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This article critically reflects on the Victoria County History's (VCH) relationship with participatory historical geography approaches. Telling a story of change, it argues that it is not only possible, but also extremely productive for long-standing, well-established academic research projects to embrace participatory approaches and engage in transformative research. The VCH is a national project to write the history of every parish-sized area in England. Begun in 1899, the VCH's contemporary network of place-based historians still actively pursues this goal. Overseen by a central editorial team, most of the network's activities are conceived, run and funded by independent county trusts. These trusts research and write the VCH's well-known ‘Big Red Books’ and a range of shorter publications, but have also begun to cultivate participatory projects that embed local communities in the development of local histories and allow these communities to reflect on how their histories have shaped their collective identities. Focusing on the project's engagement with local knowledge and communities, this article traces the VCH's use of collaborative and participatory methodologies. Acknowledging the VCH's routes in Victorian encyclopaedic endeavours, it critically reflects on how it collaborated with local people during the early twentieth century. Shifting its attention to the early twenty-first century, it then considers how the VCH has begun to develop frameworks for engaging in individually, socially and academically transformative research. While recognising the limitations of these approaches, it highlights the latent potential within the VCH's emerging engagement with participatory historical geography approaches and, emphasising how the project's future depends on continual integration of participatory methods within its activities and outputs, identifies several ways in which the VCH could continue to develop its participatory methods.

In this article, we analyse the effectiveness of ride-alongs, a specific mobile method, to better understand the daily realities of informal mobile livelihoods in Hanoi, Vietnam. The field of mobile methods has seen significant advances both within and beyond geography. Yet, there is still an absence of literature comparing the benefits and drawbacks of using a consistent mobile method across different forms of mobility in the same context, such as pedal-powered versus motorised transport. Additionally, studies specifically addressing the daily experiences of informal cyclo (trishaw) drivers in Vietnam are scarce. Our paper aims to fill these gaps by evaluating the effectiveness of ride-along interviews in understanding the mobility and livelihood challenges faced by informal cyclo and motorbike taxi (xe ôm) drivers in Hanoi, who navigate the city's dense and chaotic traffic to earn a living. Ride-alongs provide a unique perspective on the city's informal transportation sector, uncovering new insights into the nuanced micro-mobilities and rapid decision-making required of these drivers. Cyclo drivers navigate Hanoi's streets with considerations for tourist appeal, physical exertion, and police avoidance. Meanwhile, xe ôm drivers manoeuvre through alleyways and roads, balancing efficiency, speed, and passenger demands. Both groups are concerned with circumventing often-corrupt police, managing local traffic conditions, and adapting to changing weather patterns. This comparative study reveals the benefits and insights gained from ride-along interviews with mobile informal economy workers, highlighting the similarities and differences in the choices and tactics these drivers employ. The method allows for a deeper understanding of how vehicle type, physical demands, and the socio-political environment shape the split-second decisions these drivers must make to maintain their livelihoods on Hanoi's streets.

The American Geophysical Union (AGU), a scholarly society serving the Earth and space sciences, has a conventional books portfolio with their publisher, Wiley, and a new partnership with the Geological Society of London for an open access (OA) book series. The latter serves authors who need (because of funding mandates) or want to publish OA and comes with added benefits, including a production workflow to facilitate faster times to online publication. Flexibility in how the costs of individual volumes can be covered aims to encourage uptake, but challenges lie ahead in ensuring that all authors can equitably choose OA for their book project. This commentary contributes to the collection in Area about the evolving OA books landscape, addressing many of the challenges described by Gandy, and describing the start of AGU's journey towards OA books. It brings a perspective from the sciences, where books are mostly large, edited volumes with many international contributors, many of them physical geographers. Their experiences of funding, motivation and recognition for contributing to books may be quite different to human geographers more familiar with the sole-authored monograph format.

