A Practical Guide to Focus-Group Research

This article guides readers through the decisions and considerations involved in conducting focus-group research investigations into students' learning experiences. One previously published focus-group study is used as an illustrative example, along with other examples from the field of pedagogic research in geography higher education. An approach to deciding whether to use focus groups is suggested, which includes a consideration of when focus groups are preferred over one-to-one interviews. Guidelines for setting up and designing focus-group studies are outlined, ethical issues are highlighted, the purpose of a pilot study is reviewed, and common focus-group analysis and reporting styles are outlined.     

Border crossings: reflections on women's lives in twentieth-century Britain

There has been a growing focus on personal life, memoir and autobiography in feminist writing, and in the social sciences more generally, in recent years. Feminist geographers, among others, argue that family relationships and personal recollections should be part of studies of the construction of personal identity and a sense of place. I combine this argument with research into women's labour market participation to explore the changing significance of waged work in British women's lives over the last century, seen through the personal lens of three generations of women's experiences of migration across geographical and class boundaries.     

Exploring cultural geography field course using story maps

This article explores the use of Story Maps in a cultural geography field course that uses a place-based approach to understand the Delta Blue’s culture. In this study, Story Maps was used to capture and map student experiences as they engaged in a field study. Student experiences are captured by incorporating different data mediums such as narratives, personal reflections, digital photos, videos and website. Such a project has the potential to challenge students to work collectively and present a coherent story of their field experiences. This, in turn, can be used to improve the design and experience of a field course. The study demonstrates that the availability of simple web-based mapping platform such as Story maps provides students the ability to harness technology to create geocoded narratives, visual representations and spatial documentation to map their field course experience.     

Carto-fiction: narrativising maps through creative writing

Abstract

This study reacts to the recent call for a narrativisation of maps’ life in post-representational cartography, proposing ‘cartographic fictional writing’ as a means to move geography’s ‘creative (re)turn’ from a place-centred to a ‘carto-centred’ perspective, and as an epistemological tool to go on rethinking maps from post-representational perspectives. First, ‘carto-fiction’ is defined as a self-reflexive (autoethnographic), ethnofictional, creative carto-centred product/practice of research. Second, by including the entire short story entitled ‘Unfolding Berlin’ and an autoethnographic account on how it emerged, this study strives to both theorise and perform carto-fictional writing as an embodied and trans-subjective mapping experience. My goal is to propose ‘carto-fiction’ as a prolific tool to let emotional, subjective cartographies emerge and to narrativise maps as mapping practices. The article further strives to focus on the mapping power of creative writing, and carto-fictional writing and reading will be interpreted as mapping performances, in which subjects are bodily and emotionally engaged. The inclusion of original illustrations aims to involve readers in a visual experience and to further stimulate their spatial imagination: each reader is asked to reflect on his/her own mapping experiences to interpret the fictional story and, thus, the paper itself attempts to unfold unpredicted creative cartographic practices.     

From Siam to New York: Jacques May and the ‘foundation’ of medical geography

The history of medical geography is marked by a search for ancestors. The story usually begins in the writing of Hippocrates before re-emerging in the works of 18th and 19th century practitioners. In recent years, historical geographers have called for the destabilising of such assertions of lineage and descent. This paper offers a reconsideration of the history of medical geography through an exploration of the often hidden connections and intersections that have helped to frame the future trajectory of the sub-discipline. More specifically, we focus on the important contribution made by Dr Jacques Meyer May and offer a complex and multi-layered account that examines the close interweaving of his work as a colonial surgeon and specialist in tropical medicine and his role as a medical geographer in the United States.     

Teaching Introductory Geographic Information Systems through Problem-based Learning and Public Scholarship

This paper is concerned with the transition from school/college to higher education and discusses the outcomes of surveys of first-year undergraduates enrolled on geography degrees with respect to their experiences of field study as part of GCE Advanced level programmes prior to entry. Despite the core status given to fieldwork in the geographical training offered at Advanced level, the surveys show substantial variation among students in terms of field days, ranging from zero to 11 days. Consequently, each student cohort has a very uneven background of field study. Additionally, although students have developed generally positive attitudes to field study, a number of preferences and prejudices are identified. Many students have clearer recollections of data collection and recording techniques than of the character of the places in which investigations occurred. The resultant implications for field study within undergraduate programmes are discussed.     

Some rhizomatic recollections of a feminist geographer: working toward an affirmative politics

In celebration of the 21st anniversary of Gender, Place and Culture, I have taken the opportunity to argue for an affirmative politics for feminist geography. I offer a set of rhizomatic recollections of individualized moments of limit experiences that I have encountered in my own academic practice as a feminist geographer. Although perhaps not as transformative as one might expect, the limit experiences I write about are at the very least an attempt to garner attention to those experiences that transform us into academic subjects. As reflections, these recollections are an experiment in the practice of writing as part of an affirmative politics – a collective project valuing potential and possibilities. Through the writing, I assist this collective effort by many colleagues in orienting the wider projects of reflexivity, autoethnography, and autobiographical writing away from the undermining charge of being narcissistic habits borne out of the harsh criticism of not engaging the power that swirls around us toward the affirming claim of being part of a sustainable ethics whereby researchers and scholars can write from an embodied, embedded self through recounting their own intellectual and social practices.     

