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CLOKE-PRELIMS.qxd 3/3/04 12:06 PM Page i PRACTISING HUMAN GEOGRAPHY CLOKE-PRELIMS.qxd 3/3/04 12:06 PM Page ii CLOKE-PRELIMS.qxd 3/3/04 12:06 PM Page iii PRACTISING HUMAN GEOGRAPHY Paul Cloke Ian Cook Philip Crang Mark Goodwin Joe Painter Chris Philo SAGE Publications London • Thousand Oaks • New Delhi CLOKE-PRELIMS.qxd 3/3/04 12:06 PM Page iv © Paul Cloke, Ian Cook, Philip Crang, Mark Goodwin, Joe Painter, Chris Philo 2004 First Published 2004 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B-42, Panchsheel Enclave Post Box 4109 New Delhi 100 017 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7619 7325 7 ISBN 0 7619 7300 1 (pbk) Library of Congress Control Number 2003108066 Typeset by C&M Digitals (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press Ltd, Trowbridge, Wiltshire CLOKE-PRELIMS.qxd 3/3/04 12:06 PM Page v Summary of Contents 1 Changing practices of human geography: an introduction 1 PART I CONSTRUCTING GEOGRAPHICAL DATA 35 2 Official sources 41 3 Non-official sources 62 4 Imaginative sources 93 5 Talking to people 123 6 Observing, participating and ethnographies 169 PART II CONSTRUCTING GEOGRAPHICAL INTERPRETATIONS 207 7 Sifting and sorting 215 8 Enumerating 247 9 Explaining 285 10 Understanding 307 11 Representing human geographies 336 12 The politics of practising human geography 364 CLOKE-PRELIMS.qxd 3/3/04 12:06 PM Page vi CLOKE-PRELIMS.qxd 3/3/04 12:06 PM Page vii Contents Preface x Acknowledgements xvi 1 Changing practices of human geography: an introduction 1 Practising human geography? 1 A thumbnail history of practising human geography 7 Conclusion 31 Notes 32 PART I CONSTRUCTING GEOGRAPHICAL DATA 35 2 Official sources 41 Introduction 41 Types of official information 42 Information and state formation 43 The contemporary informational state 49 Understanding the construction of official information 53 Conclusion 61 Notes 61 3 Non-official sources 62 Introduction 62 Non-official sources in geographical research 63 Critical issues in the use of non-official data sources 68 Conclusion 91 Note 92 4 Imaginative sources 93 Introduction 93 Understanding the construction of imaginative sources 94 Imaginative sources in geographical research 104 Case studies 115 Conclusion 122 Notes CLOKE-PRELIMS.qxd 3/3/04 12:06 PM Page viii Contents 5 Talking to people 123 Introduction 123 The practices of talking to people 126 Questionnairing 130 Interviewing 148 Discussion groups 159 Ethics: an important end note 164 Notes 168 6 Observing, participating and ethnographies 169 Introduction: what is ethnography and how can it be geographical? 169 Geography’s humanistic ethnographies 171 The black inner city as Frontier outpost 173 Geography’s ‘new’ ethnographies 182 Top tips for prospective researchers 195 Conclusion: field-noting 196 Notes 204 PART II CONSTRUCTING GEOGRAPHICAL INTERPRETATIONS 207 7 Sifting and sorting 215 Sitting down with your data 215 What happens when we put things into boxes and make lists 223 A geographical detour into set theory 227 Alternatives and recommendations 240 Notes 245 8 Enumerating 247 Enumeration and human geography 247 Describing, exploring, inferring 253 Modelling spatial processes 264 Geocomputation 271 GIS and spatial analysis 272 The authority of numbers? 277 Notes 284 9 Explaining 285 The complexity of explanation 285 Explanation through laws: geography as spatial science 286 Explanation as causation 288 Intensive and extensive research 289 The search for a revolution in geographical explanation 290 Explanation through abstraction 291 Explanation and subjectivity 295 Explanation and practice 299 Concluding comments: from the explanation of geography to the geographies within explanation 305 Note 306 viii CLOKE-PRELIMS.qxd 3/3/04 12:06 PM Page ix CONTENTS 10 Understanding 307 Introduction 307 Seven modes of understanding 310 Conclusion: between understanding and explanation 335 Notes 335 11 Representing human geographies 336 Introduction 336 The work of writing 337 Presenting research 342 Representation and rhetoric 347 Representation in practice 358 Beyond the book 362 Conclusion 363 Notes 363 12 The politics of practising human geography 364 The ‘personal’ politics of geographical practice 364 The politics of research practice 367 The politics of the academy 370 Ethics, morality and geographical research 374 Notes 375 References 376 Index 409 ix CLOKE-PRELIMS.qxd 3/3/04 12:06 PM Page x Preface In the last few years, there has been an exciting growth of interest