available to students. They concentrate in particular on how it provided the opportunity to develop Web-based assessments. In the second half of the paper they reflect on student experience of the use of digital cameras and Web-based assessment. While acknowledging some of the problems with using technology in this way, they conclude by arguing that digital photography not only enhances the quality of student engagement with urban environments but also provides a way of more effectively integrating the field-, class- and Web-based components of urban field courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we offer a discussion of the 'materiality' of the urban. This discussion is offered in the context of recent calls in various areas of the discipline for the necessity of 'rematerializing' human geography. While we agree with the spirit of these calls, if human geography (and, within that, urban geography) is going to return to the material, let alone articulate some kind of rapprochement between the 'material' and 'immaterial', it needs to be clear about the terms it is employing. Therefore, and drawing on a range of work from contemporary cultural theory, sociology, urban studies, urban history, architectural theory and urban geography, we sketch out more precisely what a 'rematerialized' urban geography might involve. Crucially, we argue that, rather than 'grounding' urban geography in more 'concrete' realities, paying increased attention to the material actually requires a more expansive engagement with the immaterial. In developing this argument we outline some important conceptual vehicles with which to work up an understanding of the material as processually emergent, before offering two pathways along which the materialities of the urban might be usefully apprehended, pathways that avoid simple oppositions between the 'material' and 'nonmaterial' while also restating the importance of understanding the complex spatialities of the urban. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past decade has seen a remarkable turn towards the cultural in human geography. This shift has been marked by a strange gap between theory and empirical practice. Radical though the turn to the cultural has been in reconstituting the ways that human geography thinks of itself as a discipline, its impact on ways that geographers actually do empirical research has been in certain respects relatively limited. Indeed, while the cultural turn has become strongly associated with a valorisation of qualitative methodologies, the actual range of methods used has been relatively narrow. Drawing on the work of Nigel Thrift and a range of other human geographers who are exploring the metaphor of performance to understand this realm of practical action, I argue that not only can social action be viewed as performance, so too is it productive to reframe the research process itself as a kind of performance. This reframing allows for a more experimental and more flexible attitude towards both the production and interpretation of research evidence. It also makes it easier to think of new ways of engaging with how individuals and groups inhabit their worlds through practical action. Drawing on my own experimentation with written and photographic research diaries, I explore a number of ways through which the performative ethos can inform and invigorate the human geographic imagination. I conclude by arguing that human geography needs to be more imaginative, pluralistic, and pragmatic in its attitude towards both (a) methodology and (b) the kinds of final research accounts it produces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Editorial. Introduces articles in the November 2003 issue of the journal "Environment and Planning". Culture in human geography; Practices of voluntary welfare in the city; Spatial textures; Industrial clusters.