Co-Producing Mobilities: negotiating geographical knowledge in a conference session on the move

In an experimental session entitled Co-Producing Mobilities held at the 2014 Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers Annual Conference, 20 mobility scholars travelled around London on foot, by bus and by Tube to investigate how mobilities could be considered co-produced. In this paper, 18 participants reflect on this collaborative experiment and on how it influenced their thinking about mobilities, geographical knowledge and pedagogy. Contributions cast light on the function of conferences and the multiple forms of pedagogy they enable, and provide guiding resources for those now wanting to continue such experiments.     

Journeying from “I” to “we”: assembling hybrid caring collectives of geography doctoral scholars

Completing a PhD is difficult. Add a major earthquake sequence and general stress levels become much higher. Caring for some of the nonacademic needs of doctoral scholars in this environment becomes critical to their scholarly success. Yet academic supervisors, who are in the same challenging environment, may already be stretched to capacity. How then do we increase care for doctoral scholars? While it has been shown elsewhere that supportive and interactive department cultures reduce attrition rates, little work has been done on how exactly departments might create these supportive environments: the focus is generally on the individual actions of supervisors, or the individual quality of students admitted. We suggest that a range of actors and contingencies are involved in journeying toward a more caring collective culture. We direct attention to the hybridity of an emerging ‘caring collective’, in which the assembled actors are not only ‘students’ and ‘staff’, but also bodies, technologies, objects, institutions, and other nonhuman actors including tectonic plates and earthquakes. The concept of the hybrid caring collective is useful, we argue, as a way of understanding the distributed responsibility for the care of doctoral scholars, and as a way of stepping beyond the student/supervisor blame game.     

Terms in place and time: A case study from the Anthropological Index Online*

An analysis of terms, and keywords that have appeared over the last 50 years in the Anthropological Index (now AIO) challenges anthropology's purported universal coverage of regions and topics. Anthropological article production published in specialized periodicals leaves many areas uncovered, some topics marginalized, or absent. The article takes the presence or absence of keywords in articles in anthropological literature from all world regions to ask what may have generated these gaps. We argue that keyword use can reveal the role that geographical positioning, languages spoken, and national histories may have had in anthropological production. Shamanism and cognate concepts such as animism and spirit possession are taken to guide an analysis of the anthropological production in different languages through the use of keywords that appear in the coverage of AIO. The research demonstrates how far keywords use is shaped by contingent adjustments to predicaments and theoretical concerns with complex historical roots.     

Taking a hike: exploring leisure walkers embodied experiences

This paper uses ‘walk-along’ interviewing to investigate embodied experiences of walking on the South Downs Way, a long-distance trail in southern England. Using a qualitative methodology – encompassing 93 walk-along interviews and auto-ethnographic reflections of two walker/researchers – it explores how walkers conceptualise their own walking experiences and captures this information while they are walking. It contributes to and extends the emerging body of literature which explores people’s experience, specifically aiming to develop a deeper understanding of leisure walking experiences in the dynamic space of the walk. It examines a range of bodily sensations and emotional states associated with the leisure walking experience in the context of temporal and environmental aspects, identifying those feelings that are innate and those which are mediated by external conditions. Current experiences intertwine with memories of other places and times in a process where connections are made between mind, body, the immediate physical environment, self and others, and disconnections from everyday life and the wider environment. These connections and disconnections create a sense of perspective, achievement and well-being.