Peter Merriman

Rethinking Mobile Methods

Abstract Over the past, few years a broad range of scholars have been emphasising the vital importance of methodological innovation and diversification to mobilities research. Whilst welcoming this pluralisation of research methods, this paper encourages a note of caution amongst researchers who wholly embrace the call for mobile methods, which are frequently justified by an assumption that ‘conventional’ or ‘traditional’ methods have failed. I outline some of the explanations that are given for the development of ‘mobile methods’ – including their inevitable emergence from a ‘new mobilities paradigm’, the importance of innovation and political relevance for social science methods, and their importance for apprehending elusive practices – before identifying a number of problems with this work: namely the assumption that mobilities research is necessarily a branch of social science research, the production of over-animated mobile subjects and objects, the prioritising of certain kinds of research methods and practices, and the overreliance on certain kinds of technology. Particular attention is paid to the use of ‘non-representational theories’ and theories of practice in mobilities research, wherein academics frequently suggest that we must adopt certain performative, participative, or ethnographic techniques to enable researchers to be, see or move with research subjects, and to more effectively or accurately understand those practices and subjects. In the final section, I draw upon historical research on early driving practices to highlight the diverse methods and sources that can be useful for mobilities scholars seeking to apprehend particular practices, events, subjects and spaces.

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.

‘A new look at the English landscape’: landscape architecture, movement and the aesthetics of motorways in early postwar Britain

In the past decade or so geographers have been arguing for more performative, practice-oriented and non-representational accounts of the ways in which people encounter, move through and inhabit landscapes, spaces and places. In this paper I argue that these theoretical concerns should also prompt geographers to explore the fairly long history of critical commentaries and aesthetic interventions by writers, artists, film-makers and landscape practitioners who have shown a sensibility to movement and embodied practices in the landscape. The paper then examines how landscape architects focused their attention on the movements, speed and visual perspective of vehicle drivers in their arguments for the landscaping and design of motorways in early postwar Britain. During the 1940s the Institute of Landscape Architects pushed for the involvement of their members in the landscaping and planting of all future roads, and prominent landscape architects criticized the tendency of local authorities and organizations such as the Roads Beautifying Association to plant ornamental trees and shrubs which would interrupt the flow of the landscape and distract drivers travelling at speed. Landscape architects such as Brenda Colvin, Sylvia Crowe and Geoffrey Jellicoe argued for a focus on simplicity, flow and the visual perspective of drivers, and the governments Advisory Committee on the Landscape Treatment of Trunk Roads applied similar criticisms to the work of Sir Owen Williams and Partners in designing and landscaping the earliest sections of Britains first major motorway, the London to Yorkshire Motorway or M1. The paper examines how landscape architects pushed for a functional modernism to be constructed around the movements and speed of motorists, and it concludes by discussing how an admiration for foreign motorways was tempered by calls for a British motorway modernism reworked in regional and local settings.

Space and spatiality in theory

This article is an edited transcript of a panel discussion on ‘Space and Spatiality in Theory’ which was held at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Washington, DC, April 2010. In the article, the panel map out some of the challenges for thinking, writing and performing spaces in the 21st century, reflecting upon the emergence of new ways of theorizing space and spatiality, the relationship between writing, action and spacing, and the emergence of distinctive spatialized ontologies (e.g. ‘movement-space’) which appear to reflect epistemological and technological shifts in how our worlds are thought, produced and inhabited. The panellists stress the importance of recognizing the partial nature of Anglophone theoretical approaches, and they argue for more situated and modest theories. They also reflect upon the importance of a wide range of disciplinary knowledges and practices to their thinking on the spatialities of the world, from philosophy and the natural sciences to art and poetry.

