Micro‐bodily mobilities: Choreographing geographies and mobilities of dance and disability

Abstract

Publisher: Wiley This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Veal, C 2017, 'Microbodily mobilities: choreographing a geographies and mobilities of dance and disability' Area, vol (in press), pp. (in press), which has been published in final form at 10.1111/area.12377. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.

Danced movement in human geographic research: A methodological discussion

“…However, recognition of embodiment (Gibbs, 2014; Longhurst et al., 2008), greater attentiveness to the affective elements of place‐identity relationships (Essebo, 2019; Lorimer, 2005) and the emergence of scholarship on the more‐than‐human (Country et al., 2018; Dowling et al., 2017; Robertson, 2018) have all meant that theorising and conceptualising experiences of movement have become a more explicit focus within the discipline. Established approaches to researching movement include watching movement (Atkinson & Duffy, 2019) through methods such as participant observation (Veal, 2018); video (Garrett, 2010); describing experiences of moving, through spoken word as in interviews (Ameel & Tani, 2012); journaled reflection, which may include the written word, diagrams and drawings (Veal, 2016); and via visual media such as collage or photography (Barry, 2019; Vacchelli, 2018).…”

“…With the development of embodied methodologies, movement is not only an experience to be reflected on and talked about, but to be engaged in as a means of research itself: movement as methodology. Increasingly geographers have turned to physicality and motion of the body as a methodological resource to understand experiences of movement and have begun to develop, “methods that move with bodies, and prioritise the multi‐sensory, kinaesthetic aspects of human movement” (Veal, 2018, p. 308).…”

“…Writing from the perspective of mobilities research, Charlotte Veal (2018) argued that “the embodied, performed and practised dimensions of human movement have yet to be fully realised” (p. 312) within mobilities research. Veal (2018) offered danced movement as a mobile method that could contribute to further understanding these dimensions of movement. Merriman (2014) also queried why mobilities research and mobile methods had been heavily conceptualised within the social sciences and suggested that researchers were missing opportunities within the arts and humanities.…”

“…While to date there has been some engagement with danced movement in mobilities research (Cresswell, 2006; Merriman, 2010; Veal, 2018), a more thorough consideration of danced movement as methodology by mobilities researchers could respond to Merriman's (2014) concerns. The origins of danced movement within the arts could also invite scholars to engage with the variety of dance approaches, further broadening mobilities research’ interdisciplinary scope.…”

Qualitative methods II: On the presentation of ‘geographical ethnography’

“…Rather our observation is that this reporting practice opens the door for less empirically inclined researchers to ‘play the ethnography card’ – baldly deploying the term and daring reviewers to ask for more on what actually happened in the field. One final feature that we noted in our second sample of papers was how some of those who said the most about how their empirical studies practically proceeded refrained from much mention of the overarching term of ‘ethnography’ despite clearly being quite interested in how people respond to various social and physical situations (see, for example, Adams-Hutcheson, 2019; Veal, 2018; Von Benzon, 2019). It was almost as if they had moved beyond it – that the broad-brush notion of ‘ethnography’ had become too unhelpfully baggy for them when they wanted to evaluate the potential of specific techniques.…”