Telling small stories: spaces of knowledge and the practice of geography

Abstract

This article examines how the practice of learning geography, and the arenas in which knowledge-making takes place, can be usefully positioned within changing histories of the discipline. It contends that networks of action -understood through the intersection of social sites, subjects and sources -present a conceptual framework and narrative focus for the re-consideration of specific episodes from geography's past. The interventions made here are informed and illustrated by a 'small story' about the doing of geography. Based on different personal accounts, the story revives a series of events, encounters, dialogues and images dating back to the winter of 1951 at Glenmore Lodge, Scotland. This educational institution in the Cairngorm mountains offered children from urban areas the opportunity to learn field studies and the skills of 'outdoor citizenship'. Initially, the focus falls on Margaret Jack, a 14-year-old fieldcourse participant. Her learning experiences are traced through personal letters, a diary and a field journal dating from that time, and her recent recollections of this event. Margaret's account dovetails with the story of her field studies instructor, Robin Murray. Robin's role is traced through his learning experiences as a geography undergraduate at Aberdeen University, and the recent recollections of Catriona Murray, his wife. key words Scotland history of geography knowledge biography practice fieldwork

Landscape, Memory, and the Shifting Regional Geographies of Northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina

“…Such work stresses direct bodily contact with and experience of landscape, attending to the phenomenological emergence of space (see Wylie 2002Wylie , 2005Lorimer 2003Lorimer , 2006Pearson 2006;Wylie and Lorimer 2010;Dubow 2011;M. Rose 2012;Riding 2015).…”

Performing Academic Practice: Using the Master Class to Build Postgraduate Discursive Competences

“…These debates have been well rehearsed in recent years in human geography (see for example: Baerenholdt et al, 2004;Gregson and Rose, 2000;Pratt and Kirby, 2003;Thrift, 2000Thrift, , 2003Thrift, , 2004 but the discipline has yet to turn these insights either on itself or on its training practices. Bourdieu (1996) remains the one sustained consideration of the academic subject, but in human geography to think about academic practices through either sense of performance is a project barely begun (although see: Gregson, 2006;Lorimer, 2003aLorimer, , 2003b. The potential afforded by these approaches is considerable, not least in relation to the development of verbal competences .…”

Small health pilgrimages: Place and practice at the holy well

“…Given the focus on particular forms and practices of pilgrimage, I am drawn to what Lorimer (2003) describes as 'small stories', because as Cummins et al (2007) have noted, an excessive focus on scale can sometimes be as much a barrier as an enabler of work in this area. In addition, wider discussions in the area of alternative spiritualities and geographies of belief and religion suggest a certain mobility and hybridity, both physical and conceptual, to sites associated with mind-body-spirit healing (Heelas and Woodhead 2005;Hoyez 2007;Lea 2008).…”