Ragnar Granit 100 years--memories and reflections

The Swedish-Finnish Nobel laureate Ragnar Granit, born 100 years ago, is commemorated in a brief article by one of his former PhD students and collaborators. After a short account of Granit's life and scientific career, special attention is given to Granit's role as a teacher in research training and his published thoughts on this matter, partly reflecting Granit's own experience as a "postdoc" in the laboratory of Sherrington (Oxford). The article includes personal recollections of how it was to work together with Granit in his laboratory.     

Eric Sevareid and the Emotional Registers of Liberal Masculinity

A major broadcaster on both radio and television, Eric Sevareid published a memoir of his youth and wartime experiences in 1946. Not So Wild a Dream devoted considerable attention to the complicated emotional registers of male identity. The tensions between physical and mental labour, the revelation or concealment of personal feelings and the relationship between individual autonomy and community responsibility suffused Sevareid's recollections of youth and early manhood. The situational quality of his masculinity and the confessional imperative of his life writing contributes to the complex hermeneutics and intersectionalities of gender and history.     

Marginalia of a revolution: naming popular ethnography through William W. Bunge's Fitzgerald

Having recently been writing about the geographies of survival, here in this brief essay I extrapolate a methodological and ethico-political sensibility from the scattered fragments of my personal interactions with foundational radical geographer William W. Bunge. This essay is intended to reconcile the marginalization that Bunge experienced, and experiences today, within geography, with the methodological approach he pioneered, even as he is often not recognized for doing so. An exploration through a pile of notes, electronic voice files, and faxes helped me to think through lived forms of intellectual marginalia via the life and methods of William Bunge and possibilities that exist for recovering his method of ‘popular ethnography’.     

Quotidian geographies: placing feminism

We discuss Susan Hanson's contributions to geography during the 1970s and 1980s through the lens of quotidian geographies, geographies of the everyday. Beginning from our own experiences as graduate students and new faculty members, we describe the social and theoretical context in which Susan published her initial studies of men's and women's activity patterns that examined gender differences in travel behavior and their origins in men's and women's different household responsibilities. We also review her success peopling the discipline of geography. We conclude that human geography has benefited from the incorporation of feminist theory and methods as Susan predicted.     

Hair in the Disraeli Papers: A Victorian Harvest

The Hughenden Collection of Disraeli Papers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford comprises over 50,000 items relating to the life and work of Benjamin Disraeli and his family. This article tracks hair through the Hughenden Collection in order to explore the collecting habits of Mary Anne Disraeli. It argues that reading Mary Anne Disraeli's story through hair – both hair as object, held in an archive and hair as represented in archival text – reveals aspects of that story occluded by reading only those archival texts with self-evident documentary value. It thus makes the case for a holistic reading of the Disraeli archive, and Victorian collections of personal papers more generally, by taking Mary Anne Disraeli as its central case study. In so doing it also illuminates her story, and points to the necessity of reading the stories of forgotten women through archival silences and absences. Section I reviews recent scholarship on hair in nineteenth-century Britain in order to contextualize Mary Anne Disraeli's case. Section II anatomizes the Hughenden hair collection in order to illuminate Mary Anne's history, her impulses as a collector, and the extent to which her activities complicate scholarly narratives about the sentimental commodification of Victorian hair. Section III gestures towards recent work on the archive and material culture to tease out the consequences of her example for our reading of the archive and our understanding of the texture of Victorian ‘thing culture’ more generally.     

International geography field courses: practices and challenges

Abstract

This paper introduces a special issue of the Journal of Geography in Higher Education on the practices and challenges associated with taking undergraduate geography students abroad on field courses. I argue that geography is positioned to benefit from both the internationalization of higher education and the demand by students for global experiences. The papers in this special issue focus on three aspects of international field courses: curriculum design and international partnerships, student engagement during short-duration field courses, and how encounters with place can be aided through reflection and play. I conclude with suggestions for future research on international field courses.     

Dennis Norman Jeans: Historical Geographer and Landscape Interpreter Extraordinaire

This paper relates to the ideas and work of Dennis Jeans, widely known for his research into historical geography and historical conservation, as well as for publications in cultural landscapes and humanist geography. The material presented here is principally drawn from an interview with the author (in Tasmania) on 10 November 1998. Dr Jeans also provided some subsequent material. The author has known Jeans for over 32 years, her reflections stemming from having studied and worked with him, as well as from having maintained a long personal correspondence, especially over the last 14 years.     