In this paper, we detail the process of organising and facilitating a visualisation challenge as part of a larger project centring visual methods. We explore how the visualisation challenge specifically operated to highlight feminist epistemological and methodological principals, and practically, what worked and what didn't. We conclude that visualisation challenges offer exciting potential to jumpstart creative and innovative project development, but if a challenge is to be successful, context matters, and so too do practical and logical considerations. We believe that feminist visualisation challenges offer exciting models to share findings and data, learn from emerging research practices, and build community within and beyond the academy.

While historical geographers and historians increasingly recognise the benefits of and need for participatory research, the rigid structures regimenting academic practice have acted as barriers to successful knowledge exchange. Community involvement and place-based research come with a number of challenges characterised by miscommunications, frustrations, and failures. This paper reflects on findings that emerged from a three-month internship investigating public and community engagement activities at the Centre for History, University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI). The internship was the outcome of a collaboration between UHI and the Centre for the History of People, Place, and Community (CHPPC), Institute of Historical Research London (IHR). Based on interviews with UHI academics and heritage institutions beyond the Higher Education sector based across the Highlands and Islands, the paper explores the inevitable pitfalls that comes with community engagement and the ethical questions raised by knowledge co-production.

The turn to co-production in geographical research is underpinned by the social justice aim to democratise academic practice, and in recent years this has extended to training young people as co-researchers. However, discussions of intergenerational dynamics in co-produced research are limited, and there are no accounts of family members interviewing one another. This paper responds to this oversight by presenting a reflective account of a research project centring on intergenerational family discussions and negotiations of climate change knowledge, in which young co-researchers interviewed parents. We share key considerations for developing bespoke interview training and preparing co-researchers to undertake interviewing, and we highlight the strengths and opportunities of intergenerational interviews in families. Our core contention is that, when planned and supported with tact and consideration, intergenerational interviews can boost young people's confidence in their skills and generate rich dialogues that may lead to decisions and outcomes that will outlive the research. However, engaging co-researchers and their pre-existing familial relationships in research requires careful consideration, practical training, and ongoing reflection, because these relationships are defined by intergenerational dynamics that precede and outlast the research.

This paper reflects on the research process and ethics of doing research with low-income households in Stoke-on-Trent, UK, during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with five mothers experiencing food insecurity, I argue that it is imperative that researchers employ ‘care-full’, slow, flexible methodologies situated within everyday lives to ensure that research with vulnerable and precarious groups of people is not exploitative, especially during times of crisis. The emergency public health measures introduced to contain COVID-19 in March 2020 acted like a brake on my research activities, slowing things down, limiting the methods available to me, and ultimately, provoking a reimagining of my original research design. I make two contributions. First, building on feminist geographical scholarship on care and reflexivity, and calls for ‘slow’ research that prioritises the shifting needs of researchers and participants, I suggest adopting a relational approach to take account of participant subjectivities in order to minimise disruption in their everyday lives. Second, through discussing the ways in which I employed the mobile phone to continue gathering data with participant mothers during COVID-19, I build on nascent geographical and methodological conversations about the role of technologies in the design and implementation of care-full research. In highlighting the limitations of the mobile phone as a research device in this context, I extend current limited understandings of utilising mobile phones to gather data in the course of conducting research with marginalised people.

This paper aims to disrupt hegemonic ideas in transboundary water governance literature about rivers and borders being fixed and rigid. I argue that rivers are sites of uneven experiences not only in terms of access and use, but also in the way they are experienced as ‘borders’ by different communities, reflecting wider settler colonial dynamics and legacies. On the Yarmouk Tributary of the Jordan River, the river environments are borderised and territorialised in very unequal ways by nation-states and through bilateral river basin agreements. Through paying attention to how river-border environments have been transformed and how they function, this paper explores how the border is experienced and navigated in three border environments on the Yarmouk. This paper complicates the river-as-border scholarship by attending to how river borders are environments which are experienced differently by communities living in them through different forms of infrastructural and slow violence. Centring slow violence in this analysis offers a window into unexamined social worlds and experiences, showing how infrastructures on the border become environments and not just banal assemblages of pipes and pumps separate from people and land. It also presents an original contribution to examine transboundary river politics in the Jordan River Basin from the vantage points of the communities that continue to re-configure ways to forge and mend relations with the river and border environments.

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.