Glossary

Affordance

In psychology and design theory affordance is a property of an object or an aspect of the environment, especially relating to its potential utility, which can be inferred from visual or other perceptual signals; (more generally) a quality or utility which is readily apparent or available (English Oxford Living Dictionaries).

Affordances are the qualities and the possibilities made possible by these quality in an object in relation to an individual. The classic example is the door knob: it affords a twisting motion. The touch screen of a phone affords a swipe motion, the WIFI router in a building affords connectivity. Since the 1970s, much has changed about how researchers think about affordance. How artefacts afford, for whom, and under what circumstances, are some of the questions that have emerged. Sasha Costanza-Schock, argues that every affordance is a disaffordance for someone else. Affordance perceptibility and availability are all structured by race, class, gender, and other axes of structural inequality which have historically been left out of conversations about ‘good design’. This research is the basis of the Design Justice Network.

  • Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. The MIT Press.

Archive

Archives are collections of materials belonging to libraries, organisations, institutions, societies or individuals available for consultation. ‘Archives can hold both published and unpublished materials, and those materials can be in any format. Some examples are manuscripts, letters, photographs, moving image and sound materials, artwork, books, diaries, artefacts, and the digital equivalents of all of these things. Materials in an archive are often unique, specialized, or rare objects, meaning very few of them exist in the world, or they are the only ones of their kind’ (Schmidt 2016).

Coding

In humanities, arts and social sciences coding means to recognise and name patterns and themes emerging in the fieldwork and writing.

Country

Country is often misunderstood as being synonymous with land, but it goes far beyond that. It comprises ecologies of plants, animals, water, sky, air and every aspect of the ‘natural’ environment. Country is a spiritual entity: she is Mother. She is not separate to you: All things are connected, everything is interrelated. Everything you do will affect her and ultimately, come back to you. (Foster and Kinniburgh 2020, 68).

Foster, Shannon, Joanne Paterson Kinniburgh, and Wann Country. “There’s No Place Like (Without) Country.” In Placemaking Fundamentals for the Built Environment, pp. 63-82. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore, 2020.

We believe that country is not only the Land and People, but is also the Entities of Waterways, Animals, Plants, Climate, Skies and Spirits. Within this, one Entity should not be raised above another, as these live in close relationship with one another… The strength of our country can also be seen in the relationships between these Entities; hence, it is a truly relational ontology. All things are recognized and respected for their place in the overall system. Whilst they are differentiated, these relations are not oppositional, nor binaric, but are inclusive and accepting of diversity. These relations serve to define and unite, not to oppose or alienate.

Martin, Karen and Booran Mirraboopa. 2003. “Ways of Knowing, Being and Doing: A Theoretical Framework and Methods for Indigenous and Indigenist Re‐search.” Journal of Australian Studies. doi:10.1080/14443050309387838

Country soars high into the atmosphere, deep into the planet crust and far into the oceans. Country incorporates both the tangible and the intangible, for instance, all the knowledges and cultural practices associated with land. People are part of Country, and their/our identity is derived in a large way in relation to Country. Their/our belonging, nurturing and reciprocal relationships come through our connection to Country. In this way Country is key to our health and wellbeing. 

Hromek, Daniele. “Defining Country.” Designing with Country (2020): 2.

Culture

Culture, it is argued, is not so much a set of things – novels and paintings or TV programmes or comics – as a process, a set of practices. Primarily, culture is concerned with the production and exchange of meanings –the ‘giving and taking of meaning – between the members of a society or of a group … Thus culture depends on its participants interpreting meaningfully what is around them, and ‘making sense’ of the world, in broadly similar ways’ (Hall 1997, p. 2).

  • Hall, S. 1997, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, S. Hall (ed.), Sage Publications Ltd, London.

Discourse

In non-specialised language a discussion or exposition about a particular topic. In linguistics ‘an extend series of utterances that constitute a single speech event, like a conversation, joke or lecture’ (Mikula 2008, p. 54). In post-structuralist theory and in particular in the writing of Michel Foucault it refers to the ways in which we think and speak about something, to the way in which we make meaning, believe, and to the understanding and norms that guide us. These are not objective, but are shaped by institutions, practices and representations (for instance the antithetical ways in which people think about vaccines are shaped by scientific and anti-science discourses). Understanding discourses and the way they are constituted is important in place-based methodologies because discourse constructs ideas about places, including stereotypes (for instance, Australia is a fair and egalitarian society is a discourse).

