Resources
General
Massey, D. 1991, ‘A Global Sense Of Place’, Marxism Today, no. June, pp. 24–9.
This article presents key concepts on place, arguing that places do not have single identities but are multiple; places are not frozen in time, they are processes and continuously generated; they do not have clear borders marking an inside and an outside; they are generated through the encounter of local and global trajectories.
Cresswell, T. 2004, Place: a Short Introduction, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA Oxford Carlton, Vic.
This is the go to book to start thinking about place. This text introduces students of human geography to the fundamental concept of place, marrying everyday uses of the term with the complex theoretical debates that have grown up around it. A short introduction to one of the most fundamental concepts in human geography Marries everyday uses of the term “place” with the more complex theoretical debates that have grown up around it Makes the debates intelligible to students, using familiar stories as a way into more abstract ideas Excerpts and discusses key papers on place by Doreen Massey and David Harvey Considers empirical examples of ways in which the concept of place has been used in research Teaching and learning aids include an annotated bibliography, lists of key readings and texts, a survey of web resources, suggested pedagogical resources and possible student projects.
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.
The primary purpose of this chapter is to sketch out an approach to place that takes us beyond an opposition between confining, bounded, ‘reactionary’ senses of place that focus on rootedness, attachment and singularity on the one hand and a distributed, open, ‘progressive’ sense of place that focuses on flows, connections and networks on the other. A secondary purpose is to provide an overview of the history of existing theories of, and approaches to, place. Too often we make claims to new theoretical approaches by either ignoring or disparaging older traditions. Here I want to insist on the productive continuities and overlaps between the new and old. In sum, the chapter provides a meso-theoretical interpretative framework for the analysis of place and places in contemporary life.
Massey, D. 2005, For Space, Sage, London.
In this book, Doreen Massey makes an impassioned argument for revitalising our imagination of space. She takes on some well-established assumptions from philosophy, and some familiar ways of characterising the 21st century world, and shows how they restrain our understanding of both the challenge and the potential of space. The way we think about space matters. It inflects our understandings of the world, our attitudes to others, our politics. It affects, for instance, the way we understand globalisation, the way we approach cities, the way we develop, and practice, a sense of place. If time is the dimension of change then space is the dimension of the social: the contemporaneous co-existence of others. That is its challenge, and one that has been persistently evaded. For Space pursues its argument through philosophical and theoretical engagement, and through telling personal and political reflection. Doreen Massey asks questions such as how best to characterise these so-called spatial times, how it is that implicit spatial assumptions inflect our politics, and how we might develop a responsibility for place beyond place. This book is ‘for space’ in that it argues for a reinvigoration of the spatiality of our implicit cosmologies. For Space is essential reading for anyone interested in space and the spatial turn in the social sciences and humanities. Serious, and sometimes irreverent, it is a compelling manifesto: for re-imagining spaces for these times and facing up to their challenge.
Delyser, D., Herbert, S., Aitken, S., Crang, M. & McDowell, L. (eds) 2010, The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Geography, Sage, London Thousand Oaks New Delhi Singapore.
Exploring the dynamic growth, change, and complexity of qualitative research in human geography, The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Geography brings together leading scholars in the field to examine its history, assess the current state of the art, and project future directions. Moving beyond textbook rehearsals of standard issues, the Handbook shows how empirical details of qualitative research can be linked to the broader social, theoretical, political, and policy concerns of qualitative geographers and the communities within which they work. The book is organized into three sections:
- Part I: Openings engages the history of qualitative geography, and details the ways that research, and the researcher’s place within it, are conceptualized within broader academic, political, and social currents.
- Part II: Encounters and Collaborations describes the different strategies of inquiry that qualitative geographers use, and the tools and techniques that address the challenges that arise in the research process.
- Part III: Making Sense explores the issues and processes of interpretation, and the ways researchers communicate their results.
Retrospective as well as prospective in its approach, this is geography’s first peer-to-peer engagement with qualitative research detailing how to conceive, carry out and communicate qualitative research in the twenty-first century. Suitable for postgraduate students, academics, and practitioners alike, this is the methods resource for researchers in human geography
Lee, R., Castree, N., Kitchin, R., Lawson, V., Paasi, A., Philo, C., Radcliffe, Sarah, Roberts, S.M. & Withers, C.W.J. (eds) 2014, The SAGE Handbook of Human Geography, SAGE, London Thousand Oaks New Delhi Singapore.
This is a key reference text on place and space, from a human geography perspective (human and cultural geography are themselves transdisciplinary)
Each section considers how human geography shapes the world, interrogates it, and intervenes in it. It includes a major retrospective and prospective introductory essay, with three substantive sections on: Imagining Human Geographies, Practising Human Geographies, Living Human Geographies.