in questions about what we do as human geographers and how we do it. Reflecting the general shift within the social sciences towards a reflexive notion of knowledge, geographers have begun to question the con- stitution of the discipline – what we know, how we know it and what difference this makes both to the type of research we do and who participates in it with us either as colleagues or research subjects … An intrinsic part of these debates has been a greater self-consciousness about research methods. (McDowell, 1992a: 399–400) This book is inspired by these observations from and how exactly do we manage to extract ‘raw Linda McDowell, about whom we will say more data’ ready to be taken away for subsequent in Chapter 1. While written over a decade ago, detailed interpretation? What kind of interactions they can still be mobilized to frame the concerns occur here, particularly with the people from of the present book, recognizing as they do a body whom we are often trying to obtain information, of writing that was starting to accumulate from the whether they be the gatekeepers of sites and doc- early 1990s as an explicit commentary upon the uments that we wish to access or, more signifi- research methods deployed by human geographers. cantly,the people whose lives in specific spaces and Over the intervening years ‘a greater self-con- places we are hoping to research (our ‘research sub- sciousness about research methods’ has therefore jects’).And what goes on once we do get the data become more commonplace in the literature, lead- back to our office, library or front room: how do ing to a small industry of textbooks and essays, we endeavour to ‘make sense’ of these materials, to some very good, on this theme. Even so, there is bring a measure of order to them, to begin manip- arguably still much more to be done in this respect, ulating them to describe and to explain the situa- not least to make accessible to a wider audience tions under study,to arrive at the cherished goal of many of the complex issues bound up in the very understanding? Moreover, if we get this far, what is acts of ‘doing’ or, as we like to term it, the practis- then at stake as we try to write through our find- ing of human geography. ings, to offer our interpretations, and as we pro- Our purpose in the present book is hence is to duce accounts which purport to represent peoples take seriously the many tasks entailed in conduct- and places more or less different from our own? ing research on given processes and problems, cer- Can all this really be as simple as many earlier tain types of societies and spaces, and nameable human geographers tended to assume? Can it all peoples and places. We wish to ask about what is be taken for granted, subsumed under headings involved in such research, how it happens ‘in the such as ‘intuition’ or the enacting of the ‘scientific field’, whether a village under an African sky, a method’, and is it genuinely free from any rela- housing estate drenched by Glasgow drizzle or the tionship to the researcher’s own values and beliefs, seeming safety of a local planning department or ethics and politics? We would want to answer the dusty historical archive.We will on occasion query latter questions with a definitive no and, as the what precisely is meant by this so-called ‘field’, but book unfolds, to indicate why we suppose this to more significantly we will ask about what exactly be the case by striving to provide answers to many it is that we do in field locations: what sources are of the previous questions just raised. In line with we after, what methods are we using in the process, McDowell’s observations, therefore, we are x CLOKE-PRELIMS.qxd 3/3/04 12:06 PM Page xi Preface convinced that human geographers do need to geography. They undoubtedly generate useful become still more self-conscious, more reflexive ‘tools’ to be deployed on occasion, and we cer- and more willing to ‘reflect back upon’ all aspects tainly applaud the notion of combining quantita- of their research practices. tive and qualitative methods (see also Hodge, 1995; We should underline the specific contribution Philo et al., 1998), but we do not see how what are that we are aiming to make in this book, then, in basically technical exercises can be taken as more that it is designed to provide human geography than a small part of the larger whole which is the researchers – from the undergraduate to the more practising of human geography.

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