Practising Human Geography

Paul Cloke, Ian Cook, Philip Crang, Mark Goodwin, Joe Painter, Chris Philo

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780761973003, 9780761973256
• eBook ISBN: 9781446224625
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

?Filling an enormous gap in the geographic literature, here is a terrific book that shows us how to think about and practice human geographic research? - Professor Jennifer Wolch, University of Southern California

`Practising Human Geography lucidly, comprehensively, and sometimes passionately shows why methodology matters, and why it is often so hard. To choose a method is to choose the kind of geographical values one wants to uphold. You need to get it right.These authors do? - Trevor Barnes, University of British Columbia

`Practising Human Geography is a godsend for students. Written in an accessible and engaging style, the book demystifies the study of geographical methodology, offering a wealth of practical advice from the authors? own research experience. This is not a manual of approved geographical techniques. It is a reflexive, critical and highly personal account, combining historical depth with up-to-the-minute examples of research in practice. Practising Human Geography is a comprehensive and theoretically informed introduction to the practices of fieldwork, data collection, interpretation and writing, enabling students to make sense of their own data and to develop a critical perspective on the existing literature. The book makes complicated ideas approachable through the effective use of case studies and a firm grasp of contemporary debates? - Peter Jackson, Professor of Human Geography, University of Sheffield

Practising Human Geography is a critical introduction to key issues in the practice of human geography, informed by the question ?how do geographers do research?? In examining those methods and practices that are essential to doing geography, the text presents a theoretically-informed discussion of the construction and interpretation of geographical data - including: the use of core research methodologies; using official and non-official sources; and the interpretative role of the researcher.

Framed by an overview of how ideas of practising human geography have changed, the twelve chapters offer a comprehensive and integrated overview of research methodologies. The text is illustrated throughout with text boxes, case studies, and definitions of key terms. Practising Human Geography will introduce geographers - from undergraduate to faculty - to the core issues that inform research design and practice.

1	The Changing Practices of Human Geography: An Introduction

Practising human geography?

Let us begin by imagining two different human geographers, one we will call Carl and the other Linda. Both these are human geographers who believe that at least part of what human geography entails is the actual ‘practising’ of human geography: the practical ‘doing’ of it in the sense of leaving the office, the library and the lecture hall for the far less cosy ‘real world’ beyond and, in seeking to encounter this world in all its complexity, to find out new things about the many peoples and places found there, to make sense of what may be going on in the lives of these peoples and places and, subsequently, to develop ways of representing their findings back to other audiences who may not have enjoyed the same first-hand experience. Both of them are enthralled, albeit sometimes also a little daunted, by everything that is involved in this practical activity. Both of them are convinced there is an important purpose in such activity, both because it enriches their own accounts and because it can produce new ‘knowledge’ which will be eye-opening, thought-provoking and perhaps useful to other people and agencies (whether these be other academics, students, policy-makers or the wider public). For both of them, too, this practical activity is something they usually find enjoyable, fun even, and both of them would wish to communicate this importance and enjoyment of practising human geography to others. Yet Carl and Linda go about things in rather different ways, and it is instructive at the outset of our book to consider something of these differences.