Profiling the passenger: mobilities, identities, embodiments

What makes the figure of the passenger distinctive as both a subject and an object of mobility and transportation systems? What distinguishes the passenger from other mobile subjectivities, from nomad, flaneur to consumer? How is the passenger represented, practiced and performed? How has the passenger and their experiences been conceived, imagined, manipulated, regulated and engineered? And what kind of human-technology assemblages do passengers enact? Through four short perspectives, this paper seeks to ‘profile’ the passenger as a distinctive historical and conceptual figure that can help to add greater precision to the analysis of our mobile ways of life. The passenger is explored as an object of speculative theoretical debate, a figure entangled in a host of identities, practices, performances and contexts, and an important way to illuminate key conceptual problematics, from representation to embodiment.

What are surfaces

What are surfaces? “So much of life occurs at the surface that, as students of the human scene, we are obliged to pay far more attention to its character (subtlety, variety, and density) than we have done. The scholar’s neglect and suspicion of surface phenomena is a consequence of a dichotomy in western thought between surface and depth, sensory appreciation and intellectual understanding, with bias against the first of the two terms.” Tuan (1989, page 233)

Mobilities I Departures

This first report identifies key trends in mobilities research during late 2012 and 2013. Using the 150th anniversary of the London Underground as its launching point, the article explores a number of academic engagements with its history, as well as identifying the lack of research on underground or underwater mobilities. It then examines recent work which might be considered to provide creative or experimental engagements with and meditations on movement, including urban exploration, poetry, art and film. The final section examines recent work on mobility, politics, exclusion, marginalization and privilege, including work on forced, elite and family mobilities.

Architecture/dance: Choreographing and inhabiting spaces with Anna and Lawrence Halprin

In this paper I build upon geographical writings on non-representational theory and dance by exploring how the pioneering avant-garde dancer Anna Halprin and landscape architect Lawrence Halprin attempted to choreograph a range of bodies and environments in 1950s and 1960s California. In contrast to geographic writings which have focussed on the regulatory and oppressive politics which are frequently embroiled in the choreographing of specific traditions of dance, I highlight the complex and contested nature of choreography, before focusing on the Left-leaning, libertarian, democratic, counter-cultural choreographic experiments of Anna and Lawrence Halprin. I examine the evolution of Anna and Lawrence’s philosophical approaches to creativity and the arts, highlighting the importance of Bauhaus principles of interdisciplinary working and charting their early attempts to rethink landscape architecture and dance through an understanding of the spaces of choreography and performance, and the performativities and choreographies of spaces. I then focus on Anna and Lawrence’s interdisciplinary ‘Experiments in Environment’ workshops of 1966 and 1968, which marked a turning point in their respective approaches to choreography, participation, and collective exploration and creativity. I examine their pioneering attempts to include diverse communities and audiences in their performance and design projects, and I build upon recent work on the politics of non-representational theory and affect by showing how Anna and Lawrence sought to engineer affects and emotions with explicitly positive, inclusive, egalitarian, democratic, and communitarian aims.

Travel projects: landscape, art, movement

With its origins in PhD research (Intimate Distance 2006-10) and through a series of dialogues with Professor Peter Merriman, Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, University of Aberystwyth, Webster addresses the practice of painting at the intersection of cultural geography, spatial theory and fine art. ‘Travel Projects’ is a critical reflection on a number of perennial conceptual issues for both geographers and visual artists in which the cultural geography of the practice of contemporary landscape painting/drawing is explored. These include the character and formatting of spaces and objects in painterly perception, questions of proximity, distance and relation, and finally the overarching question of spatial representation and ‘semblance’ in visual art (Massumi, 2011).

Nations, materialities and affects

In this paper we demonstrate how writings on affect, materiality and relationality necessitate a rethinking of theories of the nation, focusing on the intermittent emergence and flickering presence of nation-ness and national identity. In moving beyond Billig’s notion of ‘banal nationalism’, we argue that the presencing/absencing, foregrounding/backgrounding, and individualizing/collectivizing of feelings results from the differential capacities for bodies to affect or be affected and the assembling of particular configurations of bodies and materials. We demonstrate this through a discussion of how national feelings and affects have gathered around two infrastructures in Wales, the A470 road and the Severn Bridge.