“Looking with intention”: using photographic essays as didactical tool to explore Berlin

Abstract

Although photography has long been acknowledged as an important research method and didactical tool in human geography, we feel the need to redraw attention to this particular form of doing explorative research. Today's society becomes increasingly "ocularcentral", yet this trend seems unparalleled with a rise of photography in academic work. Based on 10-year experience of using photographic essays in our graduate course on Urban and Cultural Geography, we show how taking pictures can enhance active and engaged learning, spark feelings of enchantment, and stimulate critical, reflexive and non-discursive thinking by asking students to translate theory to practice and vice versa. Our students have "looked with intention" how certain geographical theories are "congealed" in Berlin's urban landscape, specifically linking theory to empirical practice and vice versa. Despite the act of photography being inevitably partial, personal, biased, voyeuristic, colonial and possibly unethical, we believe that the enthusiasm and geographical gaze it brings into the classroom outweigh these limitations. The paper illustrates with multiple examples how the embodied practice of photography results in students carefully reflecting on the physical and social world around them and acknowledging the multimodality of the city, not just as built environment but also as a social sphere and lived place.

Assessment practices in Geography under COVID-19: Limitations and opportunities

“…This assignment, which is located at the very start of this semester-long course, is based on students identifying the nexus of physical and human environments in their local areas (e.g. Van Melik & Ernste, 2019). This can be, for example, litter caught in a tree, a plant growing up the side of a house, a cow grazing in a garden, or sand in the bottom of a drain.…”

Fostering a relational sense of place through video documentary assignments

“…There is now a wealth of literature showing how fieldwork -commonly regarded "the sine qua non of the geographer" (Dummer et al, 2008, p. 459; see also Fuller et al, 2006;France & Haigh, 2018) -enables students to develop a better understanding of concepts by linking them to their own experience, while also encouraging them to modify or evaluate their previous ideas or knowledge through critical reflection (Dummer et al, 2008;Hovorka & Wolf, 2009;May, 1999;Oost et al, 2011). The use of visual materials -photos, videoclips (Ferretti, 2009), movies (Ansell, 2002;Sigler & Albandoz, 2014), documentaries (Hay, 2017) -has similarly been said to facilitate more active and deep learning, especially if it goes beyond passive watching (Di Palma, 2009) and includes the creative process of producing photo(s) (Sanders, 2007;Van Melik & Ernste, 2019) or a video (Anderson, 2013a(Anderson, , 2013bMavroudi & Jöns, 2011). As it has been argued, in the creative process of imagemaking students are made to "look with intention" (Van Melik & Ernste, 2019) and to reflect on the way they want to represent geographic meaning about people and places (Lonn & Teasley, discussed by Anderson, 2013b; see also Dando & Chadwick, 2014;Sanders, 2007).…”

“…The readings for the course have been carefully selected with the core learning objective in mind that students should be able to "think geographically", that is, that they should be able to critically evaluate different arguments on globalization and its implications "at" different, interconnected scales, and to recognize and illustrate how "local" phenomena have been constituted by broader-scale events and developments. So, for example, we discuss how the rise and the fall of the city Detroit (Doucet, 2014) has been linked to the reorganization of the global division of labour and the forming of new economic relationships in global production networks (Dicken, 2015), or how national identities can be seen as constituted through social relations and how and why they have persisted under globalization rather than fading away (Croucher, 2003;Tomlinson, 2003). Relational thinking is thus presented as being key to "thinking geographically".…”