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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 calls for human geographers examining poverty in the global North to attend more to asset-based community development (ABCD) poverty interventions in order to complement geographers' current foci on how people experience and respond to poverty. ABCD is a community movement that originated in the USA that emphasises principles of focusing on gifts and assets rather than deficits, and on relationships at the neighbourhood level. In doing so, ABCD starts from what is ‘strong’ rather than ‘wrong’ in order to work towards community transformation. This paper's focus on ABCD emerges from an ethnography with a community following ABCD on an estate in Birmingham, UK. The housing estate in which the ethnography was conducted is an area of relatively high UK deprivation. However, the ethnography drew out how, through ABCD intertwined with a Christian ethos, local volunteers and community workers endeavoured to reframe the questions being asked of and by the community in order to focus on people's gifts, foster neighbour-to-neighbour support, and shun stigma. In conclusion, the paper argues that giving more attention to ABCD poverty interventions will complement human geographers' existing attention to poverty in the global North by broadening our foci, including to question whether ABCD interventions could be used more widely to combat both the existence and experience of poverty. However, this comes with a warning: in giving more attention to assets, we must be careful to avoid romanticising poverty, and so this must be alongside existing geographical attention to austerity and welfare provision.

As in other African countries, activists in Uganda play an important role during political campaigns. Monetary handouts, called ‘transport refund’, often facilitate their participation. Although these handouts often cover more than just the costs of transportation, the label indicates that mobility is seen as an important financial item for campaign activists. Despite this, little has been published about the role that mobility plays in the processes of political mobilisation in Africa. This article therefore examines mobility as an important yet neglected aspect of political mobilisation by evaluating the role of motorcycle taxi riders during elections in Uganda. Usually referred to as Boda-Bodas, they are essential short-distance transport providers in the country. Beyond that, being Boda-Boda has become a way of survival, a form of social organisation, and a promise that every youth can make a living if he dares to face the dangers of the country's accident-prone roads. Politicians have since discovered the potential of these bold young men and recruit them en masse ahead of elections. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2022, this paper examines the unique mobilities inherent in Boda-Bodas. It finds that characteristic mobilities enable their movements as transport providers and argues that these mobilities also enhance political rallies. Boda-Boda motorcycle riders have therefore become a crucial activist group during political campaigns in Uganda.

In the context of austerity and the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper draws on 17 interviews conducted with frontline staff and volunteers to explore the use of food banks by older people in a highly deprived North-West borough. Despite high levels of poverty amongst this age group, older people are infrequent users of food banks and it is their absence from these spaces, as opposed to their use of and experiences within food banks, that has often gained attention. By foregrounding this age group, this paper highlights different circumstances of use, generational dynamics involving heightened feelings of shame, and how food banks function as social spaces for older people. In doing so, this paper adds to literature in gerontology around spaces of ageing, as well as research on food banks, by highlighting how experiences in these spaces are differentiated by age. This paper advances discussions around the impact of austerity on the everyday lives of older people. Due to the timing of this research, it also gives insight into how older people and informal social spaces have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article develops a decolonial participatory method to map the geographies of descendants of fugitives from slavery, or Maroons, to disrupt white-Mestizo constructions of Latin American territories. Maroon-descendant communities can take advantage of existing archives and their extensive oral history to explain their territorial development from a home-grown perspective. With the researcher's assistance, members of San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia, used their knowledge and emotions as a lens through which to analyse colonial records to map their territory from both a historical and present day perspective. Feeling/thinking about dispossession and resistance while counter-using the colonial archive to reclaim Afro-descendant territory is a subversive undertaking, one that is engrained in the legacy of Maroon resistance.

Numerous studies demonstrate the benefits of the role of nature, activities, and social interaction at nature-based interventions in improving participants' wellbeing. These health-enabling encounters between people and places have typically been framed in geography via the concept of therapeutic landscapes. Empirical studies and theory have primarily focused on the characteristics of physical and social environments of therapeutic landscapes, while understanding why particular relational encounters are affective in co-creating therapeutic experiences has been given less attention. This paper focuses on understanding the nature of a person, and of interactions between people, as a fundamental part of understanding the way in which nature-based interventions co-create benefits to participants' wellbeing. To consider this we turn to person-centred psychotherapy, where we draw on Carl Rogers' conceptualisations of the person and the therapeutic relationship. Person-centred psychotherapy highlights the importance of a non-judgemental, empathic, and authentic therapeutic relationship in providing an environment for change and that a person is agentic in perceiving and engaging with affective relations in co-creating therapeutic encounters. These encounters have the potential to alleviate and/or transform aspects of a person's sense of self. These shifts in a person's self-concept are part of a process, which enables the flow of benefits from an intervention into participants' daily lives. Our approach is underpinned by using interviews with facilitators and participants of nature-based interventions. We propose that developing geographical understanding of the relational impacts on a person's sense of self and actions has implications beyond health geography.

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.

Animal geographies is going through methodological change, moving towards a variety of methodological approaches that enliven inquiry into nonhuman animals' lives. Despite this move, there is still a clear need to develop approaches to explore human–animal interaction that centre animals in geographical inquiry. This paper aims to build on lively debates in animal geographies to offer ethnomethodology as one such approach. Ethnomethodology, an approach rather than a method, has had only brief engagement with human geography, but this paper will argue that ethnomethodology has various characteristics that align with traditional geographical enquiry and that can help grapple with the many ontological and epistemological challenges animal geographers face. These characteristics: an attention to place-based practices; a focus on agency and subjectivity; and an understanding of practices as a relational, offer points of interest for geography and ethnomethodology to converge. I expand on these facets and outline ethnomethodological engagement with animals before turning to my own example of human-assistance-dog training to illustrate how an ethnomethodological approach is useful to animal geographers. Overall, this paper suggests that ethnomethodology offers animal geographers: a focus on embodied senses; a concern with forms of agency and subjectivity within space and place; and a rich descriptive approach to practical detail. The paper concludes with a discussion towards geographical ethnomethodological futures.

Amid the proportion of work on ‘Muslim geographies’, the majority has focused on Muslims as a minority discussed within societies of the West. Additionally, this work rarely discusses the positionality of the researcher despite significant overlap with work in feminist, social, and cultural geographies. This paper takes ‘Muslim geographies’ as a starting point to further problematise accounts of knowledge, subjectivity, and power with regard to the treatment of Islam in geography. I argue that geographical analysis from different standpoints is needed to yield other ways of knowing about Muslims and how they orient themselves across space and time. This theoretical intervention is informed by my fieldwork experience as a Muslim male conducting ethnographic research on migration and labour precarity with other Muslim migrants across Taiwan. As I transited through various Muslim spaces, being Muslim provided privileged access and shaped the direction in which the research progressed.