Creative Methods for Human Geographers

Nadia von Benzon, Mark Holton, Catherine Wilkinson, Samantha Wilkinson, Nadia von Benzon, Mark Holton, Catherine Wilkinson, Samantha Wilkinson, SAGE Publications Ltd

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781526496973, 9781526496980
• eBook ISBN: 9781529737257
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Introducing a broad range of innovative and creative qualitative methods, this accessible book shows you how to use them in research project while providing straightforward advice on how to approach every step of the process, from planning and organisation to writing up and disseminating research. It offers:

• Demonstration of creative methods using both primary or secondary data.

• Practical guidance on overcoming common hurdles, such as getting ethical clearance and conducting a risk assessment.

• Encouragement to reflect critically on the processes involved in research.

The authors provide a complete toolkit for conducting research in geography, while ensuring the most cutting-edge methods are unintimidating to the reader.

Chapter 1 Introducing creative methods

Nadia von Benzon

Mark Holton

Catherine Wilkinson

Samantha Wilkinson

Who is this book for?

Whether you’ve chanced upon this book in a bookshop or library or been recommended it by teaching staff or your peers, your first thought may be whether this book is relevant to you. After all, who has time to wade through a textbook (and particularly a large one like this), if the content isn’t going to address your needs?

We intend this book to be a resource that supports undergraduate and postgraduate students embarking on qualitative human geography research. Whilst the contributing authors are (mostly) geographers, and the focus is, ostensibly, towards geography degree programmes, there may be much of interest and relevance to students in allied social science disciplines such as sociology, criminology, childhood studies, international relations, international development and regional studies. As a postgraduate, or even PhD researcher, you may find particular chapters providing useful overviews and signposting you to more critical, technical, or in-depth literature on the topics addressed. Whichever level or whatever your motivation for sourcing this book, we hope that engaging with it inspires you to consider how, when and why creative methods can be important devices for the contemporary academic researcher’s toolkit.

We therefore anticipate that, for most students, this book might be used in one of two ways. Either you may use it as recommended reading to support a methods-focused module, to broaden your knowledge about creative approaches to research generally. Or you may use it to learn more about a specific method, or an aspect of approaching creativity in research, which you are considering applying to your own research project. Either way, you’ll find this book informative and accessible. We have especially written it so that it is student-friendly, with features including real life reflections from ‘the field’, key suggested readings for each chapter and opportunities to ‘have a go’ at piloting the methods yourself. At the end of the book you’ll find a glossary containing the words that are emboldened in each chapter.

Whilst it is written explicitly for a student audience, it will be helpful for those teaching and supervising creative methods – particularly those new to creative methods and who are keen to include these approaches in methods modules, or to support students who want to use creative methods in their own research. As such, teaching staff might use the book as a resource for themselves, or set it as a text for students, whether as a class, or for individual students for whom the contents might be relevant. We recognise that teaching, supervising or advising on creative methods can be daunting, particularly if your own research has used more traditional methods. Creative methods, by dint of their name, can evoke fears surrounding experience, artistic ability or cultural knowledge that might make creative methods seem ‘lofty’ and inaccessible. Moreover, the scope of ‘creative’ methods is so broad that staff might have lots of experience in one raft of methods but feel rather overwhelmed with the idea of supervising or teaching creative approaches that fall outside their area of expertise. We aim to smooth out many of these fears and, in doing so, hope that engaging with this book may provide opportunities for guidance and support in how best to approach, interpret and utilise creative methods, with lots of advice from those who are working with these methods in their research right now.

So, what are creative methods?

You’ll be hard pushed to land on a single definition of ‘creativity’. As a word, creativity is synonymous with inventiveness, originality and novelty, suggesting a sense of innovation, or daring to explore new territory and take risks. Moreover, creativity can conjure up thoughts of imaginativeness, artistry and expressiveness. Yet, arguably, it is crucial to acknowledge that all research is inherently creative in some form, as it involves exploring and innovating to find the answer to a question or solution to a problem. Even the most explicitly ‘quantitative’ or positivist research (e.g. natural science, engineering, pure mathematics) involves the need to think ‘outside the box’ and approach problems from new angles, if knowledge is to advance and human understanding is to be developed. Yet, there has been a tendency within human geography research to comply with a fairly rigid set of ‘safe’ methodological approaches (Davies and Dwyer, 2007), such as interviews, surveys and focus groups. Whilst these tried and tested methods do not necessarily fit under the remit of ‘creative methods’, they have much merit, and may still be the most appropriate methods for some research projects or participants. Indeed, these methods can be adapted to be more creative. For example, interviews and focus groups may benefit from the use of embedded activities, such as drawing or engaging with props such as photographs to elicit discussion. We are keen to know what geographers who engage with unconventional methods might be able to tell us about the everyday discourses of the world around us, drawing on approaches and practices used by other social scientists and creatives in academia and beyond (Hawkins, 2015), and giving them geography’s unique flavour of space, place and scale.