For Carl, the approach is one which does very much involve packing his bags, leaving his home, locking the office door and heading out into the ‘wilds’ of regions probably at some distance from where he normally lives and works. In so doing he tries, for the most part, to forget about all the aspects of his life and work tied up with the home and the office: to forget about his social and institutional status as a respected member of the community and senior academic, to forget about his relationships with family, friends and colleagues, to forget about the books, reports and newspapers which he has been reading, and to forget about the concerns, troubles, opinions, politics, beliefs and the like which usually nag at him on a day-to-day basis. In addition, he is determined to leave with an open mind, with as few expectations as possible, and even with no specified questions to ask other than some highly generalized notions about what ought to interest geographers on their travels. Instead, his ambition is to become immersed in a whole new collection of peoples and places, and to spend time simply wandering around, gazing upon and participating in the scenes of unfamiliar environments and landscapes. He might occasionally be a little more proactive in chatting to people, perhaps farmers in the fields as he passes, and sometimes he might even count and measure things (counting up the numbers of houses in a settlement or fields of terraced cultivation, measuring the lengths of streets or the dimensions of fields). From this engagement, as Carl might himself say, the regions visited begin to ‘get into his bones’: he starts to develop a sense of what the peoples and places concerned ‘are all about’, a feel which is very much intuitive about how everything here ‘fits together’ (notably about how the aspects of the natural world shape the rhythms of its cultural counterpart or overlay), and an understanding of how the local environments work and of why the local landscapes end up looking like they do. The impression is almost of a ‘magical’ translation whereby, for Carl, meaningful geographical knowledge about these regions is conjured from simply being in the places concerned, formulated by him as the receptive human geographer from activities which are often no more active than a stroll, the drawing of a sketch, the taking of a photograph and the pencilling of a few notes. And the magical translation then continues, perhaps on return to his office, when Carl begins to convert his thoughts into written texts for the edification and education of others, and through which his particular feel for the given peoples and places is laid out either quite factually or more evocatively. Taken as whole, this is Carl’s practising of human geography.

For Linda, the approach is arguably rather more complicated. She is much less certain about being able to manage a clean break from her everyday world as anchored in her home, her office and her own social roles and responsibilities, nor from her prior academic reading, and nor from the accumulated baggage of assumptions, motivations, commitments and formalized intellectual ideas which swirl around in her head. Moreover, her research practice, her fieldwork, may not take her physically all that far away from the home or her office: she might end up researching peoples and places that are almost literally just next door, or at least located in the estates, shopping centres, business premises and so on, in a nearby city. The separation of everyday life from the field, the regions under study, which Carl can achieve, is not possible for Linda: indeed, it is also a separation about which she might be critical. And, whereas Carl aims to go into the field as a kind of ‘blank sheet’, Linda’s approach depends on having a much more defined research agenda in advance, not one that entirely prefigures her findings but one that will incorporate definite research questions based around a number of key issues (perhaps connected to prior theoretical reading). Like Carl, though, she does wish to become deeply involved with particular peoples and particular places (which might be very specific sites such as ‘the City’, London’s financial centre and its component buildings, rather than the much larger regions visited by Carl). She does want to get to know the goings-on in these micro-worlds, to become acquainted with many of the individuals found in these worlds and to try as hard as possible to tease out the actions, experiences and self-understandings of these individuals in the course of her research. The implication is that what she does is very much ‘hard graft’ research, since she has to be extremely proactive in deploying specific research tools – perhaps questionnaires, but more likely a mixture of documentary work, interviewing and participant observation (all of which will be covered in our book) – so as to generate a wealth of data which will enable her to arrive at specific interpretations pertaining to the issues (or, to put in another way, at clear answers to her initial research questions). There is perhaps less the magical quality of Carl’s approach, therefore, in that the labour allowing Linda to complete her research is much more evident and probably rather more bothersome, wearisome and even upsetting. The labour also continues to be apparent at the writing-up stage in that Linda reckons it vital to include sections explicitly on the methodology of the research, including notes on its pitfalls as well as its advantages, alongside debating at various points the extent to which someone like her – given just who she is, her social being and academic status – can ever genuinely find out about, let alone arrive at legitimate conclusions regarding, the issues, peoples and places under study. Taken as a whole, this is Linda’s practising of human geography: it differs enormously from Carl’s.