The Handbook also has an innovative multimedia component of conversations about key issues in human geography – as well as an overview of human geography from the Editors: Doreen Massey and David Livingstone on geography and geographical thought, http://bcove.me/siljk2yb
Sarah Whatmore and Susan Owens on nature and society, http://bcove.me/6cwe80n6
Katherine Gibson and Susan Smith on geographical practice, http://bcove.me/5rpdb6fy
Editors on definitions of human geographies, http://bcove.me/2po84qex
Ethnographies
Grbich, C. 2004, ‘Data Presentation and Re-presentation’, New Approaches in Social Research, SAGE Publications Ltd, London, pp. 94–107.
This chapter defines and illustrates different rhetorical approaches, conventions and styles to write research findings.
Methods@Manchester, Ethnographic Methods https://www.methods.manchester.ac.uk/themes/ethnographic-methods/ethnography/
This is an excellent and accessible resource that covers a variety of definitions of ethnography, and ethnographic methods in video and written form. It also offers well maintained links to other academic sites dedicated to ethnography.
Social Science Bites 2013, ‘Doreen Massey on Space’, Social Sciences Bites Sage, viewed 16 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Quj4tjbTPxw.
Doreen Massey wants us to rethink our assumptions about space. In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast she explains why. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE. Transcripts of all episodes are available from www.socialsciencebites.com.
Collins, R. 2015, ‘Return of the Ethnographers’, This Anthro Life, viewed 21 June 2018, https://www.thisanthrolife.com/return-of-the-ethnographers/.
Podcast by PhD candidates and Early Career Researchers on fieldwork. ‘Back from fieldwork (albeit briefly) as we talk about our experiences in ethnography, archaeology, and excessive note taking! In this exciting episode Amy, Adam, Aneil, and Ryan all share what fieldwork is for them, fun experiences, and the challenges of traveling to new social worlds. This is anthropology in action’.
Gamwell, A. & Collins, R. 2017, ‘Coming to Our Senses’, This Anthro Life, viewed 21 June 2018, https://www.thisanthrolife.com/coming-to-our-senses stimuli
Cook, I. 2018, ‘Follow the Things’, Follow the Things, viewed 19 June 2018, http://www.followthethings.com/
This is Ian Cook website on the supply chain of ‘things’, from ballet shoes to papaya. Few of us know. They seem to be untouched by human hands. But news stories, documentary films and artworks showing the hidden ingredients in our coffee, t-shirts, phones and countless other commodities keep appearing. They often ‘expose’ unpleasant working conditions to encourage more ‘ethical’ consumer or corporate behaviour. followthethings.com is this work’s ‘online store’. Here you can find out who has followed what, why and how, the techniques they use to ‘grab’ you, the discussions they provoke, the difference they can make, and how to follow things yourself.
Helmreich, S. 2008, 21A.112 Seminar in Ethnography and Fieldwork, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare.
This advanced course in anthropology engages closely with discussions and debates about ethnographic research, ethics, and representation. Although it does not focus on place this subject, or some units and resources, will be of interest to those who want to explore ethnography in depth.
Histories
Massey, D., Chanan, M. & Salter, L. 2012, ‘Doreen Massey on London’, www.secretcity- thefilm.com, viewed 16 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhHeelvwEN0. Doreen Massey discusses globalisation and the historical trajectories that have made London what it is today.
Art21 2008, ‘Mark Dion: Methodology’, Art21 YouTube, viewed 8 June 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-Nzo0foijI.
Episode #042: Mark Dion at his Pennsylvania home and studio.
Mark Dion’s work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. Appropriating archaeological and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects, Dion creates artworks that question the distinctions between objective (rational) scientific methods and subjective (irrational) influences.
Archivefutures Research Network 2018, ‘Research framework | archivefutures’, Archivefutures, viewed 4 June 2018, https://archivefutures.com/about/research- framework/
This is the website of the Archivefutures research network, coordinated by Maryanne Dever (University of Technology Sydney, Australia) and Linda Morra (Bishop’s University, Canada). Excellent resources to think about archives, digital media and materiality.
‘We are building an international network to generate imaginative and transformative research exchange around the new questions that are shaping archives and archiving into the future, a future intimately connected to – and likely to be increasingly defined by – digital media. We are specifically concerned with exploring the status of the material in the era of digitization, thus productively joining emerging debates across the humanities regarding the character of materiality and matter to debates in the digital humanities concerning emergent modes of research.
The archivefutures research network is specifically configured to enhance exchange of knowledge across national domains and – most importantly – to promote partnerships across the professional boundaries that frequently separate scholars and archivists.
