Relations and remix
We – the fabulous media producer Matt Vella, UTS and University of Toronto colleagues and I – just finished recording our series Place-based Methodologies @UTS. All our guests in this podcast series shared some points among the variety of understandings of place, methods and processes. The first one is that place is never just a physical locality, rather it emerges through relations among people, environments, everyday life, social interactions, material characteristics, and histories. The second is that methodologies are best understood as systems of methods, frequently mixed, and supported by particular epistemologies, often arising from specific disciplines. If you think about place in any form in your teaching and research we would like to hear from you! Especially if you are from disciplines not covered in this series (that is if you are in Sciences, Law, FEIT, Business or Health). Feel free to use the comment boxes at the end of the blogpost, and you are invited to the Place-based Methodologies @UTS LXLab Forum on 19 July.
Meet our guests
We continued to talk about place with scholars from a variety of disciplines: Dr Emi Otsuji is a linguist with an interest in metrolingualism (a concept she developed in her PhD thesis with Professor Alastair Pennycook) and semiotic landscapes; Professor Lesley Harbon is a languages scholar who works on linguistic landscapes and Head of the School of International Studies and of Education in FASS at UTS; Associate Professor Stephanie Springgay and Dr Sarah Truman from the University of Toronto (Sarah has since moved to a postdoc at Manchester Metropolitan University) are education scholars with top expertise in embodied methodologies, especially walking, Carolyn Cartier is Professor of Human Geography and China Studies, currently working on an ARC project on cities in China, Dr Megan Heyward is a media arts practitioner and academic in FASS Media Arts Production program who works on digital narratives, Andrew Toland is an architect and lecturer in landscape Architecture in DAB working on cities in Asia, and Dr Susie Pratt is a Scholarly Teaching Fellow in the Faculty of Transdisciplinary Innovation with a background in arts and environmental humanities and introducing the idea of speculative design, and asking ‘what if’ of places. If the first five podcasts made you think about place in new ways, here there’s more!
Place, words and narratives
You may want to think about the relation between place and language and about the words in written form in the public sphere, as Lesley Harbon explains in her podcast on linguistic landscapes. A linguistic landscape can give insights on the social life of a specific area, and it is a relatively low tech method (it requires taking photographs of words, and coding them). Or maybe you want to consider languages from other points of view. Emi Otsuji speaks about the relations between cities and languages for instance, explaining the notion of metrolingualism as the study of the languages emerging through everyday practices and relations among people in the urban space. For Emi, and for all other speakers, place is always made through relations. The idea of relations between words and place is also explored in Megan Hayward’s podcast on her practice using locative media (works experienced in a specific location via a mobile device) to activate cultural histories and memories of certain places as one walks through following one of her apps on their phone. As Megan describes, one never walks just in a physical place, but traverses narratives at the intersection of cultural and social histories as well as social interactions.
Place and bodies
Stephanie Springgay and Sarah Truman, working together at the research project WalkingLab, also talked about walking, bodies and placemaking. They give us a survey of walking as research in all its disciplinary and historical variations, from artists practices of walking to defamiliarize known cities and learn new things about them, to walking as a strategy to augment other research methods in the social sciences, such as walking interviews. The importance of considering place starting from one own’s embodied experience is stressed by Dr Susie Pratt who, like Springgay and Truman, starts from the feminist perspective that all knowledge (including the knowledge we have about place) is situated and intersects with one’s history, gender, and everyday life. Dr Pratt also introduces the idea of ‘careful prospecting’ or asking speculative questions, ‘what if’ queries about place.
Place, cities and social change
Carolyn Cartier has unique expertise in cities in China and explains how place needs to be understood in relation to both locality and the extraordinary changes in the urban landscape of contemporary China. To understand how place matters to people locally and globally she suggests using mixed methodologies, and to compare empirical material in relation to concepts such as space and place. This, for instance, involves comparing photographs with published materials, and if there are discrepancies switching to more localised methods, such as interviews. A similar approach to methods and to a comparative process to place is also adopted by Andrew Toland, who speaks about the work of a landscape architect in the field. Andrew, who focuses on Asian cities, tells us about understanding the layers of a given landscape, and about using multiple tools, such as detailed maps in several copies in the field, to annotate and at times correct the information given in the map. From his previous job as a lawyer he describes his methodology as ‘forensic’, in that he gathers an array of physical and documentary evidence and tries to make a case with them.
These are just snippets of our conversations: you can listen to and download the complete series of podcasts here.