This article addresses the discussion, particularly prominent among feminist geographers, of reflexivity as a strategy for marking geographical knowledges as situated. It argues that, if the aim of feminist and other critical geographies is to acknowledge their partiality, then the particular form of reflexivity advocated needs careful consideration. Feminist geographers most often recommend a kind of reflexivity that aims, even if only ideally, at a full understanding of the researcher, the researched and the research context. The article begins with the author's failure at that kind of reflexivity, and that particular reflexivity is then discussed and described as ‘transparent’ in its ambitious claims to comprehensive knowledge. The article then goes on to explore critiques of transparent reflexivity, many of which have been made by feminist geographers themselves. The article concludes by suggesting that some recent discussions of the uncertainties of research practice offer another model of feminist reflexivity that may succeed more effectively in questioning the researcher's practice of knowledge production.

The suggestion that social life resembles some sort of performance is one which has been elaborated by many social theorists working within very different analytical traditions. In the 1950s and 1960s, for example, Erving Goffman was arguing that performance is critical to the study of the interaction order (Goffman, 1956; 1963; 1967; see also Burns, 1992; Drew and Wootton, 1988). Not only did Goffman approach interaction through dramaturgical metaphor (stage, zoning, front and back regions, masquerade, and so on), but he saw interaction as an engagement between individual(s) and audience(s), to whom individuals perform and who, in turn, interpret their actions. For Goffman,``the self [is] a performed character ... not an organic thing that has specific location ... [the performer and] his body merely provide the peg on which something of a collaborative manufacture will be hung for a time'' (1956, pages 252^253). Thus behind Goffman's analyses of interaction lies an active, prior, conscious, and performing self. By contrast, several writers considering performance from various psychoanalytic perspectives work with very different notions of subjectivity. Both Joan Riviere (1986) and Luce Irigaray (1985), for example, suggest that femininity is a mask donned for social performances. But Riviere claimed that there is no difference between woman and the mask. She made no assumption that there was an active, conscious human agent behind the mask of femininity, rather that the mask itself articulated feminine subjectivity. Irigaray also suggests that femininity is nothing but its masquerade, but while she too denies that the mask is manipulated by an active subject, as part of her critical project she nonetheless suggests that the subject of mimetic performances of femininity remains partially

One of the most striking developments across the social sciences in the past decade has been the growth of research methods using visual materials. It is often suggested that this growth is somehow related to the increasing importance of visual images in contemporary social and cultural practice. However, the form of the relationship between ‘visual research methods’ and ‘contemporary visual culture’ has not yet been interrogated. This paper conducts such an interrogation, exploring the relation between ‘visual research methods’ – as they are constituted in quite particular ways by a growing number of handbooks, reviews, conference and journals – and contemporary visual culture – as characterized by discussions of ‘convergence culture’. The paper adopts a performative approach to ‘visual research methods’. It suggests that when they are used, ‘visual research methods’ create neither a ‘social’ articulated through culturally mediated images, nor a ‘research participant’ competency in using such images. Instead, the paper argues that the intersection of visual culture and ‘visual research methods’ should be located in their shared way of using images, since in both, images tend to be deployed much more as communicational tools than as representational texts. The paper concludes by placing this argument in the context of recent discussions about the production of sociological knowledge in the wider social field.

This paper begins by reviewing a range of recent work by geographers conceptualising buildings less as solid objects and more as performances.Buildings, it is argued, are not given but produced, as various materials are held together in specific assemblages by work of various kinds. This has led to a range of studies looking at the diverse sorts of work that make buildings cohere: the political institutions they are embedded in, the material affordances of their non-human components, the discourses surrounding particular kinds of buildings, and, in particular, the experiencing of buildings by their human inhabitants, users and visitors. However, this experiencing has been poorly theorised. Those geographers inspired by actor network approaches to buildings acknowledge human experiences, but in very limited ways; while those geographers inspired more by affect theory evoke the 'feelings' that buildings may provoke but evacuate human subjectivity from their accounts of buildings' performances. Through a case study of two buildings, this paper argues that both approaches are flawed in their uninterest in the human, and proposes that more attention be paid to (at least) three aspects of human feeling: the feel of buildings, feelings in buildings, and feelings about buildings.

This paper addresses how geographers conceptualise cultural artifacts. Many geographical studies of cultural objects continue to depend heavily on an approach developed as part of the 'new cultural geography' in the 1980s. That approach examined the cultural politics of representations of place, space and landscape by undertaking close readings of specific cultural objects. Over three decades on, the cultural field (certainly in the Global North) has changed fundamentally, as digital technologies for the creation and dissemination of meaning have become extraordinarily pervasive and diverse. Yet geographical studies of cultural objects have thus far neglected to consider the conceptual and methodological implications of this shift. This paper argues that such studies must begin to map the complexities of digitally-mediated cultural production, circulation and interpretation. It will argue that to do this, it is necessary to move away from the attentive gaze on stable cultural objects as formulated by some of the new cultural geography, and instead focus on mapping the dynamics of the production, circulation and modification of meaning at digital interfaces and across frictional networks.