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Stevenson, Andrew (2014) How do newly arrived international students de- velop meaningful attachments to and emplaced knowledge of their new city? Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University. Downloaded from: https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/623740/ Usage rights: Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Deriva- tive Works 4.0 Please cite the published version https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk Arrival Stories How do newly arrived international students develop meaningful attachments to and emplaced knowledge of their new city? Andrew Stevenson 1 Abstract Psychological theory has traditionally yielded limited and predominantly cognitivist approaches to place and its perception. This thesis applies non- representational and phenomenological approaches to the study of place and space. It employs participatory sensory ethnography as a method for researching narratives of place-making and creative responses to a new city. Place and space theory portrays places as inseparable from meanings invested in them (Thrift, 2008), seeing cities as collections of stories, rather than as fixed locations. They are made by the performative engagements of those who move through them (Ingold, 2000). In researching place making with a cohort of collaborators that came from 16 internationally diverse new arrivals to Manchester and Salford I have curated a series of participatory collaborations from which diverse stories necessarily emerged. These collaborations are modeled on existing sensory modalities (Pink, 2009), creative and technological habits and preferred mobilities of the collaborators. Initially ascertaining the preferences of each collaborator, participants subsequently took the lead in designing creative responses to their new home city. Collaborations included engagements such as walking interviews, the recording of soundscape compositions, participatory photography and the generation of other artefacts. These works reflect an ethical relationship between researcher and participant wherein creativity emerges from a genuine willingness by all parties to use existing practices to respond to a new setting (Shotter, 2008). They yielded sensuous trails that go beyond mere academic reportage. The accumulation of excavated artefacts, maps, films, photographs and short stories supplement the conventional paraphernalia of academic enquiry. They illustrate joint actions (Shotter, 2008) that reflect genuine ethical collaborations. Using these of these collaborative works, I have constructed a critique of existing psychological theories of space and place, highlighting forms of performatively, corporeally, co-productively, relational and sensory place perception. 2 Contents Prelude: Arrival stories Chapter 1 Psychology in its place Reviewing psychological ventures into the field of space and place Chapter 2 How the places we move through acquire meaning through daily living? Space, place, mobility, non-representation and the making of the city Chapter 3 Living thinking, extended minds Cognition, culture and place making Chapter 4 Methodological considerations Using participatory sensory ethnographies to explore place making in newcomers to a city Chapter 5 Walking it over A first journey into Manchester Chapter 6 Manchester through the ears Three soundscape composition by a newcomer from Bandung Chapter 7 The making of Twearlies Manchester and Salford in pictures, poems and on buses Chapter 8 Material memories Postcards from the imagined city of Man-Tunis Interlude: A Burial Chapter 9 Human don’t get angry Trailing placed, performed memories from Manchester to Mainz Interlude: Mensch Argere Dich Nicht! Chapter 10 Walking in inter-corporeal space Border crossings in Whitworth Park and Rusholme Chapter 11 Towards an emplaced psychology Answers, appeals, reflections 3 List of figures Figure 1: People who look like things (The Simpsons) Fig. 2: Oksapmin numbering enumerates 27 bodily points (Chapter 3) Fig. 3: An anthropologist in the field (Chapter 4) Fig. 4: Suggestions for methods of participation, designed to help collaborators decide on how they might take part (Chapter 4) Fig. 5: “I spend so much time waiting for buses in England” (Chapter 7) Fig. 6: “There are so many abandoned buildings in Salford” (Chapter 7) Fig. 7: “Have we talked about this before?” “Yes, we talked about gloves” (Chapter 7) Fig. 8: “Did they just lose it? You can’t just lose a jacket like that” (Chapter 7) Fig. 9: “That very special table is booked, is reserved for them every Friday” (Chapter 7) Fig. 10: Postcard, Hulme Market, Man-Tunis (Chapter 8) Fig. 11: Postcard, Dmitris, Man-Tunis (Chapter 8) Fig. 12: Postcard, Pop Boutique, Man-Tunis (Chapter 8) Fig. 13: Postcard, Palace Hotel, Man-Tunis (Chapter 8) Fig. 14: Postcard, Cornerhouse, Man-Tunis (Chapter 8) Fig. 15: Photographic clues about a burial (Chapter 9) Fig. 16: Bundled up in cellophane, sticky tape, bubble-wrap and cardboard, a message written from Manchester (Chapter 9) Fig. 17: “Excuse me, this is for you” (Chapter 9) Fig. 18 “It’s a really old till” (Chapter 9) Fig. 19: “It was sort of structured, and yet it was just waste” (Chapter 9) Fig. 20: Egg bee (Chapter 9) 4 Prelude: Arrivals stories When I landed at Yoahuang the catholic mission there showed me much kindness. I waited for nine days on the riverbank for the carriers I had been promised. Next day was devoted to erecting my tent and persuading the Nuer to remove my abode to the vicinity of the shade and water, which they refused to do. (E. E. Evans-Pritchard, 1940:5) Ethnographic fieldwork typically generates arrival stories. As Evans- Pritchard’s irascible tone testifies in reporting his arrival in Nyasaland to begin work on his monograph The Nuer (1940), entering the field can be a disorientating experience for ethnographers. Points of concordance and difference are brought sharply into focus at first contact (Narayan, 1993). Arguably ethnographers, operating as outsiders in novel places are ideally misplaced to explore the phenomenon of arrival. In her essay Fieldwork in common places, Pratt (1986) reviews some notable forays into the arrival story genre, mainly selected from the anthropological archive. She remarks on how many ethnographers eschew discourses of scientific reportage in favour of more personal, descriptive narratives, when conveying their sense of (arriving in a) place. Such a descriptive tone is used here by Firth (1936) to open We, The Tikopia, revealing first sight of Polynesia In the cool of the early morning, just before sunrise, the bow of the Southern Cross headed towards the eastern horizon, on which a tiny dark blue outline was faintly visible (1936:1) This semi-poetic narrative can be traced further back, to the early travel literature of Louis de Bougainville, arriving in Tahiti in 1768 When we moored I went on shore with several officers, to survey the watering place. An immense crowd of men and women received us there (Bougainville, 1967: 220) Descriptive arrival narratives highlight the strangeness of novel places, exemplified here by Malinowski’s first setting down in the Trobriand Islands Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village while the launch or dinghy, which has brought you, sails away out of sight (Malinowski, 1961:4) 5 Whilst anthropological arrival scenes are typically couched in description (Pratt, 1986), in other disciplines they are rare altogether. In psychological research relating to space, place, environment and culture, subjective accounts of the beginnings of research, be it written by researcher or researched, are seldom offered at all. It is unconventional for psychological researchers to lapse into personal narrative accounts of arrival in the field, the research space (what Brunswik [1943] calls the assessment context) as Malinowski and his counterparts did. Likewise, the voices of research participants, spoken in their own words, are absent from reports of psychological research into space related concepts like cognitive mapping (Golledge, 2002), acculturation (Berry et al, 2002), personal space (Hall, 1966) or environmental psychology (Steg et al, 2013). This thesis is about arrival stories. During this project I have engaged with the stories of seven international arrivals who came to Manchester and Salford (England) from other nation states. Working in collaboration with Tasila (from Zambia), Febi (Indonesia), Andrada (Romania), Alyssa (Tunisia), Bina (Germany), Alba (Spain) and her dog Tori (U.S.), I employed a multidisciplinary approach to make sense of their construction of emplaced meaning during and after their arrival. I engaged with multisensory, personal narratives of arrival from the perspective of those who came from far afield to engage with their new city. When Bina told me “this is my Manchester” I recalled Firth’s assertion that his monograph We, The Tikopia offered stories of “his little Island” (1936:1). Arrival though can be conceived of as more than just a physical act of getting somewhere new. It can also be an epistemological transition (Chawla, 2008). In coming to understand stories about the development of emplaced meaning, an ethnographer who newly arrives in the field might seek to bring it to life in forms that go beyond mere text. Like Chawla (2008) in her Indian fieldwork with women who were engaged in the practice of arranged marriage, during my fieldwork I asked How do I bring my field alive, as a living, breathing entity with vivid colors, sounds, smells, and tones? How can the stories