Leaving the field is a crucial moment that has been examined neither from an emotional point of view nor from a life course perspective. In this co-authored paper, we, the researcher and the research assistant, analyse through our diaries how this moment was entangled with decisive life events and how our emotions were conditioned by our embodied experience of sickness, separation and incertitude towards the future. Departing from life course and feminist geographical reflexive standpoints, we engage with the complexities of positionality and turning points. Drawing on the duality of our experiences of separation and the individual and collective evolution of our positionalities and identities, this paper reifies the life course principle of linked lives by examining the interdependency of researchers’ and research assistants’ lives.
{"title":"Leaving the field: (de‐)linked lives of the researcher and research assistant","authors":"M. Caretta, Florence Jemutai Cheptum","doi":"10.1111/AREA.12342","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/AREA.12342","url":null,"abstract":"Leaving the field is a crucial moment that has been examined neither from an emotional point of view nor from a life course perspective. In this co-authored paper, we, the researcher and the research assistant, analyse through our diaries how this moment was entangled with decisive life events and how our emotions were conditioned by our embodied experience of sickness, separation and incertitude towards the future. Departing from life course and feminist geographical reflexive standpoints, we engage with the complexities of positionality and turning points. Drawing on the duality of our experiences of separation and the individual and collective evolution of our positionalities and identities, this paper reifies the life course principle of linked lives by examining the interdependency of researchers’ and research assistants’ lives.","PeriodicalId":72297,"journal":{"name":"Area (Oxford, England)","volume":"176 1","pages":"415-420"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86075312","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Recently scholars have emphasised the importance of looking at the researcher's experience and how positionality, emotions and embodiment shape the ethnographic fieldwork process. Specifically, feminist contributions have shown how the professional and the personal can be interlinked when conducting ethnographic research and have reconsidered the role of the researcher in the production of knowledge. However, such accounts often lack analytical engagements and/or reveal little about the researcher's experience beyond the fieldwork. By adopting a life course framework and its conceptual categories of social pathways, turning points, and transitions & trajectories, this paper offers an analytical device to read through the ethnographer's own experience. The paper explores a research journey undertaken in the intentional spiritual communities of Damanhur (Italy) and Terra Mirim (Brazil) by the author, which aimed to study the enactment of alternative spaces. By integrating a life course framework, this paper firstly argues the need to consider how social pathways shape the life course positioning and the research trajectory. Secondly, it shows how turning points can affect both the research direction but also the researcher's life course. Thirdly, the paper argues that the fieldwork is only one of the transitional phases of ethnographic research and encourages the researcher to reflect on its long‐term effects. It concludes by discussing how such experience can impact on the life course of the researcher as well as on the research participants.
{"title":"Understanding ethnography through a life course framework : a research journey into alternative spiritual spaces","authors":"Francesca Fois","doi":"10.1111/AREA.12332","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/AREA.12332","url":null,"abstract":"Recently scholars have emphasised the importance of looking at the researcher's experience and how positionality, emotions and embodiment shape the ethnographic fieldwork process. Specifically, feminist contributions have shown how the professional and the personal can be interlinked when conducting ethnographic research and have reconsidered the role of the researcher in the production of knowledge. However, such accounts often lack analytical engagements and/or reveal little about the researcher's experience beyond the fieldwork. By adopting a life course framework and its conceptual categories of social pathways, turning points, and transitions & trajectories, this paper offers an analytical device to read through the ethnographer's own experience. The paper explores a research journey undertaken in the intentional spiritual communities of Damanhur (Italy) and Terra Mirim (Brazil) by the author, which aimed to study the enactment of alternative spaces. By integrating a life course framework, this paper firstly argues the need to consider how social pathways shape the life course positioning and the research trajectory. Secondly, it shows how turning points can affect both the research direction but also the researcher's life course. Thirdly, the paper argues that the fieldwork is only one of the transitional phases of ethnographic research and encourages the researcher to reflect on its long‐term effects. It concludes by discussing how such experience can impact on the life course of the researcher as well as on the research participants.","PeriodicalId":72297,"journal":{"name":"Area (Oxford, England)","volume":"14 1","pages":"421-428"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76759123","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Tibetan Buddhist tradition of Tsetar rituals and practices, which direct many Tibetan pastoralists to either save or release livestock from being slaughtered in order to gain positive karma, has recently been popularised by Tibetan Nyingma masters in pastoral regions. The trend developed as they witnessed an increase in the slaughter of yaks and Tibetan sheep in the commercial meat market resulting from the growing integration of Tibetan pastoralists into the market economy. The contradictory visions of yaks as living beings, according to Tibetan Buddhist teachings, and as productive resources in accordance with market logic, have somehow worked together to shape pastoralists' understandings of, and relationships with, yaks in their everyday decision-making. By examining the case of Khenpo Jigphun's Tsetar movement and ethnographic studies of Tibetan yak herding practices in the south-eastern Tibetan Plateau, this paper examines how competing visions of yaks work together to produce a hybrid knowledge of Tibetan pastoralists that is simultaneously generated in their situated experiences in contemporary society. The paper suggests that the concept of situated knowledge has the potential to bring indigenous people from the margins into the centre where not only can they have meaningful conversations with actors possessing different forms of knowledge, but they can also find a space where the possibility of alternative development paths exist. Furthermore, I assert that conceptualising indigenous knowledge as situated does not uncritically celebrate hybridity, but rather allows for a view of indigenous peoples as contemporaries who should not be relegated to the ‘waiting room of history’, nor be viewed as romanticised models for an idealised future.