An excellent starting point for beginning to embrace the messiness of qualitative data is John Law’s (2004) book After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. This book encourages researchers to reject singular approaches that purport to be truth-seeking, certain and unambiguous. As Law (2004) argues, if the world is a complex and messy place, surely our ways of investigating phenomena should not be neat and ordered. Indeed, many of the methods discussed in our volume have emerged through what has come to be known recently as the ‘creative turn’ in geography (Hawkins, 2019). This creative turn is rooted in the opening up of the discipline in the 1990s and 2000s to cultural and creative practices through the ‘cultural turn’ (see Horton and Kraftl, 2014). Dowling et al. (2017: 823, emphasis in original) argue that, for human geographers, the contemporary shift into more-than-representational and more-than-human ways of thinking ‘challenges researchers to do geography differently’ in relation to theory and practice. This emphasises the need to think creatively about how we might approach designing and conducting our research. Yet we also need to be critical of creativity as a driving force for contemporary society. Indeed, as Oli Mould (2018) argues in his excellent book Against Creativity, as a process, creativity in a postmodern sense is deeply rooted in neoliberal ideologies of power (think perhaps of the neo-capitalist connotations associated with Richard Florida’s ‘creative class’ conceptualisation). Creativity in this sense is more than simply about ‘ability’. Instead, ‘being’ creative can often require a unique blending of knowledge, agency and a ‘desire to create something that does not yet exist’ (Mould, 2018: 4) in order to function. Hence, we follow Domosh (2014), who situates the changing audiences of geographical knowledge as a key catalyst for this shift into creative thinking, moving beyond simply academic audiences to include politicians, policymakers, practitioners, communities and the participants that so generously give up their time to engage in our research.

From a methodological perspective, a common theme among researchers employing creative approaches is the opportunity to experiment with research methods in ways that help us to think differently about how best to tackle research questions (see Dowling et al., 2018 for a review of experimenting with qualitative methods and Part II of this volume, for lots of exciting examples), and to follow this through into the analysis of data and dissemination of research outputs (Hawkins, 2014, 2019; see von Benzon and O’Sullivan, this volume; Wilkinson et al., this volume). An example of how experimenting with methods can be fruitful is Phil Emmerson’s (2016) work on comedy, in which he enrolled on a stand-up comedy course and subsequently performed six times in front of a live audience as part of his research process. Creativity here worked as a vehicle for reflecting critically on the subjective positionalities held by the researcher during research encounters. Emmerson’s (2016) work is also helpful in understanding the complicated role of the researcher (see also Hayes, this volume; Philo et al., this volume). Beyond experimentation and innovation, creativity has the capacity to ‘make the familiar strange’ (Mannay, 2016: 27), situating creativity as an opportunity to think differently about the everyday and mundane aspects of our world. This might involve examining taken for granted visual images (Pyyry et al., this volume; Rose, 2002) or objects (Smith et al., this volume; Cook, 2004), everyday walking practices and/or social interactions (Ramsden, 2017; Rose and Samuels, this volume) to explore their meaning and intentions and how these might influence behaviour or identities.

For the purposes of this textbook, we position ‘creative’ research as involving the production of knowledge in ways that draw on arts practices, or technology, to enhance and move beyond the traditional qualitative social science methods outlined above. Our approach to achieving this is intentionally broad. As geographical research amongst professional academics and postgraduate students is increasingly embracing technological, playful, reflexive and empowering approaches to creating data alone or alongside participants, this textbook intends to support students in trying to incorporate these approaches, as appropriate, into their own research design.

Away with traditional methods then?

Embracing creative methods does not (and we hope our italics are sufficiently emphatic here), mean turning your back on the more traditional qualitative methods that have served our discipline well for about the last 70 years. In fact, most of the creative methods you will read about in this book are inextricably linked to, even grounded in, traditional approaches (DeLyser and Sui, 2014) which have, in turn, been creative, radical and experimental at some point in time. Methods such as interviewing and ethnography have a long legacy in geographical and social science research. It is important then to know and understand traditional methods, their historical and philosophical foundations, and how they have transformed over time (see Clifford et al., 2016 for detailed knowledge of the core geographical methods and Philo et al., this volum...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Author biographies
• Chapter 1 Introducing creative methods
• Part I Preparing to Research
• Chapter 2 Centring reflexivity, positionality and autoethnographic practices in creative research
• Chapter 3 Researching ‘our’ people and researching ‘other’ people
• Chapter 4 Ethical considerations in creative research: design, delivery and dissemination
• Chapter 5 The practicalities of researching creatively
• Part II Creative and Innovative Methods: Section I Using Images and Visualisation Techniques
• Chapter 6 Photography and photo elicitation as visual methods
• Chapter 7 Moodboards and LEGO: principles and practice in social research
• Chapter 8 Creative approaches to mapping
• Chapter 9 Drawing and graffiti-based approaches
• Section II Multisensory and Embodied Approaches
• Chapter 10 Research with sound: an audio guide
• Chapter 11 Mobile interviews by land, air and sea
• Chapter 12 Psychogeography and urban exploration
• Chapter 13 Crafting
• Chapter 14 Creative performance and practice
• Section III Oral and Written Methods
• Chapter 15 Working with literary texts
• Chapter 16 Poetic methods
• Chapter 17 Researching music: Listening and Composing
• Chapter 18 Working creatively with biographies and life histories
• Section IV Using Technology
• Chapter 19 Mobile technology, spatial and locative media
• Chapter 20 Mobile phones, text messaging and social media
• Chapter 21 Creating and repurposing apps
• Chapter 22 Gaming and virtual reality in geographical research
• Chapter 23 Video ethnography
• Section V Using and Producing Secondary Data
• Chapter 24 Creative research in and with archives
• Chapter 25 Selecting and analysing publicly generated online content
• Chapter 26 Curation as method
• Part III Handling Creative Data
• Chapter 27 Analysing ‘messy’ data
• Chapter 28 Showcasing creative methods in your dissertation research
• Chapter 29 Creative dissemination
• Glossary
• Index