The influence of an integrated PBL format on geography students’ perceptions of their self-directedness in learning

Problem-based learning can be implemented in South African geography teacher education to foster geography students’ self-directed learning skills. The purpose of this longitudinal case study was to determine B.Ed. geography students’ (n = 45) perceptions of their self-directedness in learning in integrated problem-based learning experiences over a three-year period. The study used quantitative and qualitative research methods based on questionnaire application and semi-structured focus group interviews. The students completed a standardized questionnaire at regular intervals with the implementation of integrated problem-based learning experiences in geography modules over a three-year period. Focus group interviews with participants (n = 8) were employed to get a deeper understanding of the results of quantitative data. The results indicated that the geography students’ self-directed learning scores increased with the implementation of an integrated problem-based learning format in geography over the three-year period. The students who measured average, below average and low levels of self-directed learning at the beginning of the study had the highest increase in self-directed learning scores over the three years. The female students’ perceptions of their self-directedness in learning had higher increases in their self-directed learning scores after the problem-based learning interventions when compared to the male students.     

Using Teaching Observations and Reflective Practice to Challenge Conventions and Conceptions of Teaching in Geography

Cultural activities such as teaching and learning are highly complex systems that are deeply embedded in a wider culture and these factors impede change. Despite feeling directly the effect of the recent drive towards mass participation in higher education, most lecturers have not accounted for these changes in their teaching methods. Unless lecturers engage in critical reflection and ongoing discovery they stay trapped in unexamined judgements, interpretations, assumptions and expectations. Collaborative teaching observations and reflective practice were conducted by the author and colleagues with a range of experience within a geography department. Several surprising discrepancies appeared between lecturers' expectations and observations of the teaching sessions. The experience showed that, regardless of teaching experience, lectures allow the lecturer in his/her routine practice to neither appreciate his/her performance nor be aware of student understanding. Reflection on these experiences caused the re-evaluation of events and experience and the investigation of other firmly held beliefs that were frustrating and difficult to explain. If lecturers are to become proactive in their professional development, to question their teaching practice and become reflective practitioners, then our teaching culture must embrace the need for change and differences in teaching and learning.     

Teaching Ways of Seeing Development in the Global South: An Introduction

Development Studies, the interdisciplinary octopus, and its geography arm, Geographies of Development, have always faced a challenge when it came to providing students with experiential learning opportunities. While the subject is mostly taught in universities of the Global North, its focus has traditionally been the Global South. This symposium discusses Australian experiences of moving beyond text-based learning and bringing the Global South closer to their students.     

Teaching Postgraduate Development Studies: Possibilities within geography

This article outlines theoretical insights generated at the crossroads of geography and development studies, and elaborates their implications for postgraduate education. Reflecting on curriculum design and teaching experiences at one university (the University of Colorado, Boulder), the analysis focuses on the strengths of geography as a disciplinary home for postgraduate training in development studies. To this end, and based on faculty and student projects, it examines the relevance of geographic debates around space, place and scale for understanding specific development questions. While most postgraduate education in development geography already takes account of these themes, this article aims to make explicit the intellectual rationale behind such a focus, and to provide specific substantive strategies relevant to putting geography at the centre of postgraduate development studies education.     

Out of ‘Common Humanity’: Humanitarianism,Compassion and Efforts in Australia to Assist Jewish Refugees in the 1930s

In June 1935, Edith Roll, a thirteen-year-old from Vienna, wrote to her Australian pen-pal, Jean Doig, aged ten. This correspondence was tragically short-lived. Edith Roll’s family was swept up in the murder and destruction of Jews in Europe. The efforts of Jean’s parents – the respected country doctor, Keith Doig, and his wife, Louie – who attempted but failed to assist Edith and her family, her father, Jakob Roll, her mother Emilie and brother Fritz, are examined in this article. To disregard their efforts as tangential to the history of refugees because they were unsuccessful means we miss an opportunity to explore the historically situated notions of compassion and empathy that can be at the centre of these endeavours. Drawing on personal letters rather than the views of government officials, this article examines the Doig family efforts and what inspired them, arguing that these are a vital part of the complex story of refugee and migration history.     

‘Not a Position for a Gentleman’: Sir Matthew Nathan as Colonial Administrator: From Cape Coast Castle to Dublin Castle via Natal

This article examines the role of Sir Matthew Nathan, British permanent under secretary for Ireland at the time of the Easter Rising in April 1916, and how critical events in his career as soldier, colonial governor and civil servant shaped his conduct and reaction to events in Ireland as the Rising unfolded around him. The article raises issues of identities: namely Nathan's own identity as an English gentleman, when, given his Jewish background, he was an outsider to that caste. Nathan's brief military career and lengthier career as a colonial governor earned him high praise as a model bureaucrat. In this paper Nathan's track from the War Office through government houses situated in West Africa, Hong Kong and Natal to Dublin Castle is traced to illustrate the changes in his character from decisiveness to indecision. While Nathan clearly misread the volatile situation in Ireland over the 1916 Easter weekend, his actions demonstrated both indecision and bureaucratic delaying tactics. It is argued that his experiences with obdurate settler ministers in Natal played a role in shaping his hesitancy at the time of crisis in Dublin and that this hesitancy provided an opportunity for the direct action of the Irish Volunteers. The conclusion is that, at the time of the Irish crisis, Nathan failed to exercise the ‘power of the personal influence’ expected of an experienced governor.