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This paper discussions the implications of returning to ‘old’ interview data many years later and asks what can be learned from the different emotions that such revisiting can invoke in the researcher? It considers the significance of emotions in the process of analysing interview transcripts and how a researcher changes over time. It calls on researchers to ‘revisit’ past data for another look.

Although much debate has been undertaken about the insider–outsider and in-betweener positionalities within social science research, the third-culture researcher (TCR) represents an under-researched identity which demands greater attention. Conducting doctoral fieldwork in Islamabad as a TCR gave rise to challenges that were navigated through a research broker. The TCR positionality represents one who visits their country of ethnicity for the purposes of conducting research having mostly lived abroad, or as one who conducts research in a country where they have mostly lived but do not share ethnicity. I argue that research brokers are particularly important for TCRs—and in-betweener researchers more generally—because they provide contextual grounding, protection, and access to people and places where TCRs have partial familiarity with local conditions and where all actors involved are embedded within a context of risk. Research brokers also supplement TCRs' in-between status by negotiating and managing their own positionality and skillset to facilitate interaction between the researcher and participants. This process can be challenging and has its limitations. I assert this by drawing on joint reflections and an interview with my research broker, as well as personal anecdotes. The TCR–broker relationship transforms knowledge production in multiple ways. Firstly, working with an actor with a unique positionality and skillset offers insight into how different identities interact and engage to shape research relations and outcomes. Secondly, it highlights how the research site is experienced differently and carries various meanings, significance and consequences for those involved. Finally, the TCR–broker relationship offers the opportunity to engage in candid discussions about the benefits and limitations involved in working with others. The broker creates a significant impression on the research during fieldwork and beyond. Highlighting their voices adds to our scholarly understanding of the impact of positionality on qualitative social science methodological research.

A range of innovative off-grid sanitation technologies have been developed and deployed to improve sanitation in cities where networked sanitation by publicly managed sewers is insufficient. Studies of such technologies tend to consider toilets as static, where technologies are chosen once, at the project onset and in isolation from each other. In this study we explore off-grid sanitation as heterogeneous infrastructure configurations of people and toilets, roles and responsibilities, costs and benefits. Using two cases from Kampala, we emphasise that there are relationships between the different parts of infrastructure, and that these relationships vary over time and space. Urban residents rework configurations by changing a toilet and changing which toilets are used in order to meet their diverse sanitation desires. We demonstrate technological diversity, connect this diversity to the preferences of users by showing linkages between toilets that are proximate to each other, and show the importance of considering relations between toilets over time. Our analysis demonstrates how operations, cultural orientations, payment mechanisms, and limitations have a significant bearing on feasibility, scalability, and integration into city-wide sanitation, and that this is often not foreseen in planning phases. We thus conclude that sanitation configurations that enable flexibility rather than trying to predict needs may well enable more reliable infrastructure.

The lure of an unavailable world is becoming increasingly prominent in Geography and related disciplines. The concern is that much research today remains affirmational—still grasping and instrumentalising being and relation—and that, whilst no doubt modified in such developments as the relational and ontological turns, this nevertheless continues the legacies of the modern episteme in new ways. Indeed, there is a marked momentum, across the social sciences and humanities, from cultural geography to computer and Black studies, to read the reduction of the world to available ontic and ontological cuts and distinctions as a form of violence. In response, tropes of the non-relational, non-ontological, the negative, nothingness, the void, absence and the abyss, for examples—what could be called ‘unavailable geographies’—are of growing appeal and interest. This paper, foregrounding the importance of tracking how the material forces of history are read as enabling for the emergence of any new problem space, provides a distinctive pathway into this sense of a critical shift in Western critique. By way of an illustrative example, it focuses upon how the proliferation of logistics (broadly framed here as the logic of obtaining the world by way of cuts and distinctions, from metric culture, to identity politics, to the grasping of ontology and relation) is increasingly understood to open up the power of an undifferentiating reality; one which expands and deepens the unavailable world as a problem space for critique. Thus, whilst geographers, like many others, are currently critiquing dominant approaches for being too affirmational, the key argument of this paper is that we should also be taking one step back, asking why now, and through what broader forces of history, the lure of an unavailable world today?