You should notice that several terms in the last paragraph are italicized, and Boxes 1.1–1.4 define and expand upon the meanings of these terms. They are crucial to the book, and you should ensure that you understand them before proceeding. They are also crucial to our introduction, which will now continue by making Carl and Linda more real. We have talked about them so far as fictional characters through which we could illustrate different approaches to the practising of human geography, but we should also admit to having in mind two real human geographers, one past and one living, who are Carl Sauer and Linda McDowell. Carl Sauer (see Figure 1.1) was a geographer based for virtually all his career in the Berkeley Department in California, and his chief interests lay in the ‘cultural history’ of long-term inter-relationships between what he termed the ‘natural landscape’ and the ‘cultural landscape’, and in teasing out distinctive patternings of human culture as revealed in the mosaic of different material landscapes produced by different human activities (agricultural practices, settlement planning, religious propensities).¹ For the most part, Sauer disliked statements about both theory and methodology (although see Sauer, 1956), and he tended to regard the practising of human geography (and indeed of geography more generally) as something fairly obvious, coming ‘naturally’ to those who happened to be gifted in this respect. Linda McDowell (see Figure 1.2) is a geographer presently based at University College London, and her chief interests lie in the insights that feminist geography can bring to studies of ‘gender divisions of labour’ as these both influence the spatial structure of the city and enter into the day-to-day gendered routines of paid employment, in the latter connection paying specific attention to senior women employed in the London-based financial sector.² While McDowell has not written extensively about methodology, she has contributed significantly to the debates currently arising in this connection (see 1988; 1992a; 1999: ch. 9), and it is apparent that for her the practising of human geography is something necessitating considerable ‘blood, sweat and tears’.

Box 1.1: Research

This term describes the overall process of investigation which is undertaken on particular objects, issues, problems and so on. To talk of someone conducting research in human geography is to say he or she is ‘practising’ or ‘doing’ his or her discipline, but it also carries with it the more specific sense of a sustained ‘course of critical investigation’ (POD, 1969: 703) designed to answer specific research questions through the deployment of appropriate methods. The ambition is to generate findings which can be evaluated to provide conclusions, and usually for the whole exercise to be reported to interested audiences both verbally and in writing. It contains, too, the suggestion that the exercise will be conducted in a manner critical of its own objectives, achievements and limitations, although we will argue that, by and large, human geographers have been insufficiently self-critical in this respect. The term ‘research’ is now very widely used in the discipline (e.g. Eyles, 1988a), and its relative absence from earlier geographical writing suggests that geographers prior to c. the 1950s and 1960s were less attuned to the notion of producing geographical knowledge through premeditated and structured procedures.

Box 1.2: Field

This deceptively simple term – the field – normally refers to the particular location where research is undertaken, which could be a named region, settlement, neighbourhood or even a building, although it can also reference what is sometimes called the ‘expanded field’ (as accessed in a few studies) comprising many different locations spread across the world (see also Driver, 2000a; Powell, 2002). We would include here, too, the libraries and archives wherein some researchers consult documentary sources, which means that we are also prepared to speak of historical geographers researching ‘in the field’. In addition, we suggest that the field should be taken to include not only the material attributes of a location, its topography, buildings, transport links and the like, but also the people occupying and utilizing these locations (who will often be the research subjects of a project). As such, the human geographer’s field is not only a ‘physical assignation’, but it is also a thoroughly ‘social terrain’ (Nast, 1994: 56–7), and some feminist geographers (e.g. Katz, 1994) have extended this reasoning to insist that a clean break should not be seen between the sites of active research and the other sites within the researcher’s world (a claim elaborated at the close of this chapter). This being said, we do wish to retain some notion of the field as where research is practically undertaken, but we fully agree that fieldwork must now be regarded as much more than just a matter of logistics. Instead, fieldwork should be thought of as encompassing the whole range of human encounters occurring within the uneven social terrain of the field, in which case it is marked as much by social ‘work’ as by the practicalities of getting there, setting up and travelling around.

