“Dear Diary” revisited: reflecting on collaborative journaling

The genesis of this article was a request from the Journal of Geography in Higher Education to provide a reflection piece about our article ‘Dear Diary: Early Career Geographers Collectively Reflect on their Qualitative Field Research Experiences’ (2011) that won the journal's biennial award for 2009–2011. This request has afforded us the opportunity to reconnect as a team and, through self-directed interviews, to reflect upon how writing ‘Dear Diary’ continues to influences our current perceptions of journaling in qualitative research. More specifically, we focus here on the relationships between journaling and our approach to research, team-based collaboration, and our current teaching and mentoring practices. We all continue to keep fieldwork journals and perceive reflexive journaling as a crucial tool for qualitative methods and other collaborative ventures.     

Public Significance and Imagined Archaeologists: Authoring Pasts in Context

This paper explores how archaeological authorship is an articulation of the imagined social roles archaeologists play with the actual contexts of our practice. The discovery of popular public discourses on archaeology should not be seen as impediments to pure archaeologies, but as routes to the significance archaeology seeks to attain. A parallel concern with the determining influence of public concerns in ethnography is reviewed to develop a method for an archaeology that is truly publicly formed. An example of a public archaeology program developed in dialogue with existing historical debates in Annapolis, Maryland illustrates.     

Unfolding various academic mobility experiences of Southeast Asian women

This article draws on data from a qualitative research study undertaken with the main aim of investigating the issue of the gender dimension of the academic mobility of Southeast Asian women. Our research describes Southeast Asian women’s experiences of mobility, narrating why they choose to be mobile, how the experience of going abroad was responded to and/or rejected by their family, how they experienced life in a different country, and what evaluations they make about these experiences in personal, familial, and professional terms. The article stresses the need to improve the understanding of the factors that are still determining the chances of women to be mobile and obtain fruitful gains from these experiences. For this to be attained, the article follows through an intersectional approach to mobility, considering it is of much use as it allows to comprehend that the disadvantages associated with gender are cumulative, multi-layered, resulting from effects of several variables, including of the emotional, social, economic, and political contexts.     

Transboundary river governance and climate vulnerability: Community perspectives in Nepal’s Koshi river basin

Frequent floods in the Koshi River have left the Nepalese vulnerable to erosion and recurring inundation—especially those living on the floodplains. The situation is worsening because water flow in the river is highly uncertain, affected by rainfall in the mountains and by climate change, and influenced by the Koshi barrage, which is governed by the Koshi River Agreement, a bilateral river agreement with India. This study addresses how Koshi River governance contributes to the vulnerability of riverine communities in Nepal by drawing upon ideas about vulnerability and vulnerability mapping. A household survey and interviews were conducted in 2015 for a comparative study of people living on two river islands located upstream and downstream of the barrage. Findings remain relevant because of persistent governance challenges and growing climate change effects, escalating islanders’ vulnerability to recurrent floods. The islanders’ vulnerability was produced locally and also shaped by historical, social, economic, political, geographical, and ecological processes occurring at multiple scales. That insight highlights the need to study the broader political economy of hazard production to understand vulnerability in the context of governance.     

Three geographers in an archive: positions, predilections and passing comment on transient lives

Despite the existence of research conducted by geographers eschewing or professing religious faith, the influence of researchers and their methods have yet to receive critical attention within the study of religion. The experience of three geographers working on a three-year research project suggests that it is vital to reflect upon the inter-subjective relationships and methodologies used to reconstruct the religious past. How do different subject positions influence our selections from historical records? We also consider whether the spatialities of putatively 'religious' archives, whether formally or informally constituted, make a difference to the construction of historiographical knowledge. In attempting to answer these questions, the paper argues that developing an awareness of different types of positionality, vis-à-vis religious faith and practice, combined with reflexivity, vis-à-vis methodology, can enrich the interpretative reconstruction of the religious past.     