{"title":"Contested understandings of yaks on the eastern Tibetan Plateau: market logic, Tibetan Buddhism and indigenous knowledge","authors":"Gaerrang","doi":"10.1111/AREA.12343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/AREA.12343","url":null,"abstract":"The Tibetan Buddhist tradition of Tsetar rituals and practices, which direct many Tibetan pastoralists to either save or release livestock from being slaughtered in order to gain positive karma, has recently been popularised by Tibetan Nyingma masters in pastoral regions. The trend developed as they witnessed an increase in the slaughter of yaks and Tibetan sheep in the commercial meat market resulting from the growing integration of Tibetan pastoralists into the market economy. The contradictory visions of yaks as living beings, according to Tibetan Buddhist teachings, and as productive resources in accordance with market logic, have somehow worked together to shape pastoralists' understandings of, and relationships with, yaks in their everyday decision-making. By examining the case of Khenpo Jigphun's Tsetar movement and ethnographic studies of Tibetan yak herding practices in the south-eastern Tibetan Plateau, this paper examines how competing visions of yaks work together to produce a hybrid knowledge of Tibetan pastoralists that is simultaneously generated in their situated experiences in contemporary society. The paper suggests that the concept of situated knowledge has the potential to bring indigenous people from the margins into the centre where not only can they have meaningful conversations with actors possessing different forms of knowledge, but they can also find a space where the possibility of alternative development paths exist. Furthermore, I assert that conceptualising indigenous knowledge as situated does not uncritically celebrate hybridity, but rather allows for a view of indigenous peoples as contemporaries who should not be relegated to the ‘waiting room of history’, nor be viewed as romanticised models for an idealised future.","PeriodicalId":72297,"journal":{"name":"Area (Oxford, England)","volume":"56 1","pages":"526-532"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75113225","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A number of geographers have sought to develop the museum as a space ripe for geographical enquiry and to comprehend the positioning of the museum. This paper aims to contribute to this burgeoning field of museum geography in order to consider the ways in which museum spaces rework notions of governmentality. First, this paper seeks to comprehend how museums (specifically municipal museums) are positioned within processes of governance and how, as a state actor, they develop a form of soft disciplinary power. Second, the paper follows such a strategy, as it traces the pathways taken by participants involved in a community engagement project based at GoMA (Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow) in Glasgow. The project engaged a group of adult learners in a variety of cultural and arts activities. This allowed the group to explore a series of issues in contemporary art and it engaged them in different forms of creative practice. The community engagement work sought to improve their confidence and aspirations as well as to expand their creative abilities.
{"title":"‘The will to empower’: reworking governmentality in the museum","authors":"D. Beel","doi":"10.1111/AREA.12330","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/AREA.12330","url":null,"abstract":"A number of geographers have sought to develop the museum as a space ripe for geographical enquiry and to comprehend the positioning of the museum. This paper aims to contribute to this burgeoning field of museum geography in order to consider the ways in which museum spaces rework notions of governmentality. First, this paper seeks to comprehend how museums (specifically municipal museums) are positioned within processes of governance and how, as a state actor, they develop a form of soft disciplinary power. Second, the paper follows such a strategy, as it traces the pathways taken by participants involved in a community engagement project based at GoMA (Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow) in Glasgow. The project engaged a group of adult learners in a variety of cultural and arts activities. This allowed the group to explore a series of issues in contemporary art and it engaged them in different forms of creative practice. The community engagement work sought to improve their confidence and aspirations as well as to expand their creative abilities.","PeriodicalId":72297,"journal":{"name":"Area (Oxford, England)","volume":"12 1","pages":"460-467"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90358201","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An alternative way to measure the degree of sprawl and development patterns in Austin, TX","authors":"H. Lee, H. Kim, Sanghyeok Kang","doi":"10.1111/AREA.12337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/AREA.12337","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":72297,"journal":{"name":"Area (Oxford, England)","volume":"16 1","pages":"486-494"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86240010","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Oliver Keane, P. Hall, N. Schuurman, Paul Kingsbury
Online professional networks have the potential to expedite and expand the success of corporations and, especially, socially oriented enterprises – such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and social enterprises, which are businesses owned and operated by a non-profit. Research to date has not examined the extent and composition of online professional social networks among social enterprise employees nor their inter-relationships. Specifically, the link between individual connectivity and physical workplace is not understood. The purpose of this study was to provide a geographical understanding of communication amongst social enterprise employees. In British Columbia, Canada, 358 social enterprises and their most senior staff member were located on LinkedIn. Social network analysis, geographic information system (GIS) analysis and statistical analysis revealed that senior staff which had a betweenness centrality score were more than expectedly located in workplaces within the metropolis (Greater Vancouver) and within very highly materially deprived areas within the city. Further analysis showed that the majority of senior staff that had a betweenness centrality score, or that were directly connected to a senior staff member with a betweenness centrality score, were clustered within a 65 square kilometre downtown zone in the metropolis. This suggests the existence of ‘local buzz’, ‘regional pipelines’ and a digital divide drawn along metropolitan lines. This research represents the early understanding of social networks and their role in connecting enterprises with similar (or competing) goals along the axis of space.