The questions we want to ask about the theoretical, methodological, epistemological and ontological shifts we are witnessing are not incidental: they are field-defining ones in that they promise to extend our understanding of what happens when our archived cultural heritage is brought together with the promise of the digital. In this respect, our questions are not a supplement to current scholarship and/or archival practice but are key to the production and transfer of new knowledges being generated in this moment of ‘rethinking the archive’.
East End Women’s Museum 2018, ‘The Women’s Hall: East End suffragettes — East End Women’s Museum’, East End Women’s Museum, viewed 4 June 2018, https://eastendwomensmuseum.org/the-womens-hall.
Website of the projects on suffragette’s histories of East London.
Kaldor Public Art Projects 2016, ‘Project 32 – Jonathan Jones’, Kaldor Art Projects, viewed 22 May 2018, http://kaldorartprojects.org.au/project-32-jonathan-jones.
For the 32nd Kaldor Public Art Project Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi artist Jonathan Jones presented barrangal dyara (skin and bones), a vast sculptural installation stretching across 20,000 square-metres of the Royal Botanic Garden. The Project recalled the 19th century Garden Palace building where it originally stood in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden, before it devastatingly burnt to the ground along with countless Aboriginal objects collected along the colonial frontier.
The project was Jones’ response to the immense loss felt throughout Australia due to the destruction of these culturally significant items. It represented an effort to commence a healing process and a celebration of the survival of the world’s oldest living culture despite this traumatic event. Thousands of bleached white shields echoed masses of rubble—the only remnants of the building after the fire—and raised the layered history and bones of the Garden Palace across the site. A native kangaroo grassland formed the heart of the installation, and was enlivened by presentations of Indigenous language, performances, talks, special events and workshops each day.
The project connects directly with many Aboriginal communities throughout the south-east of Australia, who collaborated to reframe local history. The artwork took its name, barrangal dyara, meaning ‘skin and bones,’ from the local Sydney Gadigal language, on whose country the project took place with approval from the community. Members of Aboriginal communities are respectfully advised that content about this exhibition refers to the loss of cultural objects from across the south-east of Australia.
Tinkler, P. & Penny 2014, Using Photographs in Social and Historical Research, SAGE Publications Ltd, 1 Oliver’s Yard, 55 City Road, London EC1Y 1SP United Kingdom viewed 18 May 2018, http://methods.sagepub.com/book/using-photographs-in-social-and- historical-research.
Passerini, L. 2014, ‘Luisa Passerini: Living Archives | Continuity and Innovation in the Art of Memory – YouTube’, Columbia YouTube, viewed 16 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuZkHC7TcKQ.
Luisa Passerini reflects on ‘living archives’. The term “living archives” was at the centre of a debate on the purpose and method of oral history in the 1970s, concerning particularly the nature of the interview and the relationship between the past and the present. The first part of the talk will deal with the implications of this debate and with the changes in the meaning of “living archives” that took place in the following decades until the present, especially in the light of the history of the senses.
A second part of the talk will focus on the complementary nature of oral and visual memory, including notes from the fieldwork of the ongoing research project directed by the speaker, “Bodies Across Borders. Oral and Visual Memory in Europe and Beyond” (sponsored by the European Research Council). Examples of forms of visual memory will be shown and commented, within the framework of the concept of intersubjectivity understood as inter corporeality.
McCants, A. 2014, ‘Theories and Methods in the Study of History | History | MIT OpenCourseWare’, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare, viewed 4 July 2018, https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/history/21h-991-theories-and-methods-in-the-study- of-history-fall-2014/.
Although it does not focus on place this subject, or some units and resources, will be of interest to those interested in historical methods. This subject examines some of the many ways that contemporary historians interpret the past, as well as the multiple types of sources on which they rely for evidence. It is by no means an exhaustive survey, but the topics and readings have been chosen to give a sense of the diversity of work that is encompassed in the discipline of history.
Images
https://study.sagepub.com/rose4e
This is Gillian Rose’ s companion website to Rose, G. 2016, Visual Methodologies. An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, 4th ed., Sage, Los Angeles London New Delhi Singapore Washington DC. It provides excellent resources and practical advice to support those who want to use visual methodologies. Together with the book it should be the first port of call for visual methodologies.
Whiston Spirn, A. 2017, ‘Sensing Place – Home’, Sensing Place: Photography as Inquiry, viewed 4 July 2018, http://web.mit.edu/landphoto/.
