Practising Lively Geographies in the City: Encountering Melbourne through Experimental Field-Based Workshops

This article explores diverse ways of experiencing the city through an experimental field-based workshop supported by the Institute of Australian Geographers and this journal. The two-day methods practice workshop attracted 40 participants and aimed to train doctoral students and early career researchers in practices of observing, feeling, listening, mapping and visualizing the city. This paper aims to demonstrate how learning new methods that include Embodied Observation, Qualitative GIS, Locative Media Ethnography and Sonic Methodologies enabled 16 participants to encounter and experience the City of Melbourne in novel ways. The group learning environment and co-authored pieces that assemble diverse reflections demonstrate that the workshop is a form of innovative teaching and learning that has implications for Higher Education in Geography, but is yet to be explored more fully in the pedagogic literature. The experimental workshop has ongoing pedagogical benefits given the leadership, participatory and collaborative skills that unfolded when leading scholars, doctoral students and early career researchers came together to produce lively geographies of the city.