The transformative potential of migration: Polish migrants’ everyday life experiences in Belfast,Northern Ireland

In this article, we analyse the processes of migration from the perspective of agency-structure debate. In particular, we focus on the reflexive and emotional aspects of geographical movement and the complex relations between the settlement context, Belfast, Northern Ireland, and migrating people, with their biographies, gender positioning, resources and agency. The movement across space is biographically significant, as it is often meant to resolve economic, family or personal difficulties. However, the geographical movement in itself is not necessarily empowering. We bring the notion of migration as potentially transformative but only when it is accompanied by structural enablements and agential powers of reflexivity. The reflection on one’s life course and the relations between self and the changing context of action shapes the migration experiences profoundly, which may further lead to shifts in gender positioning. The dynamics of shaping and being shaped is constantly present between migrants and the new context: the place influences everyday practices and, at the same time, the place is influenced by everyday actions and their reflexive elaboration. This article sheds light on these reflexive processes through the lens of gender.     

What is in a name? How caste names affect the production of situated knowledge

Patel, Desai, Kothari … to those literate in the workings of caste these names describe a network and its power in relation to other networks, they infer the rules of engagement within and between network members, and they ascribe a geographical terrain to home. In research, rules of behaviour and assumptions of place that are coded into names can affect access to respondents, their disclosure of data and subsequent claims to validity. This article explores the coded expectations of knowledge embedded in a name as seen by someone (me) fairly illiterate in the workings of caste by utilising the principle of Bourdieu’s doxa – a ‘pre-reflexive intuitive knowledge’ – to untangle and explore the effect of names on the production of partial and situated knowledge. Drawing on fieldwork in Gujarat, India, I analyse reflexive accounts through the lenses of feminist geographers and critical race scholars to illustrate the effects of being unknowingly and unwillingly placed into a social hierarchy of power in the field, introduce the idea of ‘us-ing’ (an opposite of othering) to describe researcher-respondent relations, and explore how readers might interpret the presence or absence of data and claims to validity. These accounts make visible the effects of positionality on knowledge production in ways that speak to feminist-postcolonial research, and specifically to feminist researchers of colour conducting research away from ‘home’.     

Reflections on the ESRC internship scheme for postgraduates

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in the UK is one of the main sources of funding for postgraduate study in human geography. For some years now, the ESRC has offered funded students the opportunity to apply to undertake a short internship in a government department or with a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). This paper provides a collective reflection from the perspective of four former postgraduates who completed different ESRC supported internships in the UK. We discuss the enhancement of writing skills for diverse audiences, the advancement of knowledge in diverse subject areas, and the opening up of employment opportunities as key benefits of participating in the ESRC internship scheme.     

Good sitting,looking and listening: the regulation of young children's emotions in the classroom

Increasing attention has been given in schools in recent years to emotions as part of children's development and as core to their learning. Yet limited attention has been paid to emotions in childhood research. Based on findings from an ethnographic study within a Scottish school with children aged 6–7 years, this article explores the construction and negotiation of emotions as a part of children's classroom experience. Children's bodies and emotions are highly controlled in the classroom but despite this control, children actively construct emotions in their everyday lives.     

THE REFLEXIVE TEST OF HAYDEN WHITE'S METAHISTORY

This paper assesses Hayden White's Metahistory through the test of reflexivity; that is, it asks whether the book's “general theory of the structure of that mode of thought which is called ‘historical”’ applies, as it should, to its own history of nineteenth‐century “historical consciousness.” Most components of the theoretical apparatus—the various concepts invoked in the “theory of the historical work” and in the “theory of tropes”—fail the reflexivity test; further, it emerges that those same components are also seriously flawed on other grounds. The sole and partial exception is the concept of emplotment, which passes the reflexivity test, albeit with qualifications, but more particularly has the virtue of illuminating the traditional history of history against which Metahistory's own story was pitched; and this result provides an ironic and unexpected vindication of Metahistory's underlying vision. Thus the book's fundamental insight—that the form of historical writing is epistemologically consequential—can be retained, even though its two theories should now be set aside.