  • Mikula, M. 2008, Key Concepts in Cultural Studies, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York.

Emplacement

The sensuous interrelationship of body-mind-environment, where environment is understood as ‘a bundle of sensory and social values’ (Howes 2005, p. 7).
Howes, D. (ed.) 2005, Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, Berg Publishers, London.

Fieldwork, Field Journals, Field Notes

In ethnography fieldwork is any period of research in a specific site. In early anthropological ethnography periods of fieldworks extended for several months and were often located in remote communities. Since the 1980s the definition of fieldwork has changed to mean periods of research in any given site. It is common to keep field journals and write fieldnotes to record research. While some researchers use paper notebooks, others prefer to use a variety of apps, including Instagram (see live fieldnoting), or apps like Evernote that create digital notebooks and notes, and allow speech to text, so that instead of writing a note one can speak a note that gets transcribed into text.

Genre

A form of communication in any media that follows specific and agreed-upon rules and conventions. For instance Western, kung-fu, and Bollywood are genres of film that respect sets of conventions in the way they tell stories and represent places.

Gleaning

Historically it refers to the practice of collecting leftover crops from farmers’ fields. Contemporary forms of gleaning include forms of salvaging waste to find items that have been discarded by their owners, but that may prove of some use. Some researchers refer to the research process of collecting fragmentary bits and pieces of information and knowledge as a form of data collection.

Grand Narratives

Grand narratives or master narratives are social theories or philosophies of history which, appealing to notions of transcendental and universal truth, aim to offer a comprehensive and totalising account of knowledge and experience to the detriment of difference. An example could be the idea of progress.

  • Lyotard, J.F. 1984, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester University Press, Manchester. 

Habitus

Habitus is the embodiment of social norms and dispositions that orient and guide our behaviour. Habitus manifests itself in our actions and appearance, and in the way we speak, move, stand and so forth. In Pierre Bourdieu’s definition: ‘The habitus, a product of history, produces individual and collective practices – more history – in accordance with the schemes generated by history. It ensures the active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to guarantee the ‘correctness’ of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms’ (Bourdieu 1990, p. 54)

  • Bourdieu, P. 1990, The Logic of Practice, Stanford University Press, Stanford.

Historical Geography

The study of the geographies of the past and how the past shapes geographies of the present 

Landscape

Landscape at a basic level indicates a portion of land or water that can be seen by the eye. This definition reflects the historical developments of the idea of landscape in the Renaissance, in connection to ways of seeing and representing the environment. This basic understanding of landscape as something to look at is extended to include the imagination or sensory perception of the land, as ‘an image, construct of the mind, a feeling’ (Tuan 1979, p. 89). Landscape has been interpreted as a text to read, a palimpsest, as a way of seeing, as the materialization in space of social and economic relations, as cultural landscapes, as assemblages of nature and culture (Duncan and Duncan 2010).

  • Duncan, N. & Duncan, J. 2010, ‘Doing Landscape Interpretation’, in D. DeLyser, S. Herbert, S. Aitken, M. Crang & L. McDowell (eds), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Geography, SAGE Publications Ltd, Los Angeles London New Delhi Singapore Washington DC, pp. 225–47.
    Tuan, Y. 1977, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Live Fieldnoting

A live fieldnote is a blog post that is intended to provide an on-location and synchronous visual and textual coverage of an instance from the ethnographer’s fieldwork. The live fieldnote is created with an image sharing app on a mobile phone that is then shared to other social networking services. Images are accompanied by a description of the image and can also include a brief analysis of what the interaction means to the participants in the image and/or to the ethnographer. All live fieldnotes are timestamped, publicly accessible on the internet, and include location data.

Live fieldnotes demonstrates the combination of two activities that are central to ethnographic research:

  • the ethnographer’s participation in a social world and
  • the ethnographer’s written account of the world through her/his participation.

Live fieldnotes are typically comprised of a one to five sentences. The accumulation of many live fieldnotes works towards producing a “thick description” along with other long form fieldnotes. Live fieldnotes are not intended to replace the entire fieldnote writing process, rather it is just one of many ways notes can be jotted down for reflection at a later point in time. A live fieldnotes can consist of a location, timestamp, description of the interaction, explanation of the meaning of the interaction to the participants, and your interpretation of the interaction, and analysis of how it is related to your research.