Box 1.3: Data

‘Data are the materials from which academic work is built. As such they are ubiquitous. From passenger counts on transport systems to the constructs used in the most abstract discussion, data always have a place’ (Lindsay, 1997: 21). Data (in the plural) hence comprise numberless ‘bits’ of information which can be distilled from the world around us and, in this book, we tend to think of data, or perhaps ‘raw data’, as this chaos of information which we come by in our research projects (whether from the physical locations before us, the words and pictures of documentary sources, the statements made in interviews and recorded in transcripts, the observations and anecdotes penned in field diaries, or whatever). As we will argue, a process of construction necessarily occurs as these data are extracted from the field through active research, ready for a further process of interpretation designed to ‘make sense’ of these data (to substitute their ‘rawness’ with a more finished quality). Various kinds of distinction are made between different types of data (see also Chapter 7), the most common of which is that between primary and secondary data. The former is usually taken as data generated by the researcher, while the latter is usually taken as data generated by another person or agency, but we restate this particular distinction in terms of self-constructed and preconstructed data (see also the Preface and below). For us, therefore, primary data should be taken to include everything which forms a ‘primary’ input from the field into a researcher’s project (i.e. anything which he or she has not him- or herself yet interpreted). These data can include highly developed claims made in a government report or well-thought-out opinions expressed by an interviewee, in effect interpretations provided by others, but they remain primary data for us because the researcher has not yet begun to interpret them. We do not really operate with a notion of secondary data, therefore, except in so far as we might reserve this term for the interpretations of primary data contained in the scholarly writings of other academics.

Box 1.4: Methodology

‘In the narrowest sense, [methodology is] the study or description of the methods or procedures used in some activity. The word is normally used in a wider sense to include a general investigation of the aims, concepts and principles of reasoning of some discipline’ (Sloman, 1988: 525). On the one hand, then, there are the specific methods which a discipline such as human geography deploys in both the construction and the interpretation phases of research (including such specific techniques as measuring, interviewing, statistical testing and coding). On the other hand, there is the methodology of a discipline such as human geography that entails the broader reflections and debates concerning the overall ‘principles of reasoning’ which specify both how questions are to be posed (linking into the concepts of the discipline) and answers are to be determined (pertaining to how specific methods can be mobilized to provide findings which can meaningfully relate back to prior concepts). For some writers (including geographers: e.g. Schaefer, 1953; Harvey, 1969) there is little distinction between methodological discussion and what we might term ‘philosophizing’ about the basic spirit and purpose of disciplinary endeavour, but we prefer to regard methodology in the sense just noted, and hence as a standing back from the details of specific methods in order to see how they might ‘fit together’ and do the job required of them. In this sense, our book is most definitely a treatise on methodology.

Our reasons for now fleshing out the human geographers who are ‘Carl’ Sauer and ‘Linda’ McDowell are various and, at one level, simply emerge from a wish to emphasize that human geography is always produced by individual, flesh-and-blood nameable people whom you can see and perhaps meet. They could be you! But at another level, the differences between ‘Carl’ Sauer and ‘Linda’ McDowell are highly relevant to the broader arguments which we are developing in this introductory chapter. Indeed, in what follows we take Sauer and McDowell as exemplars of two very different ways of practising human geography which ‘map’ on to, respectively, older and newer versions of human geographical endeavour that can be identified within the history of the discipline. We must be circumspect about such a mapping: a Sauer-esque approach is still very much with us today, partly in the continuing works of regional synthesis and description carried out by many who regard this as the highest expression of the ‘geographer’s art’ (Hart, 1982;Meinig, 1983; Lewis, 1985); while a McDowell-esque approach does have its historical antecedents in the use of certain clearly defined methods, such as questionnaires and interviews, long before the current eruption of interest in putting such methods at the heart of human geographical research (see below). Yet, we believe that there is still some truth in the proposed m...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Changing practices of human geography: an introduction
• PART I CONSTRUCTING GEOGRAPHICAL DATA
• PART II CONSTRUCTING GEOGRAPHICAL INTERPRETATIONS
• References
• Index