The yips – a phenomenon whereby skilled practitioners suddenly and inexplicably struggle with their performance – has been observed in many sports. With no consensus as to the origins of the yips, it is, for many, a chronic condition bringing an end to careers and hobbies alike. This paper turns its attention to ‘target panic’, a sport-specific instantiation of the yips found amongst archers. By bringing empirical encounters with target panic into conversation with geographical literature on skill, this paper seeks to invite reconsideration as to how and where the yips manifest. Rather than focusing on whether the yips is psychological or physical in origin, ecological approaches to skill allow for us to understand the yips as stemming from the disruption of the more-than-human communicative links on which skilled ecologies are founded. The concept of disruption is used to understand how this breakdown operates. Disruption is seen to be a boundary creating or boundary affirming process which impedes the ability for different actors to attune to one another. By re-interpreting the yips as a result of disruption and locating it between actors, rather than within them, this paper contributes to ongoing discussions about what it means to be (de)skilled in a disrupted world and presents new possibilities for methods to prevent and treat the yips.

In this paper I explore the possibility that interruptions in in situ interviews can support understandings of power and social relations in research. I base my discussion on an extract from a study of young people's experiences of rapid urbanisation in Central Beqaa, Lebanon. The extract is from an interview with a young man who was continually interrupted by his mother. I problematise a tendency to silence these interruptions in the research process by considering how interruptions can reveal the social architecture in which young people are embedded.

Analysing the spoken word, in some traditions, means analysing how social life is created, ordered and transformed through interaction, rather than how it is reported about in interviews. This paper examines an excerpt recorded in that spirit—towards understanding how participants continuously and demonstrably categorise each other in face-to-face conversation. Within the larger project, this excerpt was unique and memorable, but did not seem to present any conclusive direction for analysis. Here, I show how its interactional features might combine with contexts beyond the immediate situation to frame an ethnomethodological and geographical analysis.

Beyond the boundaries of neatly presented ‘datasets’ are the words said before and after audio-recorders are switched on, small talk that is rarely transcribed or archived. In this intervention, I return to a brief moment preceding a semi-structured interview in North Norway. While I was there to study political relations in the Barents region, the research encounters generated interpersonal connections and surprises. This paper considers first, positionality and the blurriness of the researcher's role as insider or outsider; and second, the nuances often left out of research accounts, such as local dialects, small talk and the relational settings of interviews.

This paper builds on conversations surrounding decolonising research and feminist research ethics to reflect on the ways in which researchers can take a more ethical approach to research partnerships in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on principles of postcolonial feminist ethnography, it is proposed that researchers should (1) reflect on their own motivations behind their research in order to (2) understand the balance of power within research relationships through continual reflexivity and (3) ensure that a collaborative methodology is used to the extent possible and that appropriate methods are chosen to challenge uneven balances of power in research relationships. Researchers must commit to ethical changes as individuals in order to break down power imbalances in research relationships and support the decolonisation of research. The magnitude of this change is acknowledged, but the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that we are capable of change on a scale we previously thought impossible.

It is expected that we present participant quotes when writing up qualitative interview research. Yet doing so carries the risk of making our participants' lives seem too neat and can give the misplaced illusion that we have easily made sense of their situation. This paper explores other ways that we might work with interviews that are more sensitive to the complexities of interview encounters themselves. Through reflection on an interview with a rideshare driver that challenged my interpretive capacities, I explore other ways of writing up interviews that do not use quotes. The paper invites us to consider occasions where it might be more advantageous to produce a narrative description of what it was like to do the interview itself, or to write a narrative response to the interview.