Locale

Locale refers to the physical and social context within which social relations unfold. Locale refers, in one sense, to the landscape of a place – its physical manifestation as a unique assemblage of buildings, parks, roads and infrastructure. Locale also refers to place as a setting for particular practices that mark it out from other places (Cresswell 2014 p. 5).

  • Cresswell, T. 2014, ‘Place’, in R. Lee, N. Castree, R. Kitchin, V. Lawson, A. Paasi, C. Philo, S.M. Radcliffe, Sarah, Roberts & C.W.J. Withers (eds),The SAGE Handbook of Human Geography, SAGE, London Thousand Oaks New Delhi Singapore, pp. 3–21.

Location

The whereabouts of someone or something according to latitude and longitude or other spatial frameworks.

Master Narratives

See grand narratives

Memos

Notes to self on specific aspects of the research process. These may include self-reflective writing on how the research process is going, annotations on connections between ideas, notes on readings, and draft elaborations of insights.

More-than-representational, Non-representational Theory

Non-representational theory broadly indicates a shift in interest from an analysis based on meanings, representations and discourses to approaches that take into consideration materiality, affect, embodiment, practice and processes. This definition was developed first in geography, where it can be understood not as a disregard for concerns of representation, but as ‘a movement away from a focus on the interpretation of their meaning toward a consideration of what they “do” in the unfolding of the social world’ (Simpson 2018).

A related and more open term is more-than-representational, used to capture the ‘ecologies of place created by actions and processes’, rather than place as an inanimate and finite product (Lorimer 2005). Non-representational invests also research methods (see sensory ethnography) and ways of presenting research findings that borrow from creative practices. The underlining idea is to embrace techniques that bear witness to liveliness, embodied experiences, practices and processes, rather than reading places and landscapes as texts.

Participant observation, observant participation

Participant observation involves spending time being, living or working with people or communities in order to understand them. In other words, it is, as the name implies, a method based on participating and observing in which field-notes, sketches, photographs or video recordings are used as a method of data collection. The basis of this approach is to become, or stay, as close to the spatial phenomenon being studied as possible and it is thereby quite distinct from methodologies that emphasize distance and objectivity (Laurier 2010 p. 116). Observant participation is a redefinition of the method that aims to consider the researcher being in the field as an active participant who also engages in self-reflexive practice.

  • Laurier, E. 2010, ‘Participant Observation’, in N. Clifford, S. French & G. Valentine (eds), Key Methods in Geography, Sage, Los Angeles London New Delhi Singapore Washington DC

Palimpsest

A way to use historical, cultural, social and material characteristics and patterns overlain over different periods of time to understand a place or a landscape. For instance Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour considered as a palimpsest may be understood as Gadigal and Wangal, colonial, industrial and contemporary art layers.

Place

The concept of place has been the subject to multiple debates, reflecting humanities and social sciences’ increasing interest in space and place starting from the 1990s (also called ‘the spatial turn’). Because of these debates there are multiple definitions of place. In general place can be understood as having a physical location, social and cultural elements, and a temporal dimension.

Geographer Doreen Massey offers one way to understand place as emerging through relations among different elements, from the social and cultural to the natural (such as for instance the geological formation of a mountain, its historical developments, the role it plays in cultural artefacts such as novels, TV shows or paintings, the social life it engenders, such as walking activities, the role it plays in the economy of a region and so on). A constellation of these relations coming together at the same time and generating a specific ‘here and now’ constitutes place (Massey 2005). Masseys shows that places are not static entities, but they have a temporal dimension, i.e. they change with time. In this sense they are better understood as processes articulated in a given location than as the physical and historical location itself. What is more, places are not limited to specific areas or points on a map, instead they are produced by the encounter of multiple local and global trajectories, which Massey calls throwntogetherness. This view of place bans nostalgic beliefs and feelings that globalisation has erased the unique, unchangeable character of place and has instead produced homogenised spaces that are the same everywhere. Understanding place as a constellation of multiple local and global trajectories is important because it requires and promotes an ethos of openness to diversity, including to entanglements with other humans and non-humans (Whatmore 2002).

Another way to conceptualise place is to think of it as a space that has been made meaningful. According to political geographer John Agnew, place is always located (has specific coordinates on the earth surface): in this sense the word place and location are often interchangeable in everyday language. Place can also be understood as material settings for social relations, as a physical, visual and concrete structures, which Agnew defines locale. People have subjective and affective attachment to places, what it is referred to as sense of place (quoted in Cresswell 2004, pp. 4-8).

