1st Edition
CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY IN PRACTICE
Cultural Geography in Practice provides an innovative and accessible approach to the sources, theories and methods of cultural geography. Written by an international team of prominent cultural geographers, all of whom are experienced researchers, this book is a fully illustrated guide to methodological approaches in cultural geography.
In order to demonstrate the practice of cultural geography each chapter combines the following features:
·Practical instruction in using one of the main methods of cultural geography (e.g. interviewing, interpreting texts and visual images, participatory methods)
·An overview of a key area of concern in cultural geography (e.g. the body, national identity, empire, marginality)
·A nuts and bolts description of the actual application of the theories and methods within a piece of research
With the addition of boxed definitions of key concepts and descriptions of research projects by students who devised and undertook them, Cultural Geography in Practice is an essential manual of research practice for both undergraduate and graduate geography students.
Chapter 1 Knowledge is Power: Using Archival REsearch to interpret State Formulation
Chapter 2: The View from the Streets: Geographies of Homelessness in the British Newspaper Press
Chapter 3: Secondary Worlds: Reading Novels as Geographical Research
Chapter 4: Researching Bodies in Virtual Space
Part 2: Living Cultural Geography
Chapter 5: Home and Identity: Life Stories in Text and in Person
Chapter 6: Gender and Mobility: Critical Ethnographies of Migration in Indonesia
Chapter 7: Learning about Labour: Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Methods
Chapter 8: Surveying Sexualities: The Possibilities and Problems of Questionnaires
Part 3: Visualising Cultural Geography
Chapter 9: Selling America: Advertising, National Identity and Economic Empire in the late 19th Century
Chapter 10: Photographs from the Edge of Empire
Chapter 11: Mapping Worlds: Cartography and the Politics of Representation
Chapter 12: Cinematic Cities
Chapter 13: Researching the Networks of Natural History
Part 4: Performing Cultural Geography
Chapter 14: Art and Urban Change
Chapter 15: Building Sites: Cultural Geographies of Architecture and Place-Making
Chapter 16: On Display: The Poetics, Politics and Interpretation of Exhibitions
Chapter 17: Deep Listening: Researching Music and the Cartographies of Sound
Biography
Alison Blunt is Lecturer in Geography at Queen Mary, University of London.
Pyrs Gruffudd is Senior Lecturer in Geography at University of Wales Swansea.
Jon May is Lecturer in Geography at Queen Mary, University of London.
Miles Ogborn is Reader in Geography at Queen Mary, University of London.
David Pinder is Lecturer in Geography at Queen Mary, University of London.
A book designed to help students find out "how it is done, and how they themselves can do it". This book contains an interesting, readable and valuable set of essays.
The Times Higher
What it promises, and what it delivers, is a useful and accessible guide to practising cultural geography: a guide that is suggestive rather than prescriptive. If you're interested in cultural geography, you should have a copy of this book...
...This is a book to be dipped into as specific research problems arise, and to be used more generally to think about the messiness of the research process.
VOLUME 29 2004
Transactions of The IBG
