Theme: Lived Geographies

We are concerned with how social, economic, political and cultural processes emerge from, and shape people’s daily lives at home, work and in public. These concerns have led us to become involved with studies of living conditions in houses, high-rises and suburban neighbourhoods, making a living, as manifest in work and occupations, as well as everyday mobilities. We also attend to individual and collective identity formation, through scholarship on national, transnational and postcolonial identity politics. These foci are pursued through inquiries that are variously multi-scalar, interactional, creative and experiential.

Identities and Belonging

Through a number of avenues we explore ethnicity, race and gender as profound formations around which people build their sense of self-identity. Of equal import are ideas of home and the nation in colonial and post-colonial contexts for both creating a sense of who we are and were we come from.

Everyday Life

The un-noticed background to the spectacular and significant is a terrain which we examine through historical and contemporary studies. We trace the displacing of politics, science, new materials and economics into the real that is the everyday. Alongside this we map out the distinctive terrains of consumption, inhabitation and public togetherness which are traditionally associated with daily living.

Mobility

With people and things on the move in ever greater numbers and at ever higher speeds we study the infrastructures, technologies and social organisations required to make this possible and the changing experiences that are its consequence. From walking through art installations to family car trips and even into the space race during the cold war, we chart the distinctive body of work which has evolved out of a concern with movement.

Ethnomethodology

Offering a sometimes therapeutic, sometimes re-specificatory and sometimes asymmetric relationship with social theory, ethnomethodology brings together detailed studies of practice with accounts of those practices. It criss-crosses everyday life, mobility and science through a concern with the social orders that are created by the lived work of local populations of particular places.

Through a number of collaborations with artists we have searched for areas of supplementation and aesthetic convergence and divergence. Members of the group have thus both worked closely with artists to produce new works in various media while also reflecting on the new criteria that a shared concern with environment and landscape provides for geographical and artistic practice.

Projects

People

This article was published on May 11, 2011