This the webpage and archive of the course ‘Sensing Place’ by photographer and landscape architect Anne Whiston Spirn at MIT. This course explores photography as a disciplined way of seeing, as a medium of inquiry and of expressing ideas. Readings, observations, and photographs form the basis of discussions on landscape, light, significant detail, place, poetics, narrative, and how photography can inform research, design, and planning, among other issues. The class is highly recommended for students who want to employ visual methods in their thesis. It includes links to students’ projects (for inspiration).
https://www.lynda.com/SharedPlaylist/5f27832bd9ac412ab9f47c071054d4af?org=uts.edu.au
This is a playlist I made in Lynda.com on the more technical aspects of photography. In particular I suggest these three courses:
Long, B. 2015, ‘Introduction to Photography’, Lynda.com, viewed 29 May 2018, https://www.lynda.com/Photography-Night-Low-Light-tutorials/Introduction- Photography/376379- 2.html?srchtrk=index%3A2%0Alinktypeid%3A2%0Aq%3Acreative+methods%0Apage%3A 1%0As%3Arelevance%0Asa%3Atrue%0Aproducttypeid%3A2.
Fobes, N. 2011, ‘The Elements of Effective Photographs’, Lynda.com, viewed 29 May 2018, https://www.lynda.com/Photography-Lighting-tutorials/The-Elements-of-Effective- Photographs/76333- 2.html?srchtrk=index%3A3%0Alinktypeid%3A2%0Aq%3Acreative+methods%0Apage%3A 1%0As%3Arelevance%0Asa%3Atrue%0Aproducttypeid%3A2.
Long, B. 2017, ‘Photography: Advanced Composition’, Lynda.com, viewed 29 May 2018, https://www.lynda.com/Photography-tutorials/Photography-Advanced- Composition/630617- 2.html?srchtrk=index%3A1%0Alinktypeid%3A2%0Aq%3Acreative+methods%0Apage%3A 1%0As%3Arelevance%0Asa%3Atrue%0Aproducttypeid%3A2.
Wang, T. 2012, ‘Writing Live Fieldnotes: Towards a More Open Ethnography’, Ethnography Matters, viewed http://ethnographymatters.net/blog/2012/08/02/writing-live-fieldnotes- towards-a-more-open-ethnography/.
Very useful article on using Instagram as a research tool and platform.
Rose, G. 2017, ‘Gillian Rose Discusses Visual Methods’, SAGE Research Methods, viewed 8 June 2018, http://methods.sagepub.com.ezproxy.lib.uts.edu.au/video/gillian-rose-discusses- visual-methods.
Professor Gillian Rose discusses different types of visual research and how visual research is changing as technology evolves. She questions the requirement for anonymity in research ethics, and she challenges students who want to use visual methods to understand what purpose the methods would serve for their project.
Brindle, P. 2009, ‘SAGE Methodspace Sarah Pink’, YouTube Sage Methodscape, viewed 9 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcO2JlsyZvY.
Sarah Pink talks to Patrick Brindle, Research Methods Publisher at SAGE Publications, about what advice she would give to new researchers, and about she views developments in the field of research methods. Pink focuses in particular on visual ethnography. The interview was filmed at the Visual Methods Conference in Leeds, September 2009
Brindle, P. 2009, ‘SAGE Methodspace Marcus Banks’, YouTube Sage Methodscape, viewed 9 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COfhpqj83tE.
Marcus Banks talks to Patrick Brindle, Research Methods Publisher at SAGE Publications, about what advice he would give to new researchers, and about how he views developments in the field of visual research methods. He focuses in particular on what can be enabled by the visual. The interview was filmed at the Visual Methods Conference in Leeds, September 2009
Rose, G. 2014, ‘On the relation between ‘visual research methods’ and contemporary visual culture’, Sociological Review, vol. 62, no. 1.
One of the most striking developments across the social sciences in the past decade has been the growth of research methods using visual materials. It is often suggested that this growth is somehow related to the increasing importance of visual images in contemporary social and cultural practice. However, the form of the relationship between ‘visual research methods’ and ‘contemporary visual culture’ has not yet been interrogated.
This paper conducts such an interrogation, exploring the relation between ‘visual research methods’ – as they are constituted in quite particular ways by a growing number of handbooks, reviews, conference and journals – and contemporary visual culture – as characterised by discussions of ‘convergence culture’. The paper adopts a performative approach to ‘visual research methods’. It suggests that when they are used, ‘visual research methods’ create neither a ‘social’ articulated through culturally- mediated images, nor a ‘research participant’ competency in using such images.
Instead, the paper argues that the intersection of visual culture and ‘visual research methods’ should be located in their shared way of using images, since in both, images tend to be deployed much more as communicational tools than as representational texts. The paper concludes by placing this argument in the context of recent discussions about the production of sociological knowledge in the wider social field.