{"title":"Linking online social proximity and workplace location: social enterprise employees in British Columbia","authors":"Oliver Keane, P. Hall, N. Schuurman, Paul Kingsbury","doi":"10.1111/AREA.12333","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/AREA.12333","url":null,"abstract":"Online professional networks have the potential to expedite and expand the success of corporations and, especially, socially oriented enterprises – such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and social enterprises, which are businesses owned and operated by a non-profit. Research to date has not examined the extent and composition of online professional social networks among social enterprise employees nor their inter-relationships. Specifically, the link between individual connectivity and physical workplace is not understood. The purpose of this study was to provide a geographical understanding of communication amongst social enterprise employees. In British Columbia, Canada, 358 social enterprises and their most senior staff member were located on LinkedIn. Social network analysis, geographic information system (GIS) analysis and statistical analysis revealed that senior staff which had a betweenness centrality score were more than expectedly located in workplaces within the metropolis (Greater Vancouver) and within very highly materially deprived areas within the city. Further analysis showed that the majority of senior staff that had a betweenness centrality score, or that were directly connected to a senior staff member with a betweenness centrality score, were clustered within a 65 square kilometre downtown zone in the metropolis. This suggests the existence of ‘local buzz’, ‘regional pipelines’ and a digital divide drawn along metropolitan lines. This research represents the early understanding of social networks and their role in connecting enterprises with similar (or competing) goals along the axis of space.","PeriodicalId":72297,"journal":{"name":"Area (Oxford, England)","volume":"4 1","pages":"468-476"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81156262","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-12-01Epub Date: 2017-03-01DOI: 10.1111/area.12329
Jake Hodder
Geographical scholarship has rightly problematised the act of archival research, showing how the practice of archiving is not only concerned with how a society collectively remembers, but also forgets. As such, the dominant motif for discussing historical methods in geography has been through the lens of absence: the archive is a space of 'traces', 'fragments' and 'ghosts'. In this paper I suggest that the focus on incompleteness and partiality, while true, may also belie what many geographers working in archives find their greatest difficulty: an overwhelming volume of source materials. I reflect on my own research experiences in the pacifist archive to suggest that the growing scale and scope of many collections, along with the taxing research demands of transnational perspectives, pose immediate practical challenges for geographers characterised as much by abundance as by absence. In the second half of the paper, drawing on recent scholarship in history and geography, I argue that the method of biography offers one possible strategy for navigating archival abundance, allowing geographers to tell stories that are wider, deeper and more revealingly complex within the existing time and financial constraints of humanities research.
{"title":"On absence and abundance: biography as method in archival research.","authors":"Jake Hodder","doi":"10.1111/area.12329","DOIUrl":"10.1111/area.12329","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Geographical scholarship has rightly problematised the act of archival research, showing how the practice of archiving is not only concerned with how a society collectively remembers, but also forgets. As such, the dominant motif for discussing historical methods in geography has been through the lens of absence: the archive is a space of 'traces', 'fragments' and 'ghosts'. In this paper I suggest that the focus on incompleteness and partiality, while true, may also belie what many geographers working in archives find their greatest difficulty: an overwhelming volume of source materials. I reflect on my own research experiences in the pacifist archive to suggest that the growing scale and scope of many collections, along with the taxing research demands of transnational perspectives, pose immediate practical challenges for geographers characterised as much by abundance as by absence. In the second half of the paper, drawing on recent scholarship in history and geography, I argue that the method of biography offers one possible strategy for navigating archival abundance, allowing geographers to tell stories that are wider, deeper and more revealingly complex within the existing time and financial constraints of humanities research.</p>","PeriodicalId":72297,"journal":{"name":"Area (Oxford, England)","volume":"49 4","pages":"452-459"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5765836/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"35794607","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Life course scholars have theorised the relationship between individual life trajectories and geographic phenomena such as migration, partnering, reproduction and locational choice. They have engag ...
{"title":"A life course approach to the field and fieldwork","authors":"Thomas Wimark, Nathaniel M. Lewis, M. Caretta","doi":"10.1111/AREA.12362","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/AREA.12362","url":null,"abstract":"Life course scholars have theorised the relationship between individual life trajectories and geographic phenomena such as migration, partnering, reproduction and locational choice. They have engag ...","PeriodicalId":72297,"journal":{"name":"Area (Oxford, England)","volume":"13 1","pages":"390-393"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79096954","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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