Historian Tim Cresswell invites us to think of place as ‘a way of seeing, knowing and understanding the world. When we look at the world as a world of places we see different things. We see attachments and connections between people and place. We see worlds of meaning and experience. Sometimes this way of seeing can seem to be an act of resistance against a rationalization of the world, a way of seeing that has more space than place. To think of an area of the world as a rich and complicated interplay of people and the environment – as a place – is to free us from thinking of it as facts and figures’ (2004 p. 11). In summary we can think of place with art and cultural critic Lucy Lippard as ‘latitudinal and longitudinal within the map of a person’s life. It is temporal and spatial, personal and political. A layered location replete with human histories and memories, place has width as well as depth. It is about connections, what surrounds it, what formed it, what happened there, what will happen there’ (Lippard 1997, p. 7).

  • Cresswell, T. 2004, Place: a Short Introduction, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA Oxford Carlton, Vic.
  • Lippard, L. 1997, The Lure of the Local: senses of place in a multicentered society, New Press, New York.
  • Massey, D. 2005, For Space, Sage, London.
  • Whatmore, S. 2002, Hybrid Geographies. Natures cultures spaces, SAGE Publications Ltd, London Thousand Oaks New Delhi.

Position, Positionality

Positionality is the notion that personal values, views, and location in time and space influence how one understands the world. In this context, gender, race, class, and other aspects of identities are indicators of social and spatial positions and are not fixed, given qualities. Positions act on the knowledge a person has about things, both material and abstract. Consequently, knowledge is the product of a specific position that reflects particular places and spaces’ (Warf 2018).

POV

Point of view

Thick Description

According to Geertz the specificity of ethnography lies in the production of thick descriptions: the rich and detailed account of layers of meanings inscribed in cultural and social worlds. These accounts make possible to understand and communicate what a gesture, sentence or any behaviour means in a given cultural and social context. Thick descriptions call for attention to minute and circumstantial details, and to densely texture writing which enables the ethnographer to draw general conclusion from detail.

  • Geertz, C. 1975, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, Basic Books, New York, pp. 3–30.

Thrown-togetherness

In Massey’s definition that way in which different elements, human, non-human, social, cultural and political come together to define a here and now. The coexistence of diverse elements in relation. See trajectory.

  • Massey, D. 2005, For Space, Sage, London.

Trajectory

Another Massey’s word: trajectories, or stories, indicate a process of change, moments of coalescing and colliding of movement, chains of events that stretch way out of the local.

  • Massey, D. 2005, For Space, Sage, London.

Vignette

A vignette ‘is like a photo with blurred boundaries or a description that shades off at the edges. In data presentation, vignettes are usually small, illustrative stories involving observation of activity and behaviour, which illuminate or trouble some important aspect of the area of investigation.’ (Grbich 2004)

  • Grbich, C. 2004, ‘Data Presentation and Re-presentation’, New Approaches in Social Research, SAGE Publications Ltd, London, pp. 94–107.

Vision and Visuality

Vision is intended as the physiological ability to see, the mechanisms of sight (although these change historically and culturally), while visuality refers to how vision is culturally, socially, historically and technologically constructed in different manners.

“Although vision suggests sight as a physical operation, and visuality sight as a social fact, the two are not opposed as nature and culture: vision is social and historical too, and visuality involves the body and the psyche. Yet neither are they identical: here, the difference between the terms signals a difference within the visual –between the mechanism of sight and its historical techniques, between the datum of vision and its discursive determination – a difference, many differences, among how we see, how we are able, allowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing or the unseen therein” (Foster 1988, p. ix).

  • Foster, H. 1998, Vision and Visuality, DIA Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Culture, The New Press, New York. 

Visual Culture

Visual culture involves the things that we see, the mental model we all have of how to see, and what we can do as a result. That is why we call it visual culture: a culture of the visual. A visual culture is not simply the total amount of what has been made to be seen, such as paintings or films. A visual culture is the relation between what is visible and the names that we give to what is seen. It also involves what is invisible or kept out of sight. In short, we don’t simply see what there is to see and call it a visual culture. Rather, we assemble a world- view that is consistent with what we know and have already experienced’ (Mirzoeff 2015 p. 11).

  • Mirzoeff, N. 2015, How to See the World, Pelican Books, London. 

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