Hayden Lorimer

Driving and 'Passengering': Notes on the Ordinary Organization of Car Travel

We spend ever‐increasing periods of our lives travelling in cars, yet quite what it is we do while travelling, aside from driving the vehicle itself, is largely overlooked. Drawing on analyses of video records of a series of quite ordinary episodes of car travel, in this paper we begin to document what happens during car journeys. The material concentrates on situations where people are travelling together in order to examine how social units such as families or relationships such as colleagues or friends are re‐assembled and re‐organised in the small‐scale spaces that are car interiors. Particular attention is paid to the forms of conversation occurring during car journeys and the manner in which they are complicated by seating and visibility arrangements. Finally, the paper touches upon the unusual form of hospitality which emerges in car‐sharing.

Herding Memories of Humans and Animals

The study of a herd marks the point where ethnography and ethology meet. In the midst of this shared phenomenon, versions of ‘the social’ hinge on relations between herders and herd. In this paper I consider how our understanding of a herd might be extended by an awareness of its diverse geographies. This is achieved by reconstructing the entwined biographies of human and animal subjects dating from the reintroduction of reindeer to Scotland in 1952. The first transportation of reindeer from Scandinavia to the Cairngorm mountains was orchestrated by Mikel Utsi, a Lappish emigré from northernmost Sweden, and Ethel John Lindgren, a social anthropologist from Cambridge, of American–Swedish descent. What began as an ecological–economic experiment would occupy the couple until their deaths: Utsis in 1979 and Lindgrens in 1988. I draw on a ‘make-do’ methodology undertaken in collaboration with past herders and the scattered company of the present herd: walking a sentient topography of traditional grazing grounds; renewing encounters with charismatic animals through photographic portraits; consulting an archive of herding diaries; and mapping a hidden ecology of landscape relics. These different registers of memory are used to explore how day-to-day engagements between herders and herd were rooted in unconventional systems of ecological and cultural knowledge. By reanimating a local landscape, the resulting narrative works at an intimate scale, while simultaneously gathering momentum from transnational movements of humans, animals, and traditions. Here, salvage and exchange are possible between geographys heritage of landscape and folk study and the sculpting of contemporary research.

Telling small stories: spaces of knowledge and the practice of geography

This article examines how the practice of learning geography, and the arenas in which knowledge-making takes place, can be usefully positioned within changing histories of the discipline. It contends that networks of action – understood through the intersection of social sites, subjects and sources – present a conceptual framework and narrative focus for the re-consideration of specific episodes from geographys past. The interventions made here are informed and illustrated by a ‘small story’ about the doing of geography. Based on different personal accounts, the story revives a series of events, encounters, dialogues and images dating back to the winter of 1951 at Glenmore Lodge, Scotland. This educational institution in the Cairngorm mountains offered children from urban areas the opportunity to learn field studies and the skills of ‘outdoor citizenship’. Initially, the focus falls on Margaret Jack, a 14-year-old field-course participant. Her learning experiences are traced through personal letters, a diary and a field journal dating from that time, and her recent recollections of this event. Margarets account dovetails with the story of her field studies instructor, Robin Murray. Robins role is traced through his learning experiences as a geography undergraduate at Aberdeen University, and the recent recollections of Catriona Murray, his wife.

Landscape, mobility, practice

This paper is an edited transcript of a panel discussion on ‘Landscape, Mobility and Practice’ which was held at the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) Annual Conference in September 2006. In the paper the panel engage with the work of geographers and others who have been drawing upon theories of practice to explore issues of mobility and how we encounter, apprehend, inhabit and move through landscapes. The contributors discuss the usefulness of conceptions of landscape vis-à-vis place and space, and different traditions of apprehending, practising and articulating the more-than-representational dimensions of landscapes. The panel discuss the entwining of issues of power and politics with different representations, practices and understandings of landscape/landscaping, and a number of the panellists position their thinking on the politics of landscape in relation to recent work on the politics of affect.

Cultural geographies in practice: Some reflections on art-geography as collaboration

This short essay reflects on the practice of collaboration by a geography lecturer (Hayden Lorimer) and an artist (Kate Foster). During a three-year alliance, our collaborative investigations have taken different forms, led to different kinds of shared output, been enriched by the efforts of others, and resulted in independently produced work.1 As a cultural-historical geographer and an environmental artist we are keenly aware that the categories of ‘geography’ and ‘art’ encompass an extremely broad range of activities, meaning that these reflections are very much of our own making. The ways we have gone about collaborating have suited our circumstances and preferred ways of working, and have emerged out of our personal combinations of skills and experience. But collaboration has also challenged some of our assumptions and habits, and forced us to articulate something of the ongoing process of work, as well as some of our differences. Accordingly, our reflections are illustrative of one kind of dynamic, of how different rhythms and routines for work were set, and of the ways we found our learning shaped by circumstance and context.2 While these evaluative remarks take the form of a ‘self-crit’ they are intended to have wider relevance. We hope they may help other geographers and artists currently considering the prospect, practice and politics of joint work, and might assist them in thinking more generally about its possible scope and limitations.

The geographical field course as active archive

This paper narrates a collaborative effort to re-place a local culture of ‘the field’. By oscillating between two geography field courses in Glenmore, Scotland - one in 1951, the other in 2002 - it traces a route through different residues of fieldwork: material objects (photographs, log-books, diaries, equipment), mnemonic devices (biography, oral narrative, re-enactment, technology) and physical phenomena (footpaths, landscape features, field sites). Framed as an ongoing and mobile event, overlapping versions of the field course(s) are then recounted through embodied methodological strategies, or ‘taskscapes’. These close observations of the processes of field practice focus on walking, sensing, talking and archiving. They resist easy interpretation, and do not always register a resolved narrative. What is more pertinent, I argue, is to understand them as an unfinished and active archive that speaks of the localized, everyday conditions in which geography’s history is made.

Until the end of days: narrating landscape and environment

Once upon a time geographers had little room for narrative. To be sure many wrote narratives, unselfconsciously, to describe processes of change, but few reflected on, or analysed, the nature and value of narrative as a form of exposition or interpretation. When they did so, in mid-20th century Anglophone geography, narrative appeared a problem in positioning geography as a discipline, both too powerful a method and too powerless. As a conventional mode of history, narrative appeared to over-ride spatial or visual frameworks of interpretation, which led H. C. Darby to identify some interesting experiments in geographical description, cross-sections, mixtures of past and present tense, ‘retrospective asides’ and ‘flash-backs’. Endorsing positivist views of causality, David Harvey found narrative a weak method for geography, at best a preliminary verbal sketch to be filled out through more powerful, quantitative models of temporal explanation. If we plot human geography’s story as a paradigm shift into a post-positivist period from the late 1970s, those who made room for narrative did so from a variety of positions, humanist, realist, marxist, post-modernist, and the many combinations thereof. Most familiarized themselves with a wider, inter-disciplinary narratological turn in the arts and social sciences, coming from literary criticism, cultural anthropology, and particularly a widely influential hermeneutic and historiographical strain in philosophy, notably in canonical works by Paul Ricouer, Hayden White and Louis Mink. While narratology addressed a radical, structuralist suspicion of narrative, its rhetorical power to offer a mystifyingly false coherence and closure to events, it also sought to redeem narrative as a theoretically powerful and complicated form of explanation, a precise cognitive instrument, taking many forms, genres, tropes, tenses, including various kinds of storytelling. Moreover narrative not only focussed on understanding the past, but also framed the present and future, a relay of retrospect and prospect. The model of explanation itself was widened to include various modes of cultural interpretation, understanding and description, contextual, creative modes of making and meaning displacing naturalistic modes of causality. The sequential passing of time was configured synoptically, even spatially, such that period and place were brought into closer conceptual conjunction, the plot, and emplotment, as a matter of both locating and telling, of creating situated stories. The recuperation of narrative in human geography was upheld as a way of connecting, or reconnecting, conceptual polarities such as idiographic/nomothetic, analysis/synthesis and agency/ structure, and connecting other polarities which had seldom hitherto been recognized as a 432520 CGJ

Surfaces and slopes

An essay exploring the textured topography of the world-under-foot, by way of memories amassed during the lifelong habit of long-distance running. Diverse kinds of surfaces and slope are subject to scrutiny: not through any sort of systematic survey, but rather according to remembrances of matter, movement and the “thought-world” of physical effort. By these personal measures, the runner is configured as a sensualist whose feet are alive to the experience of difference and to sameness.

LOOP (a geography)

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Excavating geography’s hidden spaces

This paper considers alternative ways to approach teaching and researching the history and philosophy of geography. While exploring the geography department as a previously marginalized space in accounts of disciplinary change, three different types of source are identified: first, less formal kinds of documentation; second, material sites; and third, a bodily archive of action, gesture and movement. In combination, these are shown to open up new possibilities for localized, grass–roots versions of geography